Roundup: Historians' Take

August 8, 2005

Jonathan M. Hansen: The U.S. Is Sovereign at Guantanamo

Jonathan M. Hansen, author of The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920, is writing a book about the history of Guantánamo Bay; in the NYT (April 20, 2004): ... The history of how the United States came to possess Guantánamo Bay illuminates a question in the Supreme Court case to be argued today about whether American courts have

August 8, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Reforming Islam Is as Necessary as Reforming Iraq

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (April 6, 2004): The global war on terror cannot be won through counterterrorism alone; it also requires convincing the terrorists and their sympathizers that their goals and methods are faulty and failing. But how is this to be done? By focusing on the ideological and religious sources of the violence, say I:"The immediate war goal must be to destroy militant Islam and the ultimate war goal the modernization of Islam." I have not

August 8, 2005

Daniel Pipes: The Moderation of American Muslims Is Overstated

Daniel Pipes, in FrontPageMagazine.com (April 8, 2004): A Detroit-area Islamic organization, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, released a survey of Detroit Muslims, A Portrait of Detroit Mosques: Muslim Views on Policy, Politics and Religion , on April 6, 2004. Written by Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, and conducted i

August 8, 2005

Mark Levine: The Chaos in Iraq

Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004); in

August 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: American Hubris in Iraq

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 11, 2004): Does anyone recall the arguments of worried critics of the impending invasion of Iraq early last spring? There was a fear – not realized (until this week) of block by block urban warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Iraq's capital was to be an enormous trap Saddam Hussein had readied to spring on American troops. Casualties

August 8, 2005

Murray Polner: The Police Are Once Again Intimidating Peace Protesters

Murray Polner, author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, in Newsday (March 16, 2004): As we approach the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the coming spring nationwide demonstrations, not to mention the coming Republican convention in New York City, there is growin

August 8, 2005

Why Francis Fukuyama Opposed the Iraq War

Herb Keinon, in the Jerusalem Post (March 18, 2004):Fifteen years after his controversial end-of-history thesis celebrated liberalism's victory over communism, political thinker Francis Fukuyama probes terror's challenge to the world. Many and varied are the critics of US policy in Iraq - both of Washington's decision

August 8, 2005

Jack Granatstein: Canadians Keep Electing Bozos Prime Minister ... That's Led to a Broken Military

From CJAD (Feb. 22, 2004):Historian Jack Granatstein spreads the blame widely in answering the title question of his new book: Who Killed the Canadian Military? Two generations of politicians and a complacent electorate have left the Canadian Forces a decrepit, dispirited group and it will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild them, Granatstein writes. His sli

August 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Pentagon Officials Are Remembering Our History the Wrong Way

Tom Engelhardt, in the www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (Feb. 20, 2004): Let's remember, when we do our historical multiplication tables, that everything happening now began somewhere, some time. Take the construction and engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root, now serving (and feeding) our troops in Iraq in so many overpriced ways .

August 8, 2005

David Brooks: The Party of Jimmy or JFK?

David Brooks, in the NYT (Feb. 17, 2004):Between 1940 and 1968, the American people trusted the Democratic Party in times of war. But Vietnam shattered that trust. So if we're going to talk about Vietnam during this campaign, as I guess we are, let's not talk about how many days George Bush served in the National Guard, or how many rows John Kerry sat from Jane Fonda at a prote

August 8, 2005

Jean Edward Smith: Why Some Generals Make It in American Politics and Some Don't

Grant biographer Jean Edward Smith, in the NYT (Feb. 13, 2004): In pulling out of the Democratic presidential race, Gen. Wesley Clark ended what was once a promising quest to join the long line of men who converted battlefield prominence into political victory. The military is one of the traditional springboards to the White House: 12 former generals have been president, six of them career military men (o

August 8, 2005

Juan Cole: Why Israel Is Singled Out for Criticism

Juan Cole, writing on his blog (Feb. 2, 2004): Matthew Yglesias, a philosopher who runs a very interesting web site , cited my piece on 2/2/04 about Muqtada al-Sadr's objecting vehemently (and, characteristically, vulgarly) to Iraq selling electricity to Israel. Matt then quoted my last sentence "Most Shiite clerics view Israel negatively because of its treatment of the Palestinians, fellow Musli

August 8, 2005

David Greenberg: Dean's Howl

David Greenberg, writing in the LAT (Jan. 23, 2004):Early in Richard M. Nixon's 1968 campaign for president, his speechwriter, Raymond K. Price, was among those charged with a delicate task: Review Nixon's disastrous "last press conference" speech of Nov. 7, 1962, and figure out how to handle it in the upcoming r

August 8, 2005

David Kennedy: How Bush MAY Be Ranked by Historians in the Future

David Kennedy, writing in the Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 20, 2004): History is a stern judge, and stingy, too. As Ronald Reagan once observed (quoting Clare Booth Luce), "no matter how exalted or great a man may be, history will have time to give him no more than one sentence. George Washington - he founded our country. Abraham Lincoln - he freed the slaves and preserved the Union . Winston Churchill - he saved Europe ." What will Georg

August 8, 2005

Walter Russell Mead: The Democrats Can Make a Good Claim to Being Strong on Defense

Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the WSJ about the Democratic Party's opportunity to portray itself as strong on national defense if the voters reject Dean's anti-war position (Jan. 21, 2004):Historically, the Democrats have been America's war party. Bob Dole got into trouble during his 1976 vice preside

August 8, 2005

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,: Bush's Failed Vision

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in the LAT (Jan. 21, 2004):The president of the United States, wrote Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, "resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek." The Constitution awards presidents the helm, but creative presidents must possess and communicate the direction in which they propose to take the country. The port they

August 8, 2005

Gore Vidal: What the Election Is About

Gore Vidal, writing in the London Independent (Jan. 18, 2004):It is often hard to explain to foreigners what an American presidential election is actually about. We cling to a two-party system in the same way that imperial Rome clung to the republican notion of two consuls as figurehead - to mark off, if nothing else, the years that they held office conjointly. They reigned ceremonially but were not makers of the political weather. Our two o

August 8, 2005

Rick Perlstein: Bush, Like Nixon in 1972, Needs a Way Out

Rick Perlstein, in the Village Voice (Jan. 14-20, 2004):George Bush is selling out Iraq. Gone are his hard-liners' dreams of setting up a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic republic, a light unto the Middle Eastern nations. The decision makers in the administration now realize these goals are unreachable. So they've set a new goal: to end the occupation by July 1, whet

August 8, 2005

The Great Society Worked in Reducing Poverty

Alan Krueger, Princeton economist, writing in the NYT (Jan. 8, 2004): ''THIS administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.'' With those words, Lyndon B. Johnson began the war on poverty 40 years ago today, in his first State of the Union address. To fight poverty, Congress started Head Start, Job Corps, Medicare and Medi

August 4, 2005

Niall Ferguson & Laurence J. Kotlikoff: Why a New New Deal Is Needed

Niall Ferguson & Laurence J. Kotlikoff, in the New Republic (8-4-05): President Bush's Social Security proposal looks to be dead in the water--and a good thing, too. The plan was half-baked and fiscally irresponsible. The American public took one look and realized it provided neither personal nor national financial security. Even many Republican congressmen didn't buy it. So much for the presiden