Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: The California Suicide Bomber (Beware: Appearances Can Be Deceiving)

Daniel Pipes, at his website (4-4-05): Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog. According to a remarkable article by Scott Macleod in the April 4 issue of Time Magazine, the suicide bomber who carried off the worst atrocity

Chalmers Johnson: Wake Up!

Chalmers Johnson, in In These Times (3-31-05):The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome's most

Mike Wallace: What Liberals Can Learn from a History of the Stock Market

Mike Wallace, in the Nation (4-18-05):"Social Security is the soft underbelly," says right-wing activist Stephen Moore. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state." But things aren't going well for the jabbers. Their claims of crisis have been proved false, their motivations meanly ideological (shredding the New Deal safety net) or mer

Tom Barry, Laura Carlsen, and John Gershman: President Bush Needs to Change Course and Adopt the Good Neighbor Policy

Tom Barry, Laura Carlsen, and John Gershman, at the website of the International Relations Center (April 2005):President Bush says we must “stay the course” in Iraq , and he promises to continue during his second administration the radical foreign and domestic policies laid out during his first term. We believe it is time to change course. But can the course of U.S. foreign

Carolyn Eisenberg: Why Their Destiny Is Not in Iraqis' Hands

Carolyn Eisenberg, in Newsday (3-31-05): Carolyn Eisenberg is a professor of history at Hofstra University and the author of"Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany."]Two months past the dramatic day when millions of brave Iraqis lined up to vote, the country still lacks a functioning government. Progress has been halted by the inability to select a new president and two vice presidents, who would together designate a prime m

Joshua Brown: Bush and the End of the Senate Filibuster (Illustration)

Max Hastings: What Israelis Need to Do to Make Peace Happen

Max Hastings, in the Guardian (3-29-05): When someone says that today the chances for Middle East peace have improved, it is worth asking two questions: can there be a sustainable truce, as long as Israel maintains a significant presence in the West Bank? And do the Israelis seem remotely interested in giving this up? If your answer to both is negative, then you share my view that we should not be decei

Ruth Rosen: We Should Be Talking About the Impact of Social Security on Women

Ruth Rosen, in the Nation (4-11-05): [Ruth Rosen, professor emerita of history at the University of California, is the author of"The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America.] My 91-year-old friend Alice, like many elderly women, has outlived her modest savings. All that stands between her and destitution is the $800 check she receives from Social Security and small contribution

Daniel Pipes: Anti-Semitism in Muslim Schools

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (3-29-05):"Shocked" is how Aisha Sherazi, principal of the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa, described the reaction of the school's administration and board on learning last week that two of its teachers had incited hatred of Jews.And"shocked" was how

Alexis Dudden and Mark Selden: The Roots of Japan-Korea Conflict

Alexis Dudden and Mark Selden, in Japan Focus (March 2005):In spring 2004, members of an obscure right-wing group in southwestern Japan set sail for two islets contested between Japan and Korea in a small Boston whaler covered with Rising Sun flags. Their mission, not the first of its kind, was to reclaim what Japanese call Takeshima (Bamboo Island) and Koreans Tokdo (Lonesome Island) as Japan’s sovereign te

Updating the Devil's Dictionary in the Bush Era

Excerpts from Tom Engelhardt's "Entries for a Devil’s Dictionary of the Bush Era" (3-28-05): When asked if he would like to submit a Bush-era definition or two, Noam Chomsky replied,"I suspect that I'll have to fall back on Mark Twain's despair when trying to satirize General Funston: 'No satire of Funston could reach perfection, because Funston occupies that summit himself....[he is] satire incarnat

Murray Polner: If the DC War Hawks Sent Their Own Kids Off to War then Maybe We'd Have Fewer Wars

Murray Polner, at rockwell.com (3-26-05):In Anthony Lewis’s enlightening essay on the Pentagon Papers in the current New York Review of Books, he quotes the former RAND scholar Melvin Gurtov’s description of what the Pentagon Papers were all about. "The crux of these documents," concludes Gurtov (in John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds., Inside the Pentagon Papers (University Press of Kan

Peter Charles Hoffer: Concerning the Democratic Party's Effort to Reframe the Abortion Debate

According to news reports, recently Democrats like Hillary Clinton have been trying to change the way the Democratic Party frames the issue of abortion. We asked Charles Peter Hoffer, author of Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History to comment:Roe and its sister cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s were never"Democratic Party" issues. The right to elect to have a safe and convenient abortion was a feminist issue, a doctor's issue, and a lega

Kevin Baker: Maybe Democrats Should Just Wait 4 Years and See What Happens

Kevin Baker, in Am Heritage (March 2005): The Democratic candidate was crushed. An urban, ethnic liberal from the Northeast, he had been caught flatfooted by the waves of vitriolic attacks that smeared his background, his years of dedicated public service, the character of his beloved wife, as well as his religious beliefs and cultural values. He lost the heartland, and even the traditionally Democratic

Max Boot: 500 Miles Per Gallon!

Max Boot, in the LAT (3-24-05): Soaring oil prices - crude is over $55 a barrel and unleaded gasoline over $2 a gallon - are not much of an economic or political issue. Yet. In absolute terms, today's prices are still half of the 1970s peaks, and the U.S. economy has become much less dependent on petroleum since then. (Computers run on electricity, not gasoline.) But imagine what woul

Doron Ben-Atar: The Music Industry Needs to Get Real About Music Piracy

Doron Ben-Atar, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4-1-05):[Doron Ben-Atar is a professor of history at Fordham University and author of Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (Yale University Press, 2004).] This week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., a suit by 28 of the world's largest entertainment companies against G

David Fromkin: No, 2005 Isn't 1989 All Over Again

David Fromkin, in the NYT (3-24-05): [David Fromkin, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of"A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East."]BLISS was it in that dawn to be alive," sang William Wordsworth of the French Revolution of 1789, which, insofar as laws, customs and politics were concerned, promised to wipe the slate clean and offer the human race a fresh start

Tom Engelhardt: Starting Year 3 of the Iraq War

Tom Engelhardt, at www.tomdispatch.com (3-19-05): Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. A Little Background Music Shakar Odai, the head of the I

Robert G. Rabil: The Arab League's Role in the Lebanon Crisis

Robert G. Rabil, in the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (3-21-05): [Robert G. Rabil is a visiting professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University and author of Embattled Neighbors: Israel, Syria, and Lebanon (Lynne Reiner, 2003).]Arab leaders meet in Algiers on March 22 for an Arab League summit, at a moment of high tension within Lebanon over the pace and extent of Syria’s

Larry Schweikart: Why Universities Are Failing

From a symposium at FrontPageMag.org featuring, among others, Larry Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton and co-author (with Michael Allen) of the new book, A Patriot's History of the United States (3-18-05):FrontPage: First, let’s start with the basics. We are asking if universities can be fixed. But first, tell us briefly what is broken. Then tell u