Roundup: Historians' Take

December 3, 2004

Hugh D. Hudson Jr.: A Chance for True Democracy in Ukraine (At Last!)

Hugh D. Hudson, Jr., in Atlanta Journal-Constitution 12-2-04):[ Hugh D. Hudson Jr. chairs the department of history at Georgia State University.] I confess that as a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, I have never been a great fan of Ukrainian nationalism. Far too often during the past century, certain Ukrainian nationalists have sought to resolve their national strivings through association with some of the worst of European politics and culture, fro

December 2, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: Is This Chechnya or Iraq? You Choose

Tom Engelhardt, at his blog (11-29-04): [This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory C

December 2, 2004

Martin Van Creveld: Why Iraq Will End Like Vietnam (with Insights from Moshe Dayan)

Martin Van Creveld, at Lewrockwell.com (11-18-04): [Martin Van Creveld is professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has written a number of books that have influenced modern military theory, including Fighting Power, Command in War, and most significantly, The Transformation of War. He is also the author of The Rise and Decline of the State.]As Shakespeare once wrote, they have their exits and t

November 29, 2004

David Brooks: Now Bush Faces Rebellion in Republican Ranks

David Brooks, in the NYT (11-23-04): Three weeks ago the Republicans won an impressive victory. So what have they been doing since? First, they had an intraparty argument over whether to keep Arlen Specter as Senate Judiciary chairman. Then they had an anguished intraparty dispute over whether to bend their rules to protect Tom DeLay. Then on Saturday, they had a long, heated debate about intel

November 29, 2004

Edward Luttwak: Bush Might Surprise His Critics in His 2nd Term (Clinton and Reagan Did)

Edward Luttwak, in the NYT (11-28-04): With the prudent Colin Powell to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and with the more warlike Donald Rumsfeld remaining as secretary of defense, many feel that President Bush is set to follow an even more forceful foreign policy in his second term.As a re-elected president who will never again have to face the voters, and with loyal Republican majorities

November 29, 2004

Dan P. McAdams: Republicans Owe Much of Their Success to the Use of the Narrative of Redemption

Dan P. McAdams, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (11-29-04):[Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.]Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-intere

November 27, 2004

Paul Johnson: Bush's Election Is a Smack at Intellectuals

Paul Johnson, in the WSJ (Nov. 23, 2004): Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who

November 27, 2004

Eric Foner's Reflections on the Boston Convention

Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the Nation (July 25, 2004):As convention time approached, I asked one of America's most prominent historians, Eric Foner, for some political history about Boston and Massachusetts....Host for the very first time to a national convention, Boston is a perfect place to reflect on this country's alternative tradition of visionary thinking. It is a city, according to Fon

November 24, 2004

Michael Ignatieff: Why Bush Won

Lynda Hurst, in the Toronto Star (Nov. 20, 2004): Michael Ignatieff is not in the best of moods. A double espresso helps. A bit. On this brief lecture tour of Toronto, the Canadian historian, prolific author and Harvard professor has clearly been encountering people who dismiss the newly re-elected president of the U.S. as "a dumb, ignorant Texas hick," and it raises his hackles because he says underestimating George W. Bush is a monumen

November 24, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: The Swamp that Is Iraq

Tom Engelhardt, at his bog (Nov. 19, 2004): [Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of The American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.] Here was our tactical kindness: By threatening the invasion of Falluja

November 19, 2004

Eliot Cohen: Why Colin Powell Won't Go Down as a Great Secretary of State

Eliot Cohen, in the WSJ (Nov. 17, 2004):[Mr. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime" (Anchor, 2003).]To the role of secretary of state, Colin Powell brought enormous popularity in the U.S. and abroad, charisma and the instincts and habits of a sk

November 19, 2004

Howard Zinn: About This Misguided War on Terrorism

Howard Zinn, in the Progressive (Nov. 2004):Mr. Zinn's latest book is Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) with co-editor Anthony ArnoveI am calling it "our" war on terrorism because I want to distinguish it from Bush's war on terrorism, and from Sharon's, and from Putin's. What their wars have in common is that they are based on an enormous dec

November 17, 2004

Anthony Pagden: We Don't Want a Real Empire Even If We Sometimes Act Like One

Anthony Pagden, in the LAT (Nov. 14, 2004): [Anthony Pagden is professor of political science and history at UCLA and the author of "Peoples and Empires" (Modern Library).]In the 1960s, as Europe's once-proud empires shed their remaining colonies, "empire" became a dirty word. The Soviet Union alone was one, and an evil one at that. Only enemies of the United States used the slanderous term against this country and its "imperialist" policies.

November 17, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Why It Took Just One Death at the Hands of an Islamist in Holland to Arouse the People There

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Nov. 16, 2004): "Education by murder" describes the slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam. It took 3,000 deaths to wake up Americans, or at least to wake up the half of them who are conservative. Likewise, it took hundreds of deaths in the Bali explosion to semi-wake up Australians; it took the Madrid assault for Spaniards, and the Beslan atrocity for Russians. Twelve workers beheaded in Iraq awoke the Nepal

November 12, 2004

Benny Morris: Arafat's Ambiguous Legacy

For all his sly buffoonery - it was almost impossible to get him to answer a question properly - Yasir Arafat was a man with a vision. And when speaking in Arabic he often charted it for his audiences. He wanted, simply, to "end the occupation" and "redeem Palestine." Arab listeners, inside and outside Palestine, understood what he was saying. Many Westerners thought, or preferred or pretended to believe, that he was talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip,

November 12, 2004

Rick Perlstein: Why Bush Won

Rick Perlstein, in the Village Voice (Nov. 9, 2004): Amid the left's general dismay, a major anniversary just came and went without much notice. Thirty-five years ago last week Richard Nixon delivered his famous "Silent Majority" speech. In deep doo-doo after the biggest anti-war march in American history—a march in which middle-class squares far outnumbered wild-eyed hippies—Nixon went on TV b

November 10, 2004

Walter Russell Mead: The Democrats' Loss Was Catastrophic

An interview with Walter Russell Mead conducted by Bernard Gwertzman, at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations:What are your first impressions of President Bush's re-election?I think it is a catastrophic result for the Democrats. The party lost seats in the Senate, lost seats in the House, did not pick up any go

November 10, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Arafat's Passing May Bring on the Greatest Crisis in Israeli-American Relations

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Nov. 9, 2004): "I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly

November 10, 2004

Robert Dallek: Bush Should Use His 2nd Term to Clean Up the Mistakes of the 1st

Robert Dallek, in the Belfast Telegraph (Nov. 5, 2004): One of the ugliest elections in American presidential history is over but the deep divide in the country is anything but.For all the talk about the economy, job losses, budget deficits and health insurance as well as terrorism, Iraq, and the character flaws of both men - one a flip-flopper and the other a flimflam man - the compelling iss

November 6, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: The Election Night Hangover of a Lifetime

Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch.com (Nov. 4, 2004): [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.] How can I not start on a personal note today? Election night was a roller coaster. I had written http://www.tom