Roundup: Historians' Take

April 8, 2004

Philip Bobbitt: Occidentalism

Philip Bobbitt, the author of the forthcoming War on Terror, holds the Walker Centennial Chair at the University of Texas Law School; in the NYT (April 4, 2004): The idea of ''the enemy'' is uncongenial to the countries of the post-cold-war West, countries that until recently believed they had no natural predators. Two new titles address the post-Sept. 11 recognitio

April 6, 2004

Juan Cole: Jews Should Be Allowed to Return to Iraq

Juan Cole, in his blog (April 1, 2004):The Iraqi minister of Housing and Rebuilding, Bayan Baqir al-Zubaidi, denied Wednesday that the current Iraqi governing council had passed laws giving Iraqi Jews the right to return and to reclaim their lost property. (Until 1948 there was a large Iraqi Jewish community, and in the twentieth century, Baghdad was a third to a half Jewish. Jews were disproportionately well off, and played a multitude of central roles, f

April 2, 2004

Juan Cole: What Went Wrong When the British Tried Nation-Building in Iraq

Juan Cole, in a book review in the Nation (March 2004):... In Inventing Iraq, [Toby] Dodge analyzes what he describes as the failure of British nation-building in the 1920s. He identifies two camps in the British civil administration of the country. One camp--what I call the J.R.R. Tolkien strain of British colonialism--consisted of romantics like Dobbs, who saw the country

April 2, 2004

Juan Cole: Why Clinton Did a Better Counter-Terrorism Job Than Bush

Juan Cole, on his blog (March 28, 2004):The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different. Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever

March 31, 2004

Martin Kramer: So Israel Is Undermining Academic Freedom?

Martin Kramer, on his blog (March 31, 2004): The habitual academic petition-signers against Israel are out in force, in a letter to Hebrew University president Menachem Magidor. They charge that Israel"makes it difficult or impossible for Palestinian teachers and students to reach their universities," and that Israeli troops are responsible for"harassment, arrests,

March 31, 2004

Nader's Midlife Crisis

By Martin Halpern Mr. Halpern is professor of history, Henderson State University and the author of Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Ralph Nader has a long and distinguished career of public service but his 2000 presidential campaign divided progressives.  Will the 2004 be a repeat of 2000?  Nader’s failure to listen to what he acknowledges was the unanimous opposition of his many progressive fri

March 30, 2004

Diane Ravitch: The Pledge of Allegiance and God

Diane Ravitch, in the NY Daily News (March, 2004): The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a legal challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance in a case that makes - unintentionally - a powerful point about the place of religion in our nation's history. At issue are the two words"under God," which were added to the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954. Michael Newdow - an at

March 30, 2004

Joel Beinin: Thought Control for Middle East Studies

Joel Beinin (Stanford), writing for the Interhemispheric Resource Center (March 30, 2004): A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to Israel have mounted a campaign against American scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University, has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing to warn the American public about the dangers of radical Islam, cl

March 30, 2004

Daniel Pipes: The Leftwing Bias of University Publishers

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (March 30, 2004): Critiques of the global academic march to the left tend to focus on classroom antics, silly statements to the press, articles with incomprehensible titles, and efforts to punish students who have the temerity to disagree with their radical professors. But books are more important than all of this. Books make up the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Articles disa

March 30, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: Gunboat Diplomacy in the 21st Century

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (March 30, 2004):The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the"airship" -- these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe's burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European

March 25, 2004

Interview with Michael Beschloss: When Former Government Officials Write Tell-All Books

An interview with Michael Beschloss by Newsweek's Jonathan Darman (March 24, 2004):NEWSWEEK: How common is it in recent history for a high-profile official to leave a White House and level charges against a sitting president? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: It's less common than you would think. I think one reason why people think it's very common is, politics is tough these days and everyone criticizes everyone.

March 25, 2004

Gerald Posner: Clarke Could Be Pointing Fingers at 4 Administrations

Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (Random House, 2003), in the LAT (March 24, 2004): ... In research for my latest book, I found Clarke to be one of the few heroes in the Bush White House. He was a career bureaucrat who served under four presidents and one of the first officials to recognize the seriousness of the threat pose

March 25, 2004

David Brooks: Religion Made Civil Rights Leaders Smarter

David Brooks, in the NYT (March 23, 2004): Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether it is constitutional for public school teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, including the phrase"one nation under God," in their classrooms. So tonight's reading assignment is"A Stone of Hope" by David L. Chappell. "A Stone of Hope" is actually a history of the civil rights movement, but it's im

March 25, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: How Dick Clarke Spoiled the Bush Party

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (March 23, 2004):Quote of the day: As Richard Clarkee, former White House counterterrorism"tsar," tells it in his new book Against All Enemies, on September 12, 2001, he returned to the White House to find Iraq, not al-Qaeda, the subject of the day:"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld an

March 24, 2004

The Bush Team's Skewed View of American History

Tristram Hunt, author of the forthcoming, Building Jerusalem, in the Guardian (March 22, 2004):Paul Kennedy, the great historian of empires, likes to remind his audience that George Bush read history at Yale - but not that many history books. However, since September 11 and the installation of a Churchill bust in the Oval Office, President Bush seems to have put his college days behind him. History is now in vogue at the White House. I

March 24, 2004

Spain Is Still Haunted by the History of he Civil War and Franco

Antonio Feros, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, in the NYT March 20, 2004):While rescue crews were still picking through the rubble from the devastating explosions in Madrid last week, Spanish commentators were already making comparisons, not to 9/11, not to other terrorist attacks that had occurred in Europe over the last couple of decades but to the unrest in 1934 throu

March 23, 2004

Juan Cole: Spanish Appeasement?

Juan Cole, in his blog (March 16, 2004): Did al-Qaeda Win the Spanish Elections? This silly question is being asked by billionnaire Rupert Murdoch's and Conrad Black's media outlets all over the world in blazing headlines. For some strange reason, the billionnaires aren't happy that the Socialist Workers' Party won the elections in Spain, and are trying to portray the outcome as cowardice on the part of the Spanish public. The entire argum

March 23, 2004

Juan Cole: It's too Early to Celebrate the "Liberation" of Iraq and Afghanistan

Juan Cole, in his blog (March 21, 2004): In the speech he used to inaugurate his reelection campaign on Saturday, Bush boasted that the US had"liberated" 50 million persons in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is the problem with political rhetoric that it lacks all nuance or ambiguity. It is true that the Bush administration overthrew two harsh regimes, the Taliban and that of Saddam in Iraq. But in Afghanistan they only overthrew the Taliban because the

March 23, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Why I Became a Whistleblower

Daniel Pipes, in the New York Sun (March 23, 2004): Last week, I became a whistleblower. (According to Merriam-Webster, a whistleblower is someone"who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority.") This is not a role I expected or sought, but I felt compelled to go public when the U.S. Institute of Peace, in Washington, D.C., the taxpayer-funded organization to whose board President Bush appointed me, i

March 23, 2004

Henry Kamen: Muslim Roots Run Deep in Spain

Henry Kamen, the author of Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763, in the LAT (March 21, 2004): More than any other Western country, Spain has lived on intimate terms with Islam. For 700 years, from the 8th century to the 15th century, Muslims ruled the greater part of the country. They profoundly changed its culture, its food and its art. But they gradu