Roundup: Historians' Take

Bush Foreign Policy is Based on a Dubious Narrative of US History That Has Freedom at Its Heart

Tristram Hunt, writing for 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. Indeed, the

Tom Engelhardt: With the Antiwar Demonstrators in NYC

Historian Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com (March 21, 2004):Yesterday, I took my small sign -- "Lies!" -- out onto the streets of New York City for several hours. If you're not a cop in a copter looking down on a demonstration, or a journalist covering it from the sidelines, or a spectator watching it flow by, a march is invariably like a neighborhood in some city

Civil War Still Haunts Spanish Politics

Antonio Feros, writing for 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 through 1936, the bloody period preceding the bitter Spanish Civil War.Some on the left, for

Orville Schell: The Complex Relationship Between Beijing and Taiwan

South China Morning Post 3-19-04 Orville SchellMr. Schell is dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Why is Taiwan's relationship with Beijing so intractable an issue? Why, when they share common economic interests - 1 million Taiwanese live on the mainland, working in about 50,000 firms in which Taiwanese have invested over US$ 400 billion - does Beijing aim 500 short-range missiles at Ta

Murray Polner: William Graham Sumner's Campaign Against Imperialism (Too Bad He Lost)

Murray Polner, in LewRockwell.com (March 19, 2004): In 1965 I edited and wrote the introduction to William Graham Sumner's work, The Conquest of the United States by Spain and Other Essays (Regnery). While there is still no comprehensive, modern biography of him he was remarkably prescient about the vast bloodletting and worldwide anarchy to come in the 20 th Century, the bloodies

Is Putin Moving Left or Right? (And Why That's the Wrong Question)

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the forthcoming Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, in the NYT (March 14, 2004): When Mr. Putin diverges from the democratic path — as when he abruptly dismissed his prime minister and entire cabinet last month — Western observers tend to either criticize his authoritarianism or simply declare him"an enigma" (the traditional cop-out for

Ruth Rosen: Finally Bush's Lies Have Raised Questions About His Credibility

Historian and columnist Ruth Rosen, in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 15, 2004): ONE YEAR LATER, the lies that led to the war in Iraq are coming unraveled. Last week, even CIA Director George Tenet admitted that he had privately disputed public statements made by top government officials who had twisted intelligence reports. It's about time. One year

Martin Kramer: Title VI Is Not the Great Success Its Backers Claim

Martin Kramer, in his blog (March 17, 2004): Title VI: Turn on the Defogger. H.R. 3077 would create an advisory board for Title VI, the federal subsidies program for area studies (including Middle Eastern studies) in our universities. Part of the strategy of the bill's opponents has been defensive, to claim that Title VI is humming along just fine. If it ain't broke, why fix it? This is the line taken by Steven Heydemann in an arti

Lawrence Wittner: Unilaterialism Has Deep Roots in American History

Lawrence S. Wittner, in the Albany Times Union (March 14, 2004): A year after President George W. Bush launched a U.S. military invasion of Iraq, troubling questions remain about the unilateral policy that he adopted. Although the President did, grudgingly, consult the United Nations about the issue of Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction

Sean Wilentz: Nader Hasn't a Prayer of Changing America's Party System (But He Could Help Elect W)

Sean Wilentz, writing for the New York Times (March 7, 2004)Ralph Nader is once again running for president, but unfortunately for him, he is running in 2004 and not 1860 or 1912.Historians and pundits like to cite the rise of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party as the exception to the rule about the small influence of third parties and candidates in American presidential politics. Yet the Republicans were not in fact a thi

Daniel Pipes: Osama's Capture Might Affect the Election but Won't Put Violent Islamists Out of Business

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (March 9, 2004): Osama bin Laden's capture or death, the focus of renewed American military attention, would greatly help the war on terror — but not in the way you might expect. It would not do that much to prevent jihadist violence. True, in some cases, seizing a terrorist leader leads directly to a reduction in threat or even to the decomposition of his organization. Consider these examples : Abimael Guzman ,

Joshua Brown: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Juan Cole: A Big Brother Plan to Monitor Middle East Studies

Juan Cole, on his blog (March 6, 2004): Some of you know that some unsavory political forces have convinced the House of Representatives to create a Big Brother committee to police the thought of university professors who write about world affairs. The bill is HR 3077. The main goal of this legislation is to impose an ideological agenda on university teaching, research and writing about issues like the Middle East. The point of the committee is to warp academic study and

Joseph Ellis: What Would Jefferson Say About the Amendment to Ban Gay Marriage?

Joseph Ellis, in the NYT (Feb. 29, 2004): Abraham Lincoln once observed that America was founded on a proposition, and that Thomas Jefferson wrote it. He was referring, of course, to the section of the Declaration of Independence that begins,"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ." The reality, though, is that we are founded on a debate over what Jefferson's proposition means. And the current struggl

Stephen Prothero: A Jesus for Our Times?

Stephen Prothero, in the NYT Magazine (March 1, 2004): Don't look now, but here comes the Catholic Jesus. In February 1804, Thomas Jefferson sat in the White House, cutting verses out of two Bibles and pasting them together into an abridged New Testament that cast Jesus as a rational ethicist. Two hundred years later to the month, Mel Gibson was furiously cutting and pasting a cinematic testament to his o

Daniel Pipes: The Debate About Islamic Law We Should Have Had about Iraq but Didn't

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (March 2, 2004): In Iraq, what ought to be the role of Islam and its legal system, called the Sharia? In theory, this topic should be the subject of a soul-searching debate in America and all the other countries whose forces are occupying Iraq, for how it is answered will likely influence Iraq's future in profound ways. Views on Islam's proper role reflect how one understands the purpose of the war in Iraq one year ago:

Juan Cole: We Shouldn't Be Spying on Ourselves

Juan Cole, on his blog (Feb. 27, 2004): Philip Knightley and Kim Sengupta describe how the US National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters eavesdrop on the whole world. The NSA is forbidden from listening in on Americans without a warrant, but the US government circumvents this problem by formally allowing the GCHQ to spy on Americans. The NSA listens in on British calls, and then the two just swap the information.

Juan Cole: There's Still No Evidence of a Strong Link Between Saddam and Al Qaeda

Juan Cole, in his blog (Feb. 29, 2004): Jonathan Schanzer, writing in the Weekly Standard, notes that I had asked Bill Safire for even a single "document" that shows that Saddam Hussein's government cooperated with al-Qaeda before September 11. He suggests that we might substitute for such a document his interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who he says served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and who is now &

Ruth Rosen: Why We're Reliving the Sixties this Election Year

Ruth Rosen, in the SF Chronicle (Feb. 29, 2004): ALTHOUGH WE'RE rapidly approaching the 2004 presidential election, it often seems as though we're still shadowboxing over the 1960s. Whoever becomes the Democratic presidential candidate will be drawn into a political and cultural fray over racial equality, abortion, gay rights, environmental sustainability

Will Bagley: In Utah We've Always Known that Marriage Is an Ever-Changing Institution

Will Bagley, the the Salt Lake Tribune (Feb. 29, 2004): Marriage, says BYU law professor Richard G. Wilkins,"has always been about one sexual relationship -- the union of a man and a woman." Of course, this would be news to Brigham Young, who said"I do" to some 56 women. Consider the furor and outrage Mormon polygamy evoked in the 19th century. The laws sanctifying the one-man, one-woman model of marriage had forced millions upon millions of women"to become a prey to