Roundup: Historians' Take

Stanley Kutler: The Best Justice That Money Can Buy

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] Sen. Russ Feingold has called the glut of unlimited campaign contributions nothing more than “legalized bribery.” And who among his legislative colleagues deserves to be hit with this denunciation? “Not me,” say Max Baucus, the largest single recipient of health industry funds, and Joe Lieberman, the senator from Aetna Insurance, and, for that matter, just about all of the rest of Congress. I

Jon Wiener: Berlin, Israel, Mexico: Walls Across the World

[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he's written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He's also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.] It's being called "the most ambitious commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany": "The Wall Project" in Los Angeles --

Jonathan Zimmerman: So what if they promote it?

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be contacted at jlzimm@aol.com.] Let's suppose, for a moment, that conservative critics are correct: Gay educators want to "promote homosexuality" in American schools. So what? That's the r

Max Boot: A Prescription for Tragedy in Afghanistan

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a regular contributor to COMMENTARY's blog CONTENTIONS, and the author most recently of "War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World" (Gotham, 2006).] If media leaks are to be believed, President Obama will attempt to chart a middle way in Afghanistan, sending more soldiers but not as many as General Stanley McChrystal would like. The New York Times descr

Tom Engelhardt: Afghanistan as a Bailout State

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited

The image of the prophet in Islam: the real story

by Oleg Grabar

Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer. 

Juan Cole: Should US Troops in Iraq be held Hostage to the next Election?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi parliament again on Thursday failed to pass an electoral law to govern the holding of the planned January 16 parliamentary elections. The Kurdish delegates refused to come into the parliament building, thereby denying the session a quorum. The Turkmen and Arab delegates had demanded that K

Patrick Buchanan: Iraq and Afghanistan ... Would We Do It Again?

[Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.] If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation? Would we invade Iraq? While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won? Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk “mission failure” in A

Victor Davis Hanson: All Falling Down . . .

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College.]Money Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. W

Charles Geisst: 1929 Crash and Today: It's the Consumer

[Charles Geisst is a professor of finance at Manhattan College. Geisst is the author of Wall Street: A History his most recent book is Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America.] The Crash of 1929 and the credit market crisis have one inescapable fact in common. Both originated with a decline in consumer-related spending that precipitated a larger crisis leading to depression-like conditions. When the economy is driven by two thirds to 75% consumption, it would b

Julian E. Zelizer: Running the Senate ain't easy

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. His new book, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism,” will be published by Basic Books in December.] In recent months, many commentators have been critical of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, Reid failed to persuade Republicans who were unhappy wit

Victor Sebestyen: U.S. Can Learn From Russia's Afghan War

[Victor Sebestyen is the author of “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.”] The highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain

Victor Davis Hanson: Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy

[Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Most recently he is the editor of "Makers of Ancient Strategy," forthcoming from Princeton University Press.] Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—espec

Victor Sebestyen: What Obama should learn from the Soviet mistake in Afghanistan

[Victor Sebestyen is the author of “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.”] THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain

Victor Davis Hanson: Presidential Purpose?

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College.]Whom is Barack Obama Afraid of? — Another Barack Obama One of the reasons w

Richard Sylla: 1929: 'Great Crash' Vs. 'Break in the Market'

[Richard Sylla is Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at New York University] Because their teachers and their history books said so, most people know that the Great Crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression of the early 1930s. I am not one of these people. What I know is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 306 the day before Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and at 199 on November 13, three weeks later. That drop of

Daniel Pipes: Karzai's Brother and Washington's Kept Politicians

[Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, "a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban," and "a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade," the New York Times informs us, "gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years."

Daniel Pipes: Turkey: An Ally No More

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] "There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, says of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's

Thomas Frank: Obama Is Right About Fox News

[Thomas Frank founded The Baffler magazine in 1988, and he edits it to this day. He has a PhD in American History (U. of Chicago 1994) and is the author of four books, all of them having to do with the cultural inversions of our times: The Conquest of Cool (1997), One Market Under God (2000) and What's the Matter With Kansas? (2004). His book about conservative governance, The Wrecking Crew, was published in 2008.] Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practiti

Julia Adeney Thomas: The Exquisite Corpses of Nature and History: The Case of the Korean DMZ

[Julia Adeney Thomas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and Toyota Visiting Professor, University of Michigan, 2009-10.] Environmental protection in the Korean DMZ is purely accidental. In 1953, no one gave a thought to protecting wildlife when a temporary truce halted the fighting there. Instead, North and South Korea and their respective allies wanted only to end the human savagery that had killed 10 percent of the peninsula’s civilian population and