Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Der Spiegel Proves al-Maliki Story Correct

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Senator Barack Obama is in Iraq for consultations with American military commanders and Iraqi leaders. Despite all the talk about Iraq being" calm," I'd like to point out that the month just befo

William J. Astor: Having the "Best Military" Is Not Always a Good Thing

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism, among other works (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.] When did American troops become"warfighters" -- members of"Generation Kill" -- instead of citizen-soldiers? And when did we become so proud of declaring our m

Robert Perkinson: Lessons from the history of the prison boom

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a “malignant enemy in America.” Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson’s watch, and his conservative critics—following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid—were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his

Neve Gordon: A West Bank Town’s Struggle to Survive

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University. Read about his new book, Israel's Occupation (University of California Press), and more at www.israelsoccupation.info.] "Jerusalem bulldozer 'terrorist' kills 3 in rampage," read the headline of a CNN article describing the recent attack of a Palestinian construction worker that left three Israelis dead and scores wounded. A Google news search indicates that the brutal a

Eric Rauchway: John McCain styles himself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. But he's taken exactly the wrong lessons from TR

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. He also blogs for The Edge of the American West.] "I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold," John McCain told The New York Times last Friday. The presumptive Republican nominee

Howard Zinn: Memo to Obama, McCain ... No one wins in a war

[Howard Zinn is author of 'A People's History of the United States.] BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we 'win' and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and 'win' in Afghanistan. For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone m

Daniel Pipes: Will Washington Betray Anti-Regime Iranians?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] As the United Nations mandate that legitimizes the presence of U.S forces in Iraq expires on December 31, 2008, a humanitarian and strategic disaster is coming into view. The fate of about 3,500 anti-regime Iranians will be decided in the course of status-of-forces

Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keane: Victory means an opportunity to contain Iran and stabilize the Mideast

[Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War. Mr. Keane is a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. All have just returned from their most recent visit to Iraq.] All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended; al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been dealt a devastating blow; and the Sadrist militia and other Iranian-backed militant

Dilip Hiro: The Energy Reality We Face

[Dilip Hiro is the author of numerous books on the Middle East. His most recent book,

Al Senn: Olympic Controversies Past and Present

[Mr. Senn is a historian at the University of Wisconsin.] The hot topic of this year’s Olympics seems to be “boycott.” Protesters argue that China’s human rights policies, especially in Tibet, make Beijing an unworthy host for the celebration of human athletic prowess in the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Olympic officials, on the other hand, speak piously of keeping politics out of sports competition. I am frequently asked “Must politics be a part of the Olympic Games?” M

Jim Sleeper: Why conservatives becoming more conservative won't help (them or us)

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream grows from their 2005 essay in the

Niall Ferguson: China’s war on nature

... Just as Americans have waged their War on Terror since 9/11, it seems the Chinese are now embroiled in a War on Nature. To grasp what is at stake in this strange war, it pays to travel away from the capital – indeed, away from the entire eastern region of China. The economic front line now lies in western China, in frenetically growing industrial centres such as Chongqing. Far up the River Yangtze, to the west of the Three Gorges Dam, Chongqing is probably the fastest growing ci

Michael Oren: What Israel--and the rest of the world--can learn from 18 years of war with Lebanon

[Michael B. Oren, a contributing editor to The New Republic, is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007).] The Jerusalem theater lights came on, and no man between the ages of 25 and 35 moved. We had just watched Waltz With Bashir, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Chatila massacre.

Daniel Pipes: [The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] [This version includes some materials cut from the published National Review version.]"Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist," said socialist

Tom Engelhardt: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Donald Lewis Schaefer: Don't Mess With the Electoral College

[Mr. Schaefer is professor of political science at College of the Holy Cross.] With their appeal to independents, Barack Obama and John McCain may scramble the electoral map in November. Others want to go further and throw out the Electoral College completely, replacing this "complicated" and "undemocratic" system with a direct, nationwide popular vote for the presidency. Despite its democratic allure, it's a bad idea. Backers of the popular vote do

Ronald and Allis Radosh: When the Left Loved Israel

[Ronald Radosh, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Allis Radosh, are co-authors of a forthcoming book about Harry S. Truman and the creation of Israel.] On the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the argument that the Jewish state should cease to exist as a Jewish state may still be found in the pages of the flagship publication of the American left, The Nation. Last year, in a special issue devoted to Israel, the magazine’s editors noted that, although for many years th

Victor Davis Hanson: Barack W. Bush?

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama's flip-flops, as the Senate's most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain's efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts. Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-ri

Juan Cole: The FBI's plan to "profile" Muslims

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual

John Steele Gordon: 2008 ... A Watershed Election?

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).] Exciting as presidential elections can be, they don't often change things fundamentally. Now and then, however, they can remake the American political landscape for years to come, and the country enters into a new era. Will 2008 be one of those watershed elections? Perhaps, but not in the way that many people think. Let's look at a little his