Roundup: Historians' Take

Barry Rubin: Iraq, 5 years later, no easy answers

In November 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a number of scholars this question: “What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, MESH asked all of the respondents to revisit their predictions. This week, MESH is posting the responses it has received. Barry Rubin is a member of MESH. In 2002, he wrote: “A post-Saddam Iraq seen as reasonably democratic, independent of American control, and improving its people

Bruce J. Schulman & Julian E. Zelizer: The origins of the conservative movement in the 1970s help us understand contradictions in today's Republican Party

[Bruce J. Schulman is a professor of history at Boston University, and Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They are editors of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies, to be published this month by Harvard University Press.] ... The shift to the right ... was anything but inevitable, even if previous accounts suggested that it was. After 1970, the New Right found its secret to success; it constructed its organ

William Polk: Iran .. Danger & Opportunity

[William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism Guerrilla Warfare from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

Nick Turse: The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, The Nation, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project series

Julian E. Zelizer: How Democrats can lose in November

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, published this month by Harvard University Press.] There was a moment last year when Democrats believed that winning the White House was inevitable. The Republican Party was in disarray; there were ongoing laments that the "Reagan Coalition" could not be rebuilt. President Bush's popularity had reached rock bott

Joseph Lane: Ok, There’s Jeremiah Wright, but What About John Hagee, Pat Robertson?

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] Jonathan Martin writes in The Politico that some Republican operatives think that the discovery of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory sermons suggest that Barack Obama may be a much easier candidate to defeat in the general election than they first suspected. In Martin’s interviews with the Republicans who orchestrated the attacks on Harold Ford and Max Clel

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: China's Olympic Delusion

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, the author of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.] Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. But when it comes to the periodic clashes between Tibetan protesters and China's authorities, tragedy is all one can see. As in 1959 and 1989 a familiar story is now unfolding in Lhasa. Once again, crowds of Tibetans ang

Juan Cole: Five years of Iraq lies

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Each year of George W. Bush's war in Iraq has been represented by a thematic falsehood. That Iraq is now calm or more stable is only the latest in a series of such whoppers, which the mainstream press eagerly repeats. The fifth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq will be the last he presides over. Sen

Shelby Steele: The Obama Bargain

[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).] Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could co

Martin Shaw: My Lai to Haditha ... war, massacre and justice

[Martin Shaw is professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. A historical sociologist of war and global politics, his books include War and Genocide (Polity, 2003), The New Western Way of War (Polity, 2005), and What is Genocide?

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama's speech ... Untruth upon untruth—our new Nixon?

Almost everything Barack Obama has said about his relationship with Wright is untrue. He is hardly ‘not particularly controversial’. No one needs to “cherry-pick” his sermons to find in them hatred; in some speeches that venom is the entire theme. Obama mentions Wright’s AIDs work—never that Wright blamed America for the AIDs epidemic. Obama mentions Wright’s positive work on apartheid, not that Wright claimed the U.S. put Mandela in jail. And on and on. Obama knew of his extremisms

Edwin Black: Barack Obama--Mentored by an anti-American, anti-Zionist Black Separatist

[Edwin Black was the first Jewish journalist to interview Minister Louis Farrakhan while on assignment for the Washington Post as part his broad investigation of the Nation of Islam.] In the end it was not the lies about his religion, but the truth about his religion that may have irrevocably splattered the image of Barack Obama. Democratic presidential frontrunner Obama survived a malicious viral email campaign that he was a Muslim. While under Sharia, he was in fact bor

Nicholas J. G. Winter: Why Race, Gender, and Politics Are Dangerous Frames

[Nicholas J. G. Winter, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, is publishing his book, Dangerous Frames: How Ideas about Race and Gender Shape Public Opinion at the perfe

Jon Wiener: Clinton's Iraq Vote -- Five Years Later

[Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New Press, 2005).] The fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war provides an appropriate moment to revisit Hillary Clinton's argument in favor of authorizing Bush's use of force, and to contrast it with the case made at the time by Bush's opponents.In the last few years, Clinton has defended h

Tom Engelhardt: Blowing Them Away Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a small

Gerald Posner: Rev Wright and Barack

[Gerald Posner is the author of 10 books of investigative non-fiction, seven NYT bestsellers, and a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. His last book was Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi US Connection.] I am a Barack Obama supporter. I liked Senator John Edwards, think Hilary Clinton would make a super president, but have been persuaded ever since the start of the campaign that Barack offers the greatest chance for substantive, and greatly over needed, change.

Willard Sterne Randall: Let's kick religion off the campaign trail

[Willard Sterne Randall, author of George Washington, A Life and Thomas Jefferson, A Life, is a distinguished scholar in history at Champlain College, in Burlington, Vt.] NO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION since 1800 has taken place without an attempt to damage at least one candidate’s reputation by innuendo, rumor or ridicu

Victor Davis Hanson: Looking at Iraq

By now everyone sees what he wishes in Iraq — a disaster of many proportions, a necessary war that will still be won. Liberals who used to demand that we promote democracy abroad are fierce critics of Iraqi democracy; conservatives, who want an iron hand dealing with a hostile Middle East, support spending hundreds of billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraqi society. So it will be left to historians, as has been true in the case of the far-more-costly Korean and Vietnam wars, to adj

Barry Rubin: Let's Talk About the Nazis

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloriacenter.org and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal http://meria.idc.ac.il. His latest books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).]

Mark Naison: Spitzer, Clemens and Bonds ... A Case of Fiddling While Rome Burns

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] As I read the latest economic news, which includes stories of federal bailouts of some of the nation's largest investment banking firms and predictions of the worst recession in recent memory, I marvel at the amount of press coverage given to the Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds steroid investigations and Eliot Spitzer ill considered sexual escapades. I understand the appeal