Roundup: Historians' Take

Nasir Khan: Islam in a Western Mirror

[Nasir Khan, Dr Philos, is a historian and a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx's Writings and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey. He has written numerous articles on international affairs and human rights. He has his own blog at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com through which he can be contacted.] Present-day images of Muslims and Islam in Western

Mark Selden: A Forgotten Holocaust ... US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq

[Mark Selden is a research associate at the East Asia Program, Cornell University, and a coordinator of Japan Focus. His recent books include War and State Terrorism. The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century.] World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a

Margaret MacMillan: The Flawed Wilsonian Dream

[Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history and provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of “Women of the Raj” and “Paris 1919.” Her most recent book is “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.”] Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership

David Greenberg: In Nixon’s Tricks, Rove’s Roots and a Blueprint for Bush

[David Greenberg, an assistant professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., is the author of three books, “Nixon’s Shadow,” “Presidential Doodles” and, most recently, “Calvin Coolidge.” He writes the “History Lesson” column for Slate.] If you’re a political junkie with Internet access looking for cheap laughs — and if you’re reading this column, you probably are — take a minute, go to YouTube and search for “Nixon” and “Rove.” Your

Daniel Martin Varisco: How Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech plays today

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.]“May day, may day.” You can take this in two ways. First, this is the day in which many working people in the world celebrate being workers. This is not the way it will be commemorated on the front lawn of the White House today. Then there is the military version of a Spitfire on fire and a pilot knowing it is time to bail out. The pilot currently occupying the White House is wielding his veto pow

Daniel Pipes: Where the Nazi "Big Lie" Endures

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] "If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason." So writes Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in"The Big Lie and the Media W

Tom Engelhardt: Bush's Texas Chainsaw Massacre

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.] It had taken

Edward Luttwak: It's time to ignore the Middle East

[Edward Luttwak is senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.] Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them. The first mistake is "five minutes to midnight" catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed

Howard Zinn: Are We Politicians or Citizens?

As I write this, Congress is debating timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. In response to the Bush Administration's "surge" of troops, and the Republicans' refusal to limit our occupation, the Democrats are behaving with their customary timidity, proposing withdrawal, but only after a year, or eighteen months. And it seems they expect the anti-war movement to support them. That was suggested in a recent message from MoveOn, which polled its members on the Democrat pro

Juan Cole: George Tenet on the staircase with the neocons

The French call it "the spirit of the staircase" (l'esprit d'escalier), the clever reply to someone that comes to you on your way up to the bedroom after a cocktail party. In his new book, released Monday, former CIA Director George Tenet has delivered himself of hundreds of pages on the staircase, imagining what he should have said or could have said to Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and the other neoconservatives who marched the country to war in Iraq using the pretext of Sep

Juan Cole: Bush didn't want war?

Condi Rice on Sunday denied allegations by former CIA director George Tenet that Bush came into office determined to have a war against Iraq. This is the interview by Wolf Blitzer of CNN:QUESTION: Because you remember Paul O'Neill, the first Treasury Secretary, where he wrote in his first book, The Price of Loyalty with Ron Suskind, and what Ron Suskind later wrote in his own book, The One Percent Solutio

Frederick Kagan: Congress and Iraq

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.] As Congress prepares to vote on a supplemental defense appropriations bill that includes timelines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the lines in the debate over Iraq strategy have become ever starker. The administration and other defenders of the present strategy insist that it be given the chance to succeed. Opponents, including the Democratic leadership in Congress, insist that it is time to begin winding down America's involvem

Bernard Weiner: An "interview" with a historian in 2034 about the Bush legacy

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers ( www.crisispapers.org ).] Boston, June 26, 2034 Pulitizer Prize-winning historian Isadora Tribe's much-awaited "The Restoration Years: America in the Post-Bush Era" jumped to th

Lawrence S. Wittner: How the Peace Movement Can Win

[Lawrence S. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He serves on the board of Peace Action.] The peace movement is a very important part of American life. Much like the labor movement, the racial justice movement, and the women's movement, the peace movement is comprised of an array of organizations an

Jonathan Zimmerman: Sports and the American Ideal

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press, 2006).] Quick question: what did Don Imus' bigoted remarks and the dismissed Duke rape charges have in common? If you answered “race and gender,” you’re only partially correct. There was a third shared element in these stories, which gave them their special power and prominence in American

Stanley Kutler: How to support the troops

President Bush has reiterated his oft-repeated assertion that we must support the troops. He must not be allowed to monopolize"patriotism,""the flag," and"the troops." The rest of us can pay our respect to the idea of the nation, in our own mindful way, and as we see fit. On his own grounds, however, the president has a lot to answer for. He can begin to support our troops by a) apologizing to the family of Pat Tillman; 2) apologizing to Jessica Lynch and her family; and c) apolo

Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon: The Case for Larger Ground Forces

We live at a time when wars not only rage in nearly every region but threaten to erupt in many places where the current relative calm is tenuous. To view this as a strategic military challenge for the United States is not to espouse a specific theory of America’s role in the world or a certain political philosophy. Such an assessment flows directly from the basic biparti- san view of American foreign policy makers since World War II that overseas threats must be coun- tered b

Frederick Kagan: Al-Qaida has hit back with its own 'surge'. But for the US, grounds for optimism are rising

The new effort to establish security in Iraq has begun. At this early stage, the most positive development is a rise in hostility to al-Qaida in the Sunni community. Al-Qaida has responded with its own "surge", which so far has not revived support for the terrorists or reignited sectarian violence. The coalition has also made unexpectedly rapid progress in reducing the power of Moqtada al-Sadr, killing or capturing more than 700 members of his Mahdi army. At the same time, the rhetoric

Daniel Pipes: A Madrasa Grows In Brooklyn

Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12, will boast a"multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction." This appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military, diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy

John Arquilla: Reagan Foreign Policy Ideas Still Relevant

[John Arquilla is a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has taught in the special operations curriculum since 1993. He also serves as director of the Information Operations Center. He is the author of The Reagan Imprint.] If you were asked to name the three most important initiatives that characterize American strategy toward the world today, what would they be? More likely than not, you would list: 1) The war on terror; 2) The goal of spreading