Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Bush's Cedar Revolution Collapses in Yet Another Policy Failure

The assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel on Tuesday has thrown that country further into crisis. The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of 'democratization,' what Bush has really been about is creating pro-American winners and anti-American losers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Bush's vision is not democratic because he always installs a tyranny of the majority. The vanquis

Michael Ledeen: Unlike Previous Counterinsurgencies

[Ledeen is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, the Middle East, Europe (Italy), U.S.-China relations, intelligence, and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the NSC and to the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. His latest book is entitled The War against the Terror Masters. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin.]

Roger Morris: Reason in an age of folly (and felony)

[Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, is an award-winning author and historian whose new book, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US covert interventions and foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, will be published by Alfred Knopf next year.] Are we the eagle nation Or have we but the talons and the maw, And for the abject

William Lambers: Congress should fund school lunches for poor kids abroad

[William Lambers is the author of "The Road to Peace: From the Disarming of the Great Lakes to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty." He also writes for the History News Service. For more information on McGovern-Dole program: www. friendsofwfp.org.] After World War II, the United States sponsored the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild war-torn Europe. Food aid, medicine and reconstruction efforts vastly improved the lives of the children on that continent. Today, the

Peter Montague: We are essentially living in a new world

[Mr. Montague is a journalist and historian holding a Ph.D. degree in American Studies from University of New Mexico (1971).] We are living in a world that is essentially new. Almost everything has changed in the past 50 years. Perhaps we are trying to understand this new world using habits of thought from the old world. Maybe that is why things seem so confusing. Let's consider some of the ways the world has changed since 1950. In the largest sense, here is the big change

Judith Klinghoffer: Indians like to watch their country being put down

[Judith Klinghoffer, an affiliate professor at Haifa University and an HNN blogger, is currently lecturing at a law school in Goa, India.] To a significant degree the fate of liberty and peace in the 21st century will depend on the successful development of the largest world democracy. For it is in India that the autocratic development model is truly challenged. That is the reason it is so disheartening to find that much of the Indian (very leftist) elite is so dismissive of the coun

Michael Oren: Israel has to consider a pre-emptive strike against Iran

[Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present," forthcoming from W.W. Norton.] "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone." With these words, Lyndon B. Johnson greeted Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban at the White House on May 26, 1967. The Middle East was in the throes of an escalating crisis. Gamal Abdul Nasser had evicted U.N. peacekeepers

Tom Engelhardt: What It Means to "Salvage U.S. Prestige" in Iraq

[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.] Things are

Gavan McCormack: The Okinawan Election and Resistance to Japan's Military First Politics

[Gavan McCormack is a Japan Focus coordinator. His new book, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, will be published by Verso in May 2007. For earlier essays by him on Okinawa, see the Japan Focus files.] The election for Governor of Okinawa on 19 November is unique among prefectural elections in Japan in its national, regional and even global implications. The Japanese state has been struggling for more than a decade to secure the compliance of Okinawan people with an agenda

Jonathan Zimmerman: US midterms rebutted cynical liberals who rail about the public's stupidity and ignorance

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] To quote President Bush, the Republican Party received a good old-fashioned thumpin' in last week's elections. But so did many American liberals, who love to rail about the naivety, ignorance, and general stupidity of the American electorate.Call it Radical Pique. Way back in 1970, Tom Wolfe coined the term &

Garry Wills: A Country Ruled by Faith

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present. George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham's ministry to the pow

Richard Gott: Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler elite

[Richard Gott is the author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press).] The recent explosion of indigenous protest in Latin America, culminating in the election this year of Evo Morales, an Aymara indian, as president of Bolivia, has highlighted the precarious position of the white-settler elite that has dominated the continent for so many centuries. Although the term "white settler" is familiar in the history of most European colonies, and comes with a pejorative rin

Derek Catsam: The Unpredictability of an Unhappy Electorate

[Derek Catsam is a history professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, Tex., and a writer for the History News Service.] The confetti has begun to settle after the latest election. The Democrats have congratulated themselves, the Republicans have pointed fingers, and the pundits have tried to convince us that they knew all along that this was precisely what would happen. One of the preferred approaches of conser

Daniel Pipes: Europe is Finished, Predicts Mark Steyn

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Mark Steyn, political columnist and cultural critic, has written a remarkable book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery). He combines several virtues uncommonly found together – humor, accurate reportage, and deep thinking – then applies these to what

Ruth Rosen: America’s election ... Daddy’s swagger vs Mommy’s care

[Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who formerly wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2001) will be republished in 2007 with an updated chronology and epilogue.] The world will long wonder what took the American people so long to

Michael Rubin: Rumsfeld and the Realists

[Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly. He earned a PhD in history at Yale.] On Dec. 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then Ronald Reagan's Middle East envoy, met Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. According to declassified documents, the Reagan administration sought to re-establish long-severed relations with Baghdad amid concern about growing Iranian influence. While U.S. intelligence had earlier confirmed Sadda

Frederick W. Kagan: 'Redeployment' will not 'incentivize' the Iraqi military. It will lead to its collapse.

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of the American Military (Encounter). He formerly taught history at West Point.] The United States has two options in Iraq: stay and try to win, or cut, run, and lose. Attempts to chart a middle course--partial withdrawal or redeployment, accelerated hand-over to the Iraqis, political deals with Syria or Iran--ignore the realities of the military situat

Ira Chernus: The Unfinished Story of Election 2006

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His latest book is Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.] Election statistics are like pies. You can slice them up any way you want. And the way you slice them depends on the tool you use. My favorite tool is a nugget of wisdom from Democratic political guru Stanley Greenberg: "

H.W.Brands: How last century's money wars may lead to healthcare, pension reform

[H.W. BRANDS teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is "The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar."] PITY BEN BERNANKE. As chairman of the Federal Reserve, his every utterance (or cough or sneeze) is analyzed for clues as to the future direction of interest rates. The weight of the American economy is laid on his shoulders by pundits and much of the public. And he labors in the shadow of Alan Green

Thomas A. Foster: Sex and American Politics

[Thomas A. Foster teaches history at DePaul University. He is the author of "Sex and the Eighteenth Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America" and editor of the forthcoming "Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America."] In 2002, publishers of American history high school textbooks altered an image of Emanuel Leutze's famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware'' (1851) because the original painting