Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Time to Profile Airline Passengers?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The debate over profiling airline passengers revived after the thwarted Islamist plot to bomb 10 airplanes in London on Aug. 10. The sad fact is, through inertia, denial, cowardice, and political correctness, Western airport security services — with the notable exception of

Juan Cole: Is Bush a Narcissist?

Bush said again on Monday that he would keep US troops in Iraq until 2009 and argued that for the US to withdraw would send a bad message to reformers in the region. He said he is concerned about that talk of civil war in Iraq and seemed to admit that he isn't very happy most of the time about the way things are going, but added that he doesn't expect to be joyous in w

Juan Cole: JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi

Overseas readers who don't watch US-based cable news may not know that there is a news blackout on the 24 hours news stations, which have shown endless hours of useless speculation on a ten year old small town murder case. Why the cable news channels in the US behave in this stupid and lemming-like fashion no doubt has to do with the severe discipline of the advertising market and its dependence on ratings. I.e., news has to generate 20 percent profits, which it cannot do, and so lurid infotainm

Martin E. Marty: Irony and "Islamofascism"

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.comhttp://www.illuminos.com.] Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim excrescences that issue in terrorism are coming to be called "Islamofascism" among those who want to see the "War on Terror" be part of "World War III" (or IV).

Anson Rabinbach: Totalitarianism Revisited

[Anson Rabinbach is Professor of History and Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on the history of European antifascism.] he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vac

William Polk: Attacking Iran Would Be a Disaster

[Mr. Polk taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1961 when he was appointed a member of the Policy Planning Council of the US State Department. In 1965 he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Subsequently, he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his books are The United States and the Arab World, The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century, Neighbors and Strangers: the Fun

Niall Ferguson: The Next War of the World

Summary: The twentieth century was the bloodiest era in history. Despite the comfortable assumption that the twenty-first will be more peaceful, the same ingredients that made the last hundred years so destructive are present today. In particular, a conflict in the Middle East may well spark another global conflagration. The United States could prevent such an outcome -- but it may not be willing to. [Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University a

Victor Davis Hanson: Excuse after excuse for Islamist violence

What makes two dozen British Muslims want to blow up thousands of innocent passengers on jumbo jets? Why does al-Qaida plan hourly to kill civilians? And why does oil-rich Iran wish to "wipe out" Israel? In short, it's the old blame game, one that over the past century has taken multiple forms. Once, a tired whine of Islamists was that European colonialists and American oilmen rigged global commerce to "rob" the Middle East of its natural wealth. Bu

David Greenberg: Is Lamont Another McGovern?

[Mr. Greenberg is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003). He teaches history at Rutgers University.] Since the Iraq war began, public discussion has been thick with Vietnam analogies. Revelations of the war's bogus casus belli recalled the Gulf of Tonkin, and the horrors at Abu Ghraib and Haditha and brought to mind th

John Keegan: What went wrong in Iraq--and how to make it right.

[Mr. Keegan is the author of "The Face of Battle," "The Iraq War" and many other books.] The mystery of the Iraq War is to explain how a brilliantly executed invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle. Part of the explanation, at least, is a lack of troops, a fault for which the Defense Department has been responsible. The current policy has its roots in the desire of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to wean the Army away from its decades of i

Daniel Pipes: Strange Logic in the Lebanon War

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] As staff at some of the world's most prestigious press organizations effectively take Hezbollah's side in its war with Israel, they inadvertently expose a profound transformation in the logic of warfare.Some examples of their actions:Reuters: Adn

Stephen Morris: It Is Islamic Fascism

[Stephen Morris, an Australian citizen, is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.] The apparently successful pre-emptive strike by British and Pakistani police against a home-grown terror cell in Britain should raise the concern of every decent patriotic citizen in Britain, Europe and Australia about their long-term security. For the danger comes from what one would have hoped were the socially in

Michael Auslin: North Korea's Marshall Plan

[Mr. Auslin is an associate professor of history at Yale University.] Kim Jong Il's most recent belligerence has engendered a rare moment of unanimity in the U.N. Security Council. But few regional leaders have offered plausible suggestions on how to prepare for, and peacefully precipitate, a post-Kim, unified Korea. A Korean Marshall Plan might do the trick. Creating a multi-billion dollar stabilization fund could help bring about peaceful regime change, by emboldening

Larry Schweikart: The Failing "Insurgency" in Iraq

[Mr. Schweikart is the author of America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror.] Roadside-bomb attacks are typically cited as evidence that the U.S. and its allies are losing the war in Iraq. But a more in-depth look at the numbers suggests that the opposite may be the case. Since January of 2006, there have been some 11,242 roadside bomb/improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq, a considerable uptick from the 10,953 for the 12 months of 2

Daniel Pipes: "At War with Islamic Fascists"

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] In his first response to the major terror airline scare in London, President Bush said on Aug. 10 that “The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark remind

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ehud Olmert knows he must break with the political tradition into which he was born

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of ``The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma," which won a National Jewish Book Award.] EVERY DAY BRINGS more grim news of the conflict in Lebanon and Israel, with a mounting death toll from Katyushas and F-16s. But Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, knows that beyond this conflict with Hezbollah is another, still more existential one with the Palestinians, and that this war in Leb

Gary J. Bass: What Really Causes Civil War?

[Gary J. Bass, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is writing a book about humanitarian intervention.] The commonplace assumption that a more homogeneous society is a more peaceful society certainly sounds reasonable. Surely monoethnic Japan should have an easier time maintaining domestic order than Indonesia; or Slovenia than Macedonia. After all, in a country with numerous ethnic or religious groups, politicians are easily tempted to organize

Gabriel Kolko: 21st century technology and primitive political attitudes

[Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book, The Age of War, was published in March 2006. He can be reached at: kolko@counterpunch.org. ] The United States had a

Stephen L. Sass: Scarcity, Mother of Invention

[Stephen L. Sass, a professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell, is the author of “The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History From the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon.”] IN the wake of the closure of a BP oil field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, oil prices shot up to $77 a barrel on Wednesday, and the chorus of doomsayers concerned about the dire consequences of our fossil fuel dependency has reached a crescendo. If oil hits $100 a barrel, the impact on our ec

Mark LeVine: 101 Uses of Chaos

Mark LeVine is a professor of modern Middle Eastern History at UC Irvine and author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005) and the forthcoming Heavy Metal Islam (Random House/Verso). His website is www.culturejamming.org. Click here for his HNN blog. Perhaps the g