Roundup: Historians' Take

Aug 8, 2005

Samuel Huntington: Atheists ARE Outsiders in America

Samuel Huntington, in the WSJ (June 16, 2004):The battle over the Pledge of Allegiance has stimulated vigorous controversy on an issue central to America's identity. Opponents of "under God" (which was added to the pledge in 1954) argue that the United States is a secular country, that the First Amendment prohibits rhetorical or material state support for religion, and

Aug 8, 2005

Bernard Lewis: The UN Is Likely to Botch the Job in Iraq

Bernard Lewis, in the WSJ (May 12, 2004):The U.S. turn to the United Nations for help in Iraq raises two questions, one of perception, the other of substance.There can be no doubt that this appeal, in the context of the events in Fallujah, will be perceived in many circles in the Middle East -- and not only in the Middle East -- as signifying fea

Aug 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: It's Bush Administration Officials Who Are Drawing the Vietnam Parallels Now

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation InstituteHere was part of a May 4 conversation between Larry King and Colin Powell on Larry King Live about the photos from Abu Ghraib, and it was distinctly from the"a-few-bad-eggs" school of Iraqi analysis: "KING: Let's go one by one. First, let's discuss the a

Aug 8, 2005

Paul Kennedy: The U.S. Is Already in Decline

Mike Steketee, in the Australian (May 7, 2004):THERE are increasing signs the US has overreached and faces decline despite its unrivalled military and economic power, according to Paul Kennedy, a leading historian. In Sydney to address the Future Summit, a major conference on the nation's future, Professor Kennedy, of Yale University, said the US was top-heavy in expensive Cold War weapons systems such as nuclear submarines and suffered from a

Aug 8, 2005

Most Historians Doubt Clinton's Book Will Be of Great Value

From the Associated Press (May 3, 2004):As President Clinton rushes to finish his memoirs, he faces the more pressing task of writing a book deemed worthy of all the attention, an accomplishment no president has pulled off since Ulysses S. Grant. Some leading historians have ideas on how Clinton could do it.``He's an intelligent fellow and if he writes as well as he talks, he could make an interesting contribution to history,'' says Arthur M. Schlesin

Aug 8, 2005

Mark Levine: The Chaos in Iraq

Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004); in

Aug 8, 2005

Jonathan M. Hansen: The U.S. Is Sovereign at Guantanamo

Jonathan M. Hansen, author of The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920, is writing a book about the history of Guantánamo Bay; in the NYT (April 20, 2004): ... The history of how the United States came to possess Guantánamo Bay illuminates a question in the Supreme Court case to be argued today about whether American courts have

Aug 8, 2005

Lewis Gould: Bush Is Learning that the Presidency Is More than Photo-Ops

Lewis Gould, in the Wash Post (April 18, 2004):There comes a moment in almost every presidency when an unpleasant bit of reality intrudes upon the happy routine of striking media poses, harvesting reelection money and rubbing the egos of political allies. It's a moment when the unique burdens of the Oval Office begin to weigh upon its occupant more heavily than before,

Aug 8, 2005

Wacky French Intellectuals Blame the U.S. for All the World's Troubles

Laurent Murawiec, a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. and the author of a new translation of Carl von Clausewitz's On War (into French) in frontpagemag.com (April 15, 2004):Whence comes the phenomenon known as fundamentalist Islam or Islamism? Some French analysts from a range of disciplines (international affairs, Orientalism, security studies, journalism) have

Aug 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: American Hubris in Iraq

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 11, 2004): Does anyone recall the arguments of worried critics of the impending invasion of Iraq early last spring? There was a fear – not realized (until this week) of block by block urban warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Iraq's capital was to be an enormous trap Saddam Hussein had readied to spring on American troops. Casualties

Aug 8, 2005

Juan Cole: The U.S. Is Losing Control in Iraq

Excepts from the blog of historian Juan Cole, April 6-12, 2004:Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great pr

Aug 8, 2005

Daniel Pipes: The Moderation of American Muslims Is Overstated

Daniel Pipes, in FrontPageMagazine.com (April 8, 2004): A Detroit-area Islamic organization, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, released a survey of Detroit Muslims, A Portrait of Detroit Mosques: Muslim Views on Policy, Politics and Religion , on April 6, 2004. Written by Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, and conducted i

Aug 8, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Reforming Islam Is as Necessary as Reforming Iraq

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (April 6, 2004): The global war on terror cannot be won through counterterrorism alone; it also requires convincing the terrorists and their sympathizers that their goals and methods are faulty and failing. But how is this to be done? By focusing on the ideological and religious sources of the violence, say I:"The immediate war goal must be to destroy militant Islam and the ultimate war goal the modernization of Islam." I have not

Aug 8, 2005

Kenneth C. Davis: The Founding Fathers Might Have Appreciated Michael Newdow's Campaign to Rid the Pledge of Allegiance of the Words "Under God"

Kenneth C. Davis, in the NYT (March 26, 2004), writing about Michael Newdow's lawsuit against the Pledge of Allegiance: ... Eighteenth-century America was largely Christian and overwhelmingly Protestant, and the dominant Protestant denominations (Congregationalism in New England, the Anglican Church in the South) even enjoyed state subsidies. Quakers were hanged in the early Coloni

Aug 8, 2005

Why Francis Fukuyama Opposed the Iraq War

Herb Keinon, in the Jerusalem Post (March 18, 2004):Fifteen years after his controversial end-of-history thesis celebrated liberalism's victory over communism, political thinker Francis Fukuyama probes terror's challenge to the world. Many and varied are the critics of US policy in Iraq - both of Washington's decision

Aug 8, 2005

Murray Polner: The Police Are Once Again Intimidating Peace Protesters

Murray Polner, author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, in Newsday (March 16, 2004): As we approach the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the coming spring nationwide demonstrations, not to mention the coming Republican convention in New York City, there is growin

Aug 8, 2005

Jack Granatstein: Canadians Keep Electing Bozos Prime Minister ... That's Led to a Broken Military

From CJAD (Feb. 22, 2004):Historian Jack Granatstein spreads the blame widely in answering the title question of his new book: Who Killed the Canadian Military? Two generations of politicians and a complacent electorate have left the Canadian Forces a decrepit, dispirited group and it will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild them, Granatstein writes. His sli

Aug 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Pentagon Officials Are Remembering Our History the Wrong Way

Tom Engelhardt, in the www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (Feb. 20, 2004): Let's remember, when we do our historical multiplication tables, that everything happening now began somewhere, some time. Take the construction and engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root, now serving (and feeding) our troops in Iraq in so many overpriced ways .

Aug 8, 2005

David Brooks: The Party of Jimmy or JFK?

David Brooks, in the NYT (Feb. 17, 2004):Between 1940 and 1968, the American people trusted the Democratic Party in times of war. But Vietnam shattered that trust. So if we're going to talk about Vietnam during this campaign, as I guess we are, let's not talk about how many days George Bush served in the National Guard, or how many rows John Kerry sat from Jane Fonda at a prote

Aug 8, 2005

Jean Edward Smith: Why Some Generals Make It in American Politics and Some Don't

Grant biographer Jean Edward Smith, in the NYT (Feb. 13, 2004): In pulling out of the Democratic presidential race, Gen. Wesley Clark ended what was once a promising quest to join the long line of men who converted battlefield prominence into political victory. The military is one of the traditional springboards to the White House: 12 former generals have been president, six of them career military men (o