Roundup: Historians' Take

May 25, 2005

Niall Ferguson: Failure in Iraq Would Be Ghastly

Niall Ferguson, in the NYT (5-24-05): [Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard and a senior fellowthe Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire."]I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what

May 25, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: The Return of Bodycounting

Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (5-23-05): On March 19th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the "metrics" of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." Here is part of that interview: "NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You talk

May 25, 2005

Kevin Starr: Will LA Finally Have a Mayor Who Defines the City?

Kevin Starr, in the LAT (5-22-05): [Kevin Starr, state librarian emeritus, is professor of history at USC. His latest book is "Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003."]Every flourishing city is held together, in part, by a collective narrative. No one is more responsible for this narrative than a city's mayor. To cite this truism in the context of the Los Angeles mayor's race that at long last ended on Tuesday is to remind ourselves that this cit

May 25, 2005

Ralph Luker: James Watt's Misguided Swipe at the Religious Left

Ralph Luker, on CNET (5-22-05): I find it perfectly fascinating that James Watt of all people is accusing the religious left of attempting to "divide the people of faith" -- when: -- Some evangelical Protestants in these latter days declare that some evangelical Protestant judges and justices are greater threats to our national security than are Islamic ter

May 25, 2005

Daniel Pipes: The Mad Conspiracy Theory that's Blocking the End of Polio in Muslim Countires

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (5-24-05):A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.The theory's source seems to be a physician and the president of Nigeria's Supreme Council for Shari'a Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68. Dr. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Ameri

May 24, 2005

Bernard Lewis: Disgruntled Iraqis Need to Remember the Prized Role of the Loyal Opposition

Bernard Lewis, in the WSJ (5-24-05): The Iraqis have made tremendous progress toward democracy, first by holding fair and contested elections, then by freely negotiating a series of compromise agreements, to form a coalition government comprising diverse and even previously conflicting elements. In a country where freedom and compromise were equally unfamiliar, these are giant steps forward. But an important step still remains. The underlying assumption of the Iraqi pa

May 21, 2005

Juan Cole: The Memo that Proves Bush Lied Us into War

Juan Cole, at Salon.com (5-19-05): When Newsweek's source admitted that he had misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?" Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush administration. Tens of thousands of people are dead in Ira

May 20, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Amazon.com's Koran Desecration Problem

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (5-20-05):As the Koran-flushing-in-Cuba episode becomes old news, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has helpfully found a way to keep Koran desecration in the public eye. It does so – and I draw on MPAC's two press releases (here and here), plus reports from the Associate

May 19, 2005

Max Boot: Mubarak Must Think Bush Is a Chump

Max Boot, in the LAT (5-19-05):Hosni Mubarak must think that George W. Bush is a chump. The Egyptian pharaoh apparently realizes that the U.S. president is serious about spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East, but he still thinks he can get away with cosmetic changes that do nothing to seriously change the ugly nature of his regime. Mubarak grand

May 19, 2005

Jon Wiener: Israeli Boycott ... A Mistake

Jon Wiener, in the Nation (5-19-05):The blacklist of Israeli academics declared by Britain's leading union of university faculty is a bad idea. The 50,000-member Association of University Teachers (AUT), seeking to support Palestinian rights, passed resolutions late in April targeting faculty members at two universities in Israel, Haifa and Bar-Ilan. Professors there are banned from"any f

May 18, 2005

Daniel Pipes: CAIR's Hate Crimes Nonsense

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (5-18-05):Should you read Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005, an annual report issued last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), you'll learn how the Muslim experience in America is worsening. Specifically, the number of"anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States" has gone up dramatically: from 42 cases in 2002,

May 17, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Business as Usual in the Palestinian Authority

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (5-17-05):Yasser Arafat's demise in November excited great hopes among those who saw his malign personality as the main reason for Palestinian intransigence.But those of us who saw the problem as larger than Arafat – as resulting, rather, from the deep radicalization of the Palestinian body politic – expected little change. Indeed, I wrote at the

May 16, 2005

Ernest R. May: Why the 9-11 Commission Succeeded

Ernest R. May, writing in the New Republic about his experience as a consultant to the 9-11 Commission (3-16-05):... My job was to help produce the historical narrative. For this task, I had two comparative advantages. The first was a long career as a historian. The second was a lack of partisan bias. Many years earlier, I had been a commissioner myself. The commission was to re

May 16, 2005

Fouad Ajami: How the Middle East Became George W. Country

Fouad Ajami, in the WSJ (5-16-05):"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here -- the borders of th

May 13, 2005

Jon Wiener: How the Media Framed the Columbia University Story--And How It Should Have

Jon Wiener, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (5-9-05): [Jon Wiener is a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine and author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005).]The media storm around Columbia's Middle Eastern-studies department provides one of the few cases in which students' complaints about professors' classroom conduct

May 13, 2005

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: Bush's Rewriting of the History of Yalta

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at the Hufflington Blog (5-9-05):The Yalta conference in February 1945 produced, according to President Bush, "one of the greatest wrongs of history." The Yalt

May 12, 2005

Geremie Barmé: The Antecedents to the Current Sino-Japanese Conflict

Geremie Barmé presented this at a conference organized by Li Narangoa and Tessa Morris-Suzuki and revised it for Japan Focus. He is Professor in the Division of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. His recent books include In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. May 4 2005 marked the 76th anniversary of the iconic Chinese patriotic protest movement. It was the day in 1919 when students

May 12, 2005

Bernard Lewis: The Two Changes that Sabotaged Democracy in the Middle East

Bernard Lewis, in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2005): ... The Islamic tradition insists very strongly on two points concerning the conduct of government by the ruler. One is the need for consultation. This is explicitly recommended in the Koran. It is also mentioned very frequently in the traditions of the Prophet. The converse is despotism; in Ar

May 10, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Some Palestinians Are Inspired by Israel's Democracy

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (5-10-05):For all their rhetoric about Israel's"vicious" and"brutal" occupation, Palestinian Arabs - including their leaders - sometimes let down their guard and acknowledge how they prefer Israel to the Palestinian Authority. Here are some recurring themes:Restraints on violence. After PA police raided the house of a Hamas supporter in a late-night operation and roughed up

May 7, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Did Both the US and USSR Lose the Cold War?

Tom Engelhardt, at the website, TomDispatch.com (5-2-05): [Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.] Of the two superpowers that faced each other d