Roundup: Historians' Take

May 4, 2004

Victor Davis Hanson: A Little Perspective Please About the Offensiveness at Abu Ghraib Prison

Victor Davis Hanson, in the WSJ (May 3, 2004):Pictures of American military police humiliating and, in some cases, allegedly torturing Iraqi prisoners in Saddam's old Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad now flash across the world. "The Shame!," Egyptian papers blare out at the sight of a pyramid of contorted naked males amid a smiling female GI. Various human-rights

May 4, 2004

David Greenberg: Woodward Deserves the Praise He Is Now Getting from Critics Who Doubted His Approach in Bush at War

David Greenberg, in the Boston Globe (May 2, 2004):FORGET FOR A MINUTE, if you can, the last fortnight of publicity for Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack." Think back to November 2002 and the release of "Bush at War," his account of White House decision-making just after the Sept. 11 attacks. Like Woodward's previous 10 books, that volume was a bestseller,

May 3, 2004

Nicholas Turse: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

Nicholas Turse, writing in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 2004): Since 1961, thanks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we've all been cognizant of the"unwarranted influence" of the military-industrial complex in America. Later in that decade, Senator J. William Fulbright spoke out against the militarization of academia, warning that,"in lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university

Apr 30, 2004

Cass Sunstein: Brown Reconsidered?

Cass Sunstein, in the New Yorker (May 3, 2004):... In September of 1953, just before Brown was to be reargued, [Chief Justice] Vinson died of a heart attack, and everything changed. “This is the first indication that I have ever had that there is a God,” [Justice Felix] Frankfurter told a former law clerk. President Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, then the g

Apr 30, 2004

Amitai Etzioni: What Will We Say Years from Now When We Wake Up and 300,000 People Have Been Killed in a Nuclear Suitcase Terrorist Attack?

Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University, in the LAT (April 26, 2004): Fast-forward three years. A bipartisan commission is conducting hearings in Washington to determine why we were asleep at the wheel when terrorists set off a nuclear device in one of our major cities. The attack killed 300,000. It shook the nation's confidence so profoundly that the Constitution was"temporarily" suspended; all civil liberties were waived to prevent future atta

Apr 30, 2004

Richard Rorty: Our Liberties Are at Risk If We Succumb to Another Major Attack

Richard Rorty, who teaches philosophy at Stanford, in the London Review of Books (April 2004): Europe is coming to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda's opponent is the West, not just America. The interior ministers of the EU nations have been holding meetings to co-ordinate anti-terrorist measures. The outcome of these meetings is likely to determine how many of their civil liberties Europeans will have to sacrifice. We can be grateful that t

Apr 29, 2004

The U.S. Bungled by Not Taking Account of the Tribes in Falluja

Sandra Mackey, author of The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, in the NYT (April 29, 2004): The United States is in a no-win situation in Falluja. Yesterday, fighting increased in and around the city of 300,000, the place where four civilian contractors were burned to death last month. Even if American forces storm and subdue the town, it is unlikely that there will be peace there any

Apr 29, 2004

Juan Cole: 57% of Americans Believe Saddam Gave Substantial Support to al-Qaeda

Juan Cole, in his blog (April 25, 2004): A new poll shows that as of mid-March, 57% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had given substantial support to al-Qaeda. Worse, 45% actually say that" clear evidence" has been found in Iraq to support this allegation! As for weapons of mass destruction 45 percent say they believe Saddam had them before the recent war, and 22 percent s

Apr 26, 2004

Bill O’Reilly and Ted Kennedy are Wrong

D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in the Kansas City Star (April 25, 2004): Dear Bill & Ted:You are wrong when you say that the American people will "throw out" George W. Bush if the war is not "won" in the next five months. Forget what you see in the polls. The American people have no history of getting rid of their presidents in the middle of a war. They certainly did not throw out LBJ --- he lost his nerve

Apr 23, 2004

Juan Cole: Answering Hitchens

Juan Cole, in his blog (April 23, 2004): A reader sent me these questions that he said Christopher Hitchens had posed. I then found them at his web site. They are: 1) Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? 2) Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been b

Apr 23, 2004

Jonathan Zimmerman: Feel-Good History Hurts Kids

Jonathan Zimmerman (New York University), in the LAT (April 23, 2004):Seventeen years ago, as a social studies teacher in Baltimore, I led a class of sixth-graders through a lesson on the civil rights movement. We had just reached the 1963 March on Washington when one asked a question that I hadn't expected. "Is it true," she asked, "that Martin Lu

Apr 23, 2004

On Ten Commandments Bill, Christian Right Has It Wrong

Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, in the Christian Science Monitor (April 21, 2004):Was the United States founded as a "Christian nation"? For many conservative Christians there is no question about it. In fact, this is one of the primary ideas animating and informing the Christian right in the US. We are likely to hear a great deal about it this election year - thanks to

Apr 22, 2004

Martin Kramer: If the War Goes Badly, Congress Could Defund Title VI

Martin Kramer, on his blog (April 21, 2004):... The public hasn't yet fixed blame for the on-the-ground problems that have beset the United States. But some of it could easily settle upon the academy, for failing to prepare this country for its mission despite almost fifty years of federal subsidies for area studies. That would make Title VI a tempting target for retribu

Apr 21, 2004

Niall Ferguson: Don't Think Vietnam, Think Iraq Under British Rule

Niall Ferguson, in the NYT (April 18, 2004):From Ted Kennedy to the cover of Newsweek, we are being warned that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, George W. Bush's Vietnam. Learning from history is well and good, but such talk illustrates the dangers of learning from the wrong history. To understand what is going on in Iraq today, Americans need to go back to 1920,

Apr 21, 2004

This Historian Sees a Parallel Between Islamist Terrorists and Hitler

Allison Kennedy, in the Columbus Ledger Enquirer (April 20, 2004): A renowned historian and author of books and other materials about the Holocaust presented lectures Monday in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was Sunday.

Apr 21, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Anti-Israel Terror Backfires

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (April 20, 2004): A day after Israeli troops killed its second leader within a single month, the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas put on a brave face. The Israelis"are dreaming" if they think this would weaken Hamas, announced Ismail Haniyeh to a crowd of over 70,000 mourners at the funeral for Abdel Aziz Rantisi."Every time a martyr falls," Haniyeh insisted,"Hamas is strengthened."This sort of

Apr 20, 2004

Kevin Starr: What's Happened to California's Spirit?

Peter Schrag, in the Mercury News (April 18, 200): For the ever-ebullient Kevin Starr, who retired almost three weeks ago as California's state librarian, optimism about his native state is second nature, the view almost as grand as it was a decade ago when he took the job. And as California's premier social and cultural historian, he's as entitled to it as anyone. Even when

Apr 20, 2004

Juan Cole: How the U.S. Is Like Iran

Juan Cole, in his blog (week of April 12, 2004): I have concluded that the Bush administration is like Iran. The Iranian government has two of everything. It has a relatively liberal president, and a hardline supreme jurisprudent. The reformists control the foreign ministry, the hardliners control the military. The reformists have some parliament representatives, the hardliners control the Guardian Council, which has the power of judici

Apr 20, 2004

Juan Cole: President Bush's Incoherent News Conference

Juan Cole, in his blog (April 14, 2004): I saw President Bush's news conference Tuesday evening. He said many things that disturbed me, not in any partisan sort of way (and I continue to maintain that simple partisanship makes for bad analysis), but on grounds of ethics and clear thinking and democratic values. I got the transcript and began arguing back, but could see it could go on for hours. And probably others would do a better job

Apr 16, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: Yes, Vietnam Echoes Are Loud and Clear

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com (April 16, 2004): Optimism then, optimism now: Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, Centcom's second in command in January: "We've watched the number of significant events (against coalition forces) decline considerably... I won't say we've turned the corner or that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but our soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors ar