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An Exchange: American Imperialism

by Jonathan Schell and Tom Engelhardt

Following is an exchange between Mr. Schell and Mr. Engelhardt. Mr. Engelhardt edited Mr. Schell's book, The Unconquerable World, which recently appeared in paperback. Dear Tom, You'll remember that just before the September 11 attacks, when I was writing and you were editing my book The Unconquerable World, you were much readier than I to call American policies"imperial" and the United States an"empire." I hesitated; I hung back. After all, on

President Bush Admits He Misnamed the War on Terrorism

by Daniel Pipes

In a striking admission, George W. Bush said the other day that that"We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be [called] the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."This important concession

How Bush's Bad-Boy Image Helps

by Jim Sleeper

I am looking at a photo of the George W. Bush that you've probably never seen before. It's a sports-action close-up of him at Yale, over a caption written prophetically by a fellow undergraduate more than 30 years ago:"George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier." Never mind that this is a rugby game, alien to most Americans, and that the caption writer's assessment wasn't political. I think it explains one reason why Bush hasn't slid in the polls si

2003 in Review: Which Articles on HNN Drew the Most Comments?

by Rick Shenkman, Jennifer Itskevich

Over the course of the last year readers posted more than 20,000 comments on the articles published by HNN. Which articles drew the most responses? Unsurprisingly, it was an HNN Poll on Iraq which inspired the most comments, more than 400 in all. The poll was posted on March 19, the day the war began. Readers, styling themselves with a panoply of names from the graveyard of ancient history--from Herodotus to Suetonius--argued

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Do Liberals Owe An Apology to the Victims of Sterilization? The Case of Margaret Sanger

by Miriam Reed

Sterilization--or more particularly, compulsive sterilization--became an issue in America with the rise therein of Eugenics, the name given by the Englishman Francis Galton in 1883 to his newly created science of inquiry. Eugenics had as its purpose race betterment. Eugenics began by asking questions: Why were men what they were? What caused poverty? Why did blue eyes persist in generations along with alcoholism and insanity? The infant science proposed to answer these questions by,

Hello ... So There Weren't Atrocities in Vietnam?

by Fran Shor

In any case, anyone who spends five minutes reading the Swift Boat Veterans' book ("Unfit for Command") will quickly realize that their attack has nothing to do with Mr. Bush. This is all about Mr. Kerry and what the veterans believe was his blood libel against their service when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971 that all American soldiers had committed war crimes as a matter of official policy."Crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the ful

40 Years Ago: The Summer that Transformed America

by Ruth Rosen

Even though we’re rapidly approaching the 2004 presidential election, it often seems as though we’re still shadowboxing over the meaning of the 1960s. This is the 40th anniversary of a momentous summer that created many of the cultural, social and political divisions that make it so difficult to find independent voters who haven’t yet decided how they’ll vote in November. Consider what happened during the summer of 1964. More than 1,000 Northern college

Olympics Memories

by George Beres

The 2004 Games have evoked Olympics memories that transported me back twenty-five years to my only trip to Greece. It included a stop at a hallowed site: Olympia with its artifacts of the ancient Games. It looked to me in 1979 as it did on TV this August, when the Greek hosts of 2004 scheduled one event in Olympia for a link-up to symbolically span more than 3,000 years. Ironically, the event at Olympia was the shot put, a competition that was not part of the early Games. Fans wandered

How Do You Ask a Man to Be the Last Man to Die in Vietnam?

by John Kerry

“One day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons,” Dole said. “The next day he’s standing there, ‘I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran. “Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam,” said Dole, whose World War II wounds left him without the use of his right arm. -- Associated Press (Aug. 22, 2004)

The Vietnam Atrocities an Ohio Newspaper Exposed

by Mike Davis

In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s. Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly b

Why Nation-Building on the Cheap in Iraq Won't Work

by Matthew Levinger

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush disavowed the goal of"nation-building" by U.S. military forces. Since then, he's reversed himself. But instead of nation building, he's given us nation-building lite.   Building peace in a war-torn country is an expensive and time-consuming proposition. The postwar occupations of Germany and Japan lasted seven years after 1945 and involved as many as 1.6 million U.S. troops in the European theater alone. In Kosovo since 1999, t

Hitler's Ambitious Plans for the 1936 Olympics

by Jeffrey O. Segrave

There is no doubt that the 1936 Berlin Olympics served as a watershed moment in the panoply of modern Olympic games history. The Berlin games were by far the largest games held to date. A record 3.77 million spectators showed up to support a record 4,066 athletes (including a record 328 women) from a record 49 countries. The most up-to-date radio equipment helped to transmit the Berlin games around the globe, and the high powered, state run propaganda machinery that advertised the ga

Would It Be Better for Democrats If the Protesters Stayed Home?

by Jules Tygiel

I recently got together with an old Brooklyn friend and fellow veteran of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. As we now both live in San Francisco, he expressed regret that he could not participate in the demonstrations planned to coincide with the Republican Convention in New York in September. Another friend sends me enthusiastic e-mail updates about the anti-Bush activities slated for that week. But rather than feeling inspired, I am far more chagrined. It strikes me that the romance of the ol

Alan Keyes's Daffy Idea to Repeal the 17th Amendment

by Lewis Gould

Alan Keyes, the Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois, has now joined Senator Zell Miller of Georgia and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in calling for repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that provides for the direct election of United States senators. Senator Miller, who has introduced his own amendment to repeal the Seventeenth, contends that the direct election of senators “was the death of the careful balance between state and federal governments.

The Strange Twists and Turns in Syrian-Israeli Diplomacy

by Daniel Pipes

One of the most secretive and unusual rounds of Arab-Israeli diplomacy took place in the summer of 1998, when three private American citizens, businessman Ronald Lauder, his aide Allen Roth, and magazine publisher George Nader, made nine trips to each of Damascus and Jerusalem, trying to secure a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty.(I provided the fullest account of these negotiations – and the dispute surrounding what exactly Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered – in"

John Marshall, Sitting Bull, and the Law of Nations

by Paul VanDevelder

The storm of public bitterness that has attended several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued from Indian country dramatically illustrates how few facts of American life have more deeply contentious freight than Native-

Why I Think History Will Be Kind to Nixon

by Walter A. McDougall

An address to the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, August 5, 2004.To help my thinking about President Nixon's historical legacy, I accessed the Nixon Library's excellent web site and reread the eulogies made at the president's funeral. I was stunned to realize it's been ten years already since that sad and glorious day. Yet the fact that thirty years have passed since Nixon's resignation does not surprise me. The anxieties and cri

In the Shadow of William McKinley

by Stephen K. Tootle

After four years, the Karl Rove-George W. Bush political team can claim one narrow electoral victory in the presidential election of 2000, a series of domestic policy successes, victory in two major battles in the war on terror, and stunning gains for the Republicans in the 2002 midterm elections. Though it is too soon to assess whether or not Bush will realign American politics in the manner of William McKinley, the next test comes this November.To Rove, President McKinley was the master

Why the Media Failed Us in Iraq

by Orville Schell

When, on May 26, 2004, the editors of the New York Times published a mea culpa for the paper's one-sided reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war, they admitted to"a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been." They also commented that they had since come to"wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made by the Bush Administration. But we are still left to wonder why the Times, like many other major media outlets in t