[Frederick W. Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]

IN A SPEECH THAT will no doubt be hailed by the left as bold and original, Senator Barack Obama today unveiled "his" plan for a "responsible" withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq by the end of 2009. The plan may be bold, but it is certainly not original. In fact, Obama's plan is extremely similar to one unveiled in June by the Center for a New American Strategy called "Phased Transition: A Responsible Way Forward and Out of Iraq." Like the CNAS report, Obama's plan calls for the withdrawal of almost all American combat forces from Iraq by the time the next president takes office (oddly enough), but purports to offer ways to achieve vital American goals in Iraq without using U.S. forces in combat, including continuing the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq, helping the Iraqis achieve political reconciliation, preventing the Iraq struggle from becoming a regional war, and preventing genocide within Iraq (the CNAS report called its objectives "the three nos:" no al Qaeda, no regional war, and no genocide, and also argued that its approach would enable reconciliation within Iraq). Like the CNAS plan, Obama's proposal asserts that U.S. forces can continue to train Iraqi Security Forces even after this withdrawal of combat power (as long as the ISF are non-sectarian). Like the CNAS plan, Obama's proposal is utterly unworkable. Any attempt to transfer it from the realm of thought-experiment to the real world would lead to immediate disaster in Iraq and the region.

The authors of the CNAS report, James Miller and Shawn Brimley, put a lot of serious effort into the challenge of finding some middle way to achieve America's goals in Iraq that was neither precipitous withdrawal nor the current strategy. They considered real military problems in some detail and offered a detailed proposal backed with reasoned arguments. In the end, as an equally detailed study by the American Enterprise Institute concluded, the solution Miller and Brimley came up with is simply not feasible from a military-technical standpoint, and relies on a number of baseless assumptions about how Iraqi and regional actors will respond. Any effort to implement it in the timelines suggested in the report would lead to the immediate collapse of the Iraqi Security Forces for certain, and most probably an escalation in violence, the collapse of the Iraqi government, and a failure to achieve any of America's vital national security goals in Iraq.

The CNAS team deserves credit for making a serious and respectable effort to grapple with a difficult task. Obama's proposal does not. Not only is it a strategy someone else developed and published, but it is dumbed down to the point of incoherence. On the one hand, the plan trumpets: "All combat troops redeployed by 2009." The proposal even provides a little plan for how to do that: "The withdrawal would be strategic and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Troops would be removed from secure areas first, with troops remaining longer in more volatile areas. The drawdown would begin immediately with one or two combat brigades deploying each month and all troops engaged in combat operations out by the end of the year." This sounds good (if one accepts the premise that withdrawal is desirable), but means little.

Moving something like 160,000 troops and their equipment out of Iraq between now and January 2009 would not be "strategic" or "phased." It would be a rush for the exit. Even the CNAS report proposed removing only 100,000 soldiers over a longer period, and even that effort would have been highly problematic (see the AEI report for additional details). The notion of removing troops from safe areas first and hotspots later also sounds reasonable, but isn't. American forces move into and out of Iraq by brigade. But brigades in Iraq are not deployed all together--they normally have battalions and even companies in various, sometimes widely dispersed, areas. In the real world, withdrawing a brigade requires moving its subordinate units back to bases, reassembling them into the brigade, and then moving it out of the country--along the single road that serves as our principal line of supply from Kuwait. The process of moving one-to-two brigades per month would not permit such an orderly and carefully calibrated withdrawal as Obama pictures. It would be simple cut-and-run, about as fast a withdrawal as it would be possible for the U.S. to undertake.

The weird thing about Obama's plan is that the section following "All Combat Troops Redeployed by 2009" is headed "Residual Force to Remain." This "residual force" would "protect American diplomatic and military personnel in Iraq, and continue striking at al Qaeda in Iraq. If Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we would also continue training the Iraqi Security Forces. In the event of an outbreak of genocide, we would reserve the right to intervene, with the international community, if that intervention was needed to provide civilians with a safe-haven." The CNAS report was clear and explicit about this point. It argued that something like 60,000 American soldiers, including three combat brigades, would be required to achieve these goals (Jim Miller explained subsequently that the 60,000 troops was not intended as a firm number, but that the range would probably be between 40,000 and 80,000). It described in considerable detail what those forces would do and what kind of troops would be required. Even so, the AEI evaluation of the CNAS plan concluded that 60,000 or even 80,000 troops could not possibly perform all the missions the CNAS authors wanted to give them. But at least there was thought and logic in the CNAS proposal.

Obama's proposal, on the other hand, can charitably be called disingenuous. How are the American people expected to parse "All Combat Troops Redeployed by 2009" but "Residual Force to Remain"? Sounds like American forces won't be in combat and won't be in danger, right? The CNAS team was straightforward and honest about this. They recognized that American troops would continue to fight and continue to be in danger, and they argued that American interests in Iraq were sufficiently important to continue to accept that price. The whole stated purpose of the CNAS exercise, in fact, was to find a way to head-off an irresponsible precipitous withdrawal that the authors feared would result if President Bush continued to fight for his current strategy. They appear to have been wrong in that assumption, but the aim of their effort was to find a way to ensure that American national security interests in Iraq would be protected. It is less clear that that is the aim of the Obama proposal, and it is far less clear from the proposal itself just exactly what the American people and the American military would be in for were it adopted.

It is too much to expect Senators to develop concrete and detailed war plans on their own--with very few exceptions they have neither the staffs nor the expertise to do so. That is one of the reasons why the United States has traditionally left the developing of war plans to its generals. But when a senator puts out his "own" plan that is virtually identical to one that has already been carefully evaluated and shown to have been unworkable, it seems only right that the American people should be aware of the fact.

[Jon Wiener is professor of history at the University of California at Irvine and a contributing editor of The Nation. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower.]

The biggest academic freedom fight of the year was also the shortest — and the hardest to understand. Duke Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky accepted an offer on Sept. 4 to serve as founding dean of the new law school at UC Irvine; UCI Chancellor Michael Drake withdrew the offer a week after the contract had been signed; the firing was greeted with outrage on the campus and among law school faculty nationwide, and was condemned in editorials in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times; and Chemerinsky was rehired six days later, on Sept. 16....

It’s widely assumed that political pressure from the right led the chancellor to withdraw the offer. But where exactly did the pressure come from? The answer could reveal a lot about the battle lines over academic freedom in America today.

Drake has offered several explanations for his actions. Chemerinsky reports that when Drake withdrew the offer, he explained that his appointment would have caused “a bloody battle” with the Board of Regents. But it turns out the regents had the appointment on their consent calendar, indicating that they considered it uncontroversial and planned no debate — which is in fact what happened when they approved it on Sept. 20.

The problem with Chemerinsky, according to Drake, was not his political positions, but rather the fact that he was a “polarizing” figure. But in the furor over withdrawing the offer, Chemerinsky turned out not to be polarizing at all. Not only was the faculty virtually unanimous in supporting him, but he received crucial support from leading conservative legal scholars and commentators in southern California. Pepperdine’s Douglas Kmiec wrote for the Los Angeles Times op-ed page describing Chemerinsky as “one of the finest constitutional scholars in the country.” Chapman’s conservative law dean, John Eastman, called firing Chemerinsky “a serious misstep.” Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt called Drake’s action “revolting.”

Drake denied that “political pressure” played any role in his decision. After he withdrew the offer to Chemerinsky, he explained that it was “a management decision, not a political one.”

He told the Los Angeles Times that “no one called me and said I should do anything.” But that turned out to be untrue. A group of 20 prominent Republicans had organized against Chemerinsky in recent weeks, according to the Times, which reported that “Drake’s cell phone number was distributed so the protesters could call the chancellor.” A separate campaign was organized by conservative Republican activist and L.A. county supervisor Mike Antonovich, who said he had e-mailed a “small group of supporters” urging them to contact the university and demand that the Chemerinsky offer be rescinded. Antonovich told the Associated Press that appointing Chemerinsky to head the UCI law school “would be like appointing al-Qaeda in charge of homeland security.” So much for “no political pressure.”

Chemerinsky argued that he was fired because of an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in August that criticized California’s procedures for death penalty appeals. The op-ed appeared the same day Chemerinsky was offered the job. He said (in another L.A. Times op-ed) that Drake had told him that op-ed had made him “too politically controversial.”...

The fact is that we still don’t really know the sources of the pressure that lead Drake to act against his newly-appointed dean. And at this point, with Chemerinsky himself calling for a focus on the future, it seems unlikely we will ever know what happened to cause the biggest academic freedom fight of the year.

[Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.]

A week has passed since George W. Bush announced that U.S. troops will stay in Iraq in"a security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency." Last spring, those words would have evoked howls of protest from Democratic leaders. Now, scarcely a peep.

While the world was on August vacation, Republican and Democratic leaders moved toward a compromise. The outlines are clear enough: Some U.S. troops will start leaving Iraq soon, but tens of thousands will stay on indefinitely with a permanent mission of providing something called"overwatch." This open-ended "Korea model" seems to be a done deal. About the only issue left to debate is how fast the"transition" should happen, how quickly the troops that aren't staying should be"redeployed."

Peace activists who despair of the spineless Democrats should keep in mind that Bush and Cheney have compromised, too. In his most recent speech, just six years and two days after he became our tough-as-nails"war president," the Decider announced that he has decided to do what many Democrats and the peace movement have been demanding -- begin getting troops out of Iraq.

Yes, the numbers will be so pitifully small that many already claim they are meaningless. Nonetheless, it's a major shift in Bush's narrative. And that counts for something all too real, because the debate is hardly about policy any more. It's mainly about the stories we tell about policy -- and about"America." Perhaps it always was.

Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle -- the more mythic the better. It's no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a"theater."

Political"battles" are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist"drawdown" -- how many troops should leave and how soon -- is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives.

Last spring, with the President's surge plan seemingly floundering, it looked like the Democrats were winning that contest. Then, over the summer, the administration began to catch up -- and not just by accident. According to the Washington Post:

"Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge. From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and [early September], the office put out 94 such documents."

Call it a surge of words on the home front. But mounting a publicity blitz, no matter how well funded, is no guarantee of success. You have to put on a show good enough to sell tickets and elicit applause. So, why did the pro-war show draw a big enough audience (at least among beleaguered Republicans) that many key Democrats, frustrated by Congressional voting math and frightened for the 2008 electoral future, began to wave the flag of compromise -- and so few Republican Senators were willing to support even the Democrats' half-way measures?

A War President Who Can't Win the War

Part of the answer is revealed in the most astounding polling figure of recent weeks. A New York Times poll asked,"Who do you trust the most with successfully resolving the war in Iraq?" In response, only 5% of those polled gave the nod to the Bush administration, just 21% to Congress, but fully 68% -- more than two out of three -- plunked for"the military."

Once again, the top-rated show of the season is evidently that all-time favorite,"The Military Saves the Day," a sequel to the smash hit of the past several seasons,"Support Our Troops." No wonder the White House brought its hero and surge commander, General David Petraeus, on stage for the final scene in this act of a seemingly unending drama. No wonder Bush used the general as cover, not only for continuing the war, but for making his own shadowy compromises in his September 13 address to the nation (which, by the way, drew a far smaller audience than his last major speech introducing his surge plan, or"new way forward," on Jan. 10)."General Petraeus recommends that in December, we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy," the President said."Our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks." It was as if, all of a sudden, the newly four-starred general, and not the President, were now the commander-in-chief.

For White House scriptwriters, there was certainly another reason to give the general the leading role in this scene from the administration's home-front Iraq drama. He has actually seen something of the reality of war. Everyone knows that the President (like the Vice President and others high in this administration) studiously -- even notoriously -- avoided the real theater of battle. With his wartime credibility always somewhat suspect, all Bush can offer is an illusion spun out of dramatic words.

Bush and his writers also made compromises in their story line. The ringing language of past years about bringing"freedom" to Iraq and the Middle East, though not completely absent, was far more muted this time around. Instead of spreading good tidings about an American mission to liberate the world, the main theme of the President's Petraeus speech was a reprise of another close-to-home classic:"The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States." The post-9/11 narrative -- defending America against those who would destroy us -- had again taken center stage.

No facts are available to indicate that the war in Iraq is making Americans safer, as Petraeus himself admitted. So, the President's claim made no sense -- not, that is, if you were measuring his argument against facts or logic. But don't fool yourself, it made fine sense as a good old-fashioned American yarn: The band of brothers righteously defending themselves against evildoers who will annihilate us if we don't annihilate them first.

There is, however, one crucial piece of that old American yarn that Bush now has no choice but to downplay -- the piece that says the good guys always win, unconditionally. After years of announcing that victory was at hand, or at least claiming that he had a surefire strategy for victory, he can no longer tell that part of the story because no one will believe it any more. In his latest speech the word"victory" -- which he once used 15 times in a single speech -- was missing in action, replaced by the far less martial, so much less triumphant word"success." The"Korea model," that more than half-century of garrisoning the southern part of that country after a stalemated war, lets us know what"success" is supposed to mean: A government (or a set of regional governments) in Iraq that can provide safety for American troops on their permanent bases and wherever they go throughout the country.

But even that hard-to-imagine outcome would be far too pallid a dénouement to look like victory to an American audience. In fact, that's one big reason Bush's public support has eroded enough to force him to make compromises. He's a war President who can no longer promise to actually win the war.

A Test of Character

A good plot raises the right question, one that keeps people in the theater because they care deeply about the answer. In the battle of narratives, this administration, no matter how crippled, still knows what the right question is.

When it comes to Iraq, in recent months, Democratic scriptwriters have indeed spotlighted a question: Can inept Iraqi politicians succeed in getting their act together, when brave Americans give them the time to do so? It's just not the right question from a story-telling point of view. Few Americans really care about the performance of a faction-torn foreign government on the other side of the world.

The administration's story might seem to turn on a question with little more mobilizing power: Can American troops succeed in reducing violence in Iraq? But behind that question -- and General Petraeus' elaborate charts on the metrics of violence in that country -- Republicans build dramatic tension by raising a very different question, which really does matter to a sizeable part of the American audience: Does our nation have the" character" or the"stomach" -- Dick Cheney's favorite word -- to keep on fighting evil until something that can plausibly be called"success" is conjured out of the dusty air of Iraq?

Bush raised that question in the opening words of his recent address:"In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment." And he offered the answer many want to hear -- even if not, at the moment, from him -- in his closing words:"Support our troops in a fight they can win."

That has, of course, been the basic plot of Bush's Global War on Terror. Since September 11, 2001, he and his speechwriters have been telling a story whose hero is not, in fact, a president, or a general, or any individual, but"America" -- with all the world, by rights, its stage.

In Bush's story, as long as America is strutting across that stage, playing the lead with a commanding tone, fighting evil at every turn, Americans can feel like winners and heroes. All of this is supposed to be not an American ego trip, but a classic test of character.

Only by defeating evil enemies, in Bush's tale, can you prove you have character. It's the old story of victory culture, and millions of Americans still believe in it.

Millions more wish they could. If they are old enough, many remember a time when they did -- before Vietnam. Failure in Vietnam cast into doubt all the old American verities about heroism, character, and national direction. It left many wondering whether the old stories could ever be played out again on the stage of American life -- and feeling remarkably good, after September 11, 2001, when victory in war seemed once again to become the finale of our national drama. The growing feeling since that"Iraq" is Arabic for"Vietnam" has, of course, been devastating to any sense of fated American triumph. Yet millions of doubters must still yearn to believe in an American story that ends with good defeating evil on some planetary frontier.

Because the Iraqis have proven so unwilling to play the role of defeated enemy in the theater of battle -- and the Iraqi situation has grown so complex -- the Bush administration has been left with little choice but to blame all evil on al-Qaeda, in Iraq and elsewhere. As a White House official told a Washington Post reporter, at least Americans"know what that means. The average person doesn't understand why the Sunnis and Shia don't like each other. They don't know where the Kurds live… And al-Qaeda is something they know. They're the enemy of the United States."

In such a script, our protectors are"the troops," the ultimate symbol and proof of America's character. The most powerful weapon of war supporters has long been the question, raised with appropriate self-righteousness:"Don't you support our troops?" The politically correct antiwar answer almost has to be:"Yes. That's why I want to bring them home." As it happens, though, such a response has had little effect because it misses the point.

"Supporting our troops" is not about helping individual soldiers to live better lives or, for that matter, making their lives safer. It's about supporting a morality play in which the lead actor,"our troops," represents all the virtues that so many believe -- or wish they could believe -- America possesses, giving us the privilege (and obligation) of directing all that happens on the world stage.

Bush put on yet another performance of that morality play on September 13th, ending with the almost obligatory tragic message from grieving parents:"We believe this is a war of good and evil and we must win.... even if it cost the life of our own son. Freedom is not free." That sums up the essence of the drama. Coming from people whose child is dead, it's seems like a show stopper. What else can you say?

The Democrats Read from a Thin Script

In response to the President's Petraeus address, the Democrats' answer man, Senator Jack Reed, did not actually have much to say. He did make it clear that, when it comes to war and the military, he's a lot more in touch with reality than the President."I was privileged to serve in the United States Army for 12 years," Reed said modestly. He might have added that he was a West Point graduate and an officer in the famed 82nd Airborne Division.

But like so many Democrats, including legless former Senator Max Cleland and Vietnam veteran John Kerry, he found himself mysteriously unable to turn his real-life experience into an effective post-9/11 narrative. A powerful drama creates a world of its own, one that can easily feel more real than reality. Even after so many years of disaster and so much repetition, against Bush's rich drama, Reed could still offer only a thin script with feeble characters, little if any plot, and no sense of direction. Mostly he carped at the commander-in-chief of what the Democrats themselves acclaim to be the finest fighting force in the world. So he left his party open to the same criticism thrown at Sixties radicals:"You only know what you're against. You don't know what you're for."

The Democrats' story does embody positive values. It calls on us to act in an old American tradition of pragmatism, where the only question that matters is:"Is it working?" If it's not working, you try something else that might actually get the job done. But Reed never even suggested what that something else might be.

In a battle between stories, it's often not enough to attack the incumbent's ineptitude. As John F. Kennedy, another Democrat with a real-life war record, knew, you also have to tell a satisfying tale about moving onto a new frontier, where you can pass that test of character and become a profile in courage. Heroism makes for a more alluring story than timidity every time.

So, even if the practical side of Americanism screams out,"Leave the theater, now!", there is still a powerful impulse to stay glued to our seats until the bugles sound, the cavalry charges, and our side wins the day.

The Democrats sense that. They sense as well that opposition to the war is spread wide but not necessarily deep; that public opinion might, at least to some extent, still be turned by a well-produced show -- as the marginal poll gains of the President among Republican audiences in the last two months have indicated. The Democrats fear that, if they truly lead the way to the exits, they might turn around one day to find less than half the voters following. That's why so many of them -- and all too many Republicans as well -- are afraid to act on what they know is right.

The Show Must Go On

The great debate about Iraq is not, and never really was, about what we should do in Iraq. No matter how many Iraqis have died or become refugees thanks to the Bush intervention, they remain largely ignored bit players in our central drama, which is, and always was, about what we will make of America. Now, the outcome of that debate is coming more clearly into view and it's not a pretty picture. The compromise the two parties are hammering out on Iraq policy reflects a deeper compromise the public seems to be groping toward on national identity -- between who we are in reality (pragmatic, if sidelined, civilians who know a war is badly lost and want to end it) and who we are in our imaginations (heroic soldiers proving our character in the theater of war).

All theater, all storytelling, rests on the power of illusion and the willing suspension of disbelief. Bush and the Republicans have repeatedly given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their post-Vietnam disbelief in traditional tales of American character; the Democrats have given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their disbelief that the will of the people can make any difference whatsoever. The two parties join together to give the whole nation a chance to believe that a fierce debate still rages about whether or not to end the war. That political show we can expect to go on at least until Election Day 2008.

And we can expect both parties, and the media who keep the show going, to abide by an unspoken agreement that one kind of question will never be asked, because the tension it raises might be unbearable: Is it moral for our troops to occupy another country for years, bomb its cities and villages, and kill untold numbers of people halfway across the planet? If the script ever makes room for that question, we'll be able to watch -- and participate in -- a far more profound debate about the war.

---

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ]

When the University of California Regents rescinded former Harvard president Lawrence Summers's invitation to speak at a Board dinner this month, it was too easy to link Summers with Erwin Chemerinsky: Just days before, the University of California at Irvine had rescinded Chemerinsky's invitation to serve as dean of their new law school. While the two cases share some common elements--in both, the officials reneged under pressure on commitments presumably made in good faith and for good reasons--the superficial similarities conceal deep differences. In the Chemerinsky case, UC threatened Chemerinsky's academic freedom; in the Summers case, UC threatened mine--and that of everyone else who teaches here.

UCI unhired Erwin Chemerinsky because, he said, they were worried about "conservatives out to get me," and they knew some of the UC Regents would vigorously oppose him. This threat almost certainly came from someone outside UCI: maybe the politician who said appointing Chemerinsky dean would be "like appointing Al Qaeda in charge of homeland security," maybe a discontented donor, maybe both.

Universities' vulnerability to outside pressure is what brought us academic freedom in the first place. In 1900, the Stanford economist-turned-sociologist Edward Ross said he opposed immigration because it threatened Anglo-Saxon racial purity. Jane Stanford, widow of railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and benefactor of the university (as well as beneficiary of immigrant labor) insisted Ross be fired. Ross countered, "It is my duty as an economist to impart ... in a scientific spirit, my conclusions on subjects with which I am expert." Mrs. Stanford won.

The Ross case inspired what became the American Association of University Professors' 1915 "General Declaration of Principles." In it, the AAUP explained universities must act so it is clear that "what purport to be the conclusions of men [sic] trained for, and dedicated to, the quest for truth, shall in fact be the conclusions of such men, and not echoes of the opinion of the lay public, or the individuals who manage or endow universities." Otherwise the truth is imperiled.

As the AAUP's 1915 statement indicates, academic freedom differs from freedom of speech. Scholars enjoy it not because they have First Amendment rights (indeed, as the historian Thomas Haskell points out, in 1915, nobody had the First Amendment rights Americans enjoy today) but because of their training and participation in a specialized community of inquiry. What Ross said, though unpleasing to us and indeed to many decent people in 1900, was at the time within the realm of legitimate sociology. His ideas demanded investigation and critique--not firing.

Insofar as UCI succumbed to "the opinion of the lay public, or the individuals who manage or endow universities" when it unhired Erwin Chemerinsky for expressing opinions within his expert competence (including especially his comments on now-resigned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales), they obviously violated a core canon of academic freedom. Perhaps because the case was so blindingly clear, UCI un-unhired Chemerinsky.

Summers's case differs. Here, the objection came from within the community of scholarly inquirers at UC Davis who organized a petition signed by UC professors who believe it "inappropriate at a time when the University is searching for a new president" to invite Summers, who "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia" since his clash with African American Studies professor Cornel West and his 2005 comments on genetic differences in scientific aptitude between men and women.

You might think this looks a lot like the case of Edward Ross--in both, a northern California university doesn't want to hear from an economist talking the sociology of innate differences. But there are key distinctions. Summers doesn't work here and, as one of his Harvard colleagues points out, he doesn't have the right to "speak anywhere and everywhere" or indeed on everything....

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century” (Harvard University Press).]

So it turns out that Erwin Chemerinsky is going west, after all.

Last week, citing the Duke professor’s “controversial” public positions, the University of California, Irvine withdrew an offer to make him dean of its new law school. But it reinstated the offer after a firestorm of protest, including a letter signed by hundreds of faculty members.

That’s exactly as it should be. As the letter noted, “unacceptable ideological considerations” clearly caused the university break its initial deal with the left-leaning Chemerinsky. And the entire sordid affair threatened academic freedom, putting other professors on notice that they should moderate their views—or pay the price.

So why isn’t the professoriate rallying around Condoleezza Rice?

About six hours up the road from Irvine, at Stanford University, there’s another battle brewing over academic freedom. But this time the target is Rice, a national security adviser and secretary of state for a Republican president. So we’re about to find out whether America’s mostly liberal professors really believe in academic freedom, or whether they simply want their own side to win.

The initial salvo was fired last May, when the Stanford student newspaper ran an article discussing the return of Rice after President Bush leaves office. A political science professor and former provost at Stanford, Rice hasn’t committed to any job past January 2009. But it seems likely that she will come back to campus in some capacity, as the student newspaper reported.

And that was too much for many readers. “Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty,” wrote an emeritus math professor, in a letter published several days later. “Stanford should not welcome her back.”

The blogosphere was even harsher, of course. On the newspaper’s website, one reader compared Rice to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; another called her a war criminal. “Would Stanford harbor a serial killer just because she previously worked at the University?” one alumna asked. “She’s a controversial figure . . .Now is the time for the administration to quietly encourage Ms. Rice to go elsewhere.”

So let’s get this straight. If you refuse to hire Erwin Chemerinsky because of his “controversial” liberal opinions, that’s a blow against academic freedom. But if you turn away Condoleezza Rice because of her controversial conservative views, you’re upholding the highest values of the academy itself.

Here you might reply that Rice should be rejected on the basis of her deeds, not her ideology. But there’s a slender line between them. Every action implies some kind of opinion, and every opinion carries the potential for action. As soon as we start dismissing academicians on either ground, American history shows, academic freedom is dead.

And some of the grimmest history comes from Stanford itself. Consider the case of E. A. Ross, one of the nation’s top economists at the turn of the last century. Ross publicly defended socialist leader Eugene Debs and also called for restrictions on Chinese immigration, running afoul of the railroad barons who financed his university. So Jane Stanford—widow of Stanford’s founder—engineered his resignation.

“A man cannot entertain such rabid ideas without inculcating them in the minds of the students under his charge,” Jane Stanford wrote. “Stanford University is lending itself to partisanism and dangerous socialism. Professor Ross cannot be trusted, and he should go.”

Fifty years later, during the height of the McCarthy period, a similar fate befell Edward Condon. An eminent physicist and veteran of the Manhattan Project, which designed the first atomic bomb, Condon received an offer to become dean of Stanford’s graduate school. But the university withdrew the offer after Condon was attacked by Parnell Thomas, chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Condon had never been a communist, as Thomas charged, he had supported Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. That was dangerous enough.

And unlike Chemerinsky, Condon didn’t get his offer reinstated. Indeed, for several years, he couldn’t get an academic job at all. Too “controversial.”

How can you bemoan the ravages of the red-baiting 1950s, when dozens of professors were dismissed for ideological reasons, then erect your own ideological litmus tests for the present? It really doesn’t matter if you agree with Condoleezza Rice; I certainly don’t. The question is whether you’ll grant her the same consideration as Erwin Chemerinsky. And if you don’t, you’re repeating some of the worst mistakes of our past.

So let’s all salute Chemerinsky, a brilliant scholar and author, as he rides west to assume his new post at Irvine. But let’s make sure that Condoleezza Rice is welcomed back to Stanford, too. Anything less will betray academic freedom, which means nothing once you start restricting it to people whom you like.

[Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.]

There are two things that are futile to try to predict a year or more ahead: the exchange rate of the dollar and the next president of the United States. But let's just suppose the most probable thing -- based on current opinion polls -- happens. By that I mean that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party's nomination and Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican Party's.

If that is the choice Americans confront on election day, Giuliani could very well emerge as the next president of the United States. ...

I remember visiting the pre-Giuliani Manhattan. It was like one long episode of "Kojak." The professions then open to young New Yorkers were dealer, hood, hooker, junkie, pimp -- or bent cop. Yet by the time I moved to the city, not long after 9/11, the analysts outnumbered the psychos. "Kojak" had been replaced by "Seinfeld." A large share of the credit for that transformation belongs to Giuliani. His presidential bid is based on the notion that what worked for the world's capital city can work for the world.

America, Giuliani says, must remain "on offense" to win the "terrorists' global war on us." What, like George W. Bush? No, no, no, no, no. In common with nearly all the Republican candidates, Giuliani's hero of choice is Ronald Reagan. But he also makes a point of likening himself to Winston Churchill.

That worries me. It shows that Giuliani buys the idea that since 9/11, the U.S. has been fighting World War III. You know how this routine goes. Al Qaeda is made up of Islamo-fascists; 9/11 was Pearl Harbor; Saddam Hussein was the Arab Hitler; the fall of Baghdad would be like the liberation of Paris. And so on. Now it's Giuliani's turn. "We should try to accomplish [in Iraq] what we accomplished in Japan or in Germany," he says. What, like bombing the place flat?

The reality is that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism today is wholly different from the threat posed by the Axis powers in 1941-42. To judge by Osama bin Laden's latest rant, he aims at mass conversion, not conquest (with low-interest loans as the latest inducement).

The Islamists have thousands rather than millions of trained warriors. Their most dangerous weapons are land mines and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, not aircraft carriers and guided missiles. The total number of American fatalities that can be attributed to this supposed world war is about 6,000 (adding together 9/11 victims with U.S. passports and the service personnel killed in action in Iraq). On average, the Axis powers killed about 20,000 Allied soldiers and civilians a day.

The trouble is that the more Americans imagine they are in a world war, the less attention they pay to the more profound strategic threats their country faces. I can think of four in particular:

* the descent of the greater Middle East into a large-scale war;

* the disintegration of the system of nuclear nonproliferation;

* the escalating competition between developed and emerging economies over scarce raw materials;

* the breakdown of the system of multilateral trade liberalization.

Taken together, these challenges will sorely test whoever occupies the White House after Bush. Has Giuliani given any of them serious thought? Does he have any strategic vision beyond preventing another 9/11 (his nightmare, he says, is an Iranian-made dirty bomb "in London or Rome or America")?

Applied to cleaning up the mean streets of New York, Giuliani's offensive approach worked pretty well (though it eventually ended in overkill). How well it can work as foreign policy is another matter altogether.

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and a writer on American civic culture and politics, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997). ]

Two years ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay of mine, "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind," in which I showed that Bloom rejected conservatives' touting his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students as if it were a manifesto for their movement.

True, Bloom's book was properly scathing of leftist racial and sexual "identity" politics and of the political-correctness police. And it inspired a surge in conservative campus funding, pedagogy, and activism intended to rescue liberal education from a vapid, divisive multiculturalism.

Far from rescuing the liberal arts, though, the conservative surge was weakening them. It was inundating undergraduate life with premature training in marketing, self-marketing, national-security strategizing, misplaced religious enthusiasms, and sometimes, as a grace note, jejune affectations of classical virtue. And no one, I showed, had decried all this more loudly than Bloom himself.

Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to "left vs. right" scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn't notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.

As it turns out, some of these confused journalists were working at The Times Book Review itself.

Under its editor-in-chief Sam Tanenhaus and a curdled former leftist apostate or mini-con or two, the Book Review clambered onto the bandwagon of neoconservative folly in Iraq, skewing its mix of reviews toward bashing critics of the war until sometime in 2005. Around then the Book Review began doing some damage control, sometimes bashing addled liberals all the more eagerly, as if that would cleanse its own excesses. How many more rounds of reviews by Christopher Hitchens, David Brooks, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, Joe Klein, and others fixated on the follies of the left will it take to make obvious the Review's displacing of its own war guilt onto whatever liberals it can find who are even more addled than its own liberal war hawks and neo-con fellow travellers?

Occasionally the Book Review does praise a good liberal book (by the Times' own Frank Rich, for example), or it lets someone like the sorry Beinart hustle some truly embarrassing neo-con like Norman Podhoretz off-stage. Tanenhaus, in a meltingly tender New Republic profile of William F. Buckley, Jr., seemed to me to be trying to insinuate himself retroactively into Buckley's early and prescient skepticism about the war. But integrity at the Book Review (and the New Republic) will require a change not of tactics but of hearts -- and, in some cases, maybe even hands.

I've assailed the Book Review on this in passing here, and in The American Prospect, perhaps annoying some review editors. And now comes another Times Bloom essay by one of them that really ought to be read alongside my own.

Rachel Donadio's "Revisiting the Canon Wars" is fair and balanced, so to speak, but it repeats so much of what I said two years ago that one wonders why she wrote it at all. This is the Bloom book's 20th anniversary, but, if the timing of these two pieces were reversed, wouldn't Book Review editors have told me, "We can't run yours because we ran a big essay on this subject only two years ago."?

Donadio's essay is also twice as long as mine, but that's no improvement, reflecting as it does Review editors' penchant for writing much more voluminously and ponderously than they let other reviewers do. (Did you ever finish Tanenhaus' grand reassessment of Richard Hoftstadter, nearly five times the length of most full-page Times reviews? Or Barry Gewen's encyclopedic and exhausting meditation on the death of art?)

Donadio's extra space does let her call around to savants for apercus on who's killing liberal education, but her composite of their comments is something of a muddle. She acknowledges that Bloom mistrusted capitalism and that market and career pressures may indeed hurt the humanities more than mad lefties do. But her essay leaves the impression that if liberal education is ailing, it's mainly because – as an enlarged "pull quote" in the margin puts it -- "Two decades after Allan Bloom's book, it's generally agreed that his multiculturalist opponents won the canon wars." So it was they who shattered any possible consensus about which great books and core courses are essential to a good education.

But was it? Mightn't it also be "generally agreed" that while multiculturalist leftists were winning the canon wars, multiculturalist (global) capitalists were winning almost everything else? As Todd Gitlin put it memorably in The Twilight of Common Dreams, while the left was marching on the English Department, the right was marching on the White House, pushing a neoconservative interventionism that turned on the universities themselves. That has ill served liberal education, let alone ancient or Enlightenment republicanism. I say more about this today in The Guardian.

When I made such arguments in the Book Review in 2005, some of the most encouraging responses came from thoughtful conservatives: Ross Douthat wrote that "the questions Sleeper's essay raises are important, and deserve a hearing on the Right." Four of Bloom's former editors and friends wrote to thank me for rescuing his legacy from "Take Back the University" yahoos like Kimball and David Horowitz. Bloom's colleague Nathan Tarcov, who'd co-directed with him the conservative Olin Center at the University of Chicago, said so in a letter to the Times.

It was right of the Book Review to publish Tarcov's letter then (next to one from David Horowitz, of course), but on Sunday a tiny but very telling indication of how the Review has changed came in the online box of "Related" Times articles posted with Donadio's essay. It failed to link the most "related" article the Times has published in recent years – my Bloom essay. Yet it did link the conservative zealot Roger Kimball's glowing 1987 review of Bloom's book, and then Kimball's own book, "Tenured Radicals," as well. Whether out of pique or incompetence, editors who can't reference their publication's own published work are getting Orwellian and letting their own paper down.

It would be nice to "take back the Book Review" from its punch-drunk conductors, but not in order to hand it over to politically correct former editors like Rebecca Sinkler. We badly need gatekeepers with a civic-republican integrity and courage that reflects liberal education, not the curdled ressentiment about professors that we get so much from Tanenhaus, culture columnist Edward Rothstein and others I'm too merciful (or just not annoyed enough) to name.

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Controversy of Zion” and “Yo, Blair!”]

... This ["special"] relationship [between Great Britain and the United States] has always been a curious notion. Along with the even more dubious idea that Churchill popularized of a community of “English-speaking peoples,” it is sustained by make-believe and rewritten history. Americans don’t often use the phrase, but there was an almost comical exception when Senator John McCain visited England last year. “The special relationship between our two countries will endure throughout the 21st century,” he said. “I say that with total confidence because it’s lasted for 200 years.”

It has what? The senator’s “200 years” would take us back to the early years of the 19th century, or let’s say to 1812. What was special about the relationship that year was that the two countries were at war. Some of us take modest patriotic pride recalling the day that our brave lads burned the White House. And when he sings “The Star-Spangled Banner,” can Senator McCain have forgotten that it was a British rocket’s red glare?

For the next century the two countries were decidedly more often on bad terms than good. A large part of the British Army was stationed in Canada to protect it from its southern neighbor, and with good reason. Before the Civil War, Sir Robert Peel warned Parliament about the grave danger of an American war; during it, the secretary of state, William Seward, wanted to declare war on England and was supposedly restrained only by Lincoln himself (“One war at a time, Mr. Seward”); after it, there was a bitter dispute about a Confederate warship built in England.

In 1895 the two countries nearly went to war over a trivial border dispute in South America, and it was recorded at the time that in America a war with England would be the most popular of wars. And again in 1914: not only did Woodrow Wilson worry that he might need to intervene on the German side because of the British naval blockade but it was reckoned that more Americans would have wanted to fight against England than for it.

The two did quite briefly fight together in two world wars, but only Tony Blair, after telling a grieving New York six years ago that “My father’s generation went through the blitz; they know what it is like to suffer this deep tragedy and attack,” could have added: “There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. That country was America, and those people were the American people.” He meant the blitz in the winter of 1940-41, when the United States was conspicuously neutral....

[Mr. Furnish, Ph.D (Islamic History), is Assistant Professor, History, Georgia Perimeter College, Dunwoody, GA 30338. Mr. Furnish is the author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads and Osama bin Laden (Praeger, 2005). He is the proprietor of www.mahdiwatch.org.]

As of this writing I am watching C-SPAN2's "Book TV." Lawrence Wright is interviewing Raymond Ibrahim, who works in the Middle East section at the Library of Congress and just published The al-Qaeda Reader, containing translations of Usama bin Ladin's and Ayman al-Zawahiri's writings. Wright is trying, at every turn, to refute Ibrahim's analysis. For example, Ibrahim was just discussing the fact that UBL and his ilk justify their violence from the Qur'an and the Hadiths. Wright interjected "but of course every religion has violent tendencies: in Christianity you're supposed to stone homosexuals." Amazing. I've read the New Testament numerous times, and I've yet to find that passage.

Wright is a noted and best-selling author and alleged "expert" on the war on terror and the Middle East--and a guest host on C-SPAN--yet he is incredibly ignorant (or simply misrepresentative) of the basic teachings of Christianity. (For those of you that don't know: homosexuality is condemned as sinful in Romans 1:18-26, I Corinthians 6:9ff and I Timothy 1:8ff, but NOWHERE in the Christian faith is stoning mandated for gays or lesbians.) Of course, this attempt to brand Christianity as equal to Islam in spawning violence is a familiar trope of mainstream media types.

Ibrahim is now pointing out, over Wright's protestations, that Buddhists don't commit suicide bombings--whereas Muslims do, and furthermore that they ground such activity in their religion. Wright is trying to counter with the example of the Japanese kamikazes, who were willing to die for the Emperor.

Wright now is claiming that "every religion has contradictions in it" and is adducing Judaism as an example. He's following this with vague, blanket statements about "fundamentalist Christians who want to bring about the end of days." Ibrahim is countering that "there is no text in the New Testament telling them to do that"--whereas the Qur'an and Hadith, according to Islamic exegetes and commentators, DO contain violent commandments. So Christians who act violently are contradicting their faith--whereas Muslims who do so are not necessarily contradicting theirs.
(I've made this point in a number of articles, and of course Robert Spencer does so, quite articulately, for a living.)

Wright has moved into claiming that this problem in Islam is because "Islam has no center of authority." Well, that may be part of it. But as Ibrahim is now responding, ijma' ("consensus" of Islamic authorities) has long said that violence is totally justified in expanding the Dar al-Islam (World of Islam) at the expense of the Dar al-Harb (World of War, literally--that is, the rest of us who are not Muslims). "Fighting is prescribed for you" is a Qur'anic dictate, as Ibrahim is pointing out.

Wright just asked an incredibly moronic question: "why is violence just now becoming paramount in Islam?" Ibrahim just told him--the "expert" on Islam--that "it's not modern, Islamic violence has always been justified and acted on to expand Islam, from the earliest days through the time of the Ottoman Empire." And to Wright's rhapsodic musings about the tolerance of medieval Islam in al-Andalus (Spain), Ibrahim just reminded him "well, the Muslims got Spain in the first place through violent conquest." He also reminded Wright that "the Crusades didn't happen until AFTER Muslims had invaded the Byzantine Christian Empire and conquered territory."

Watch yourself, if C-SPAN2 shows this again. And I highly recommend getting a copy of The al-Qaeda Reader. I'm going to stop listening to Wright's dhimmi drivel and go order the book.