William Astore teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 2005, having taught at the Air Force Academy as well as the Naval Postgraduate School. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and History News Network.

There's little question that unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are helping to save the lives of U.S. and NATO troops in places like Afghanistan while aiding in the killing of terrorist suspects in regions largely inaccessible to ground troops.

But the bigger question is whether drones are in any way decisive to the war effort. Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?

So far, it appears that drones aren't decisive. They're merely instrumental. They're instrumental in keeping us in a losing cause. They keep our military's casualty rate at a "sustainable" level, low enough so as not to rankle the folks back home, while they give us an illusion of progress in the sense of a body count of suspected militants killed.

But is sustainability a good thing if you're sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire? Is killing "militants" a good thing if in the process you alienate and terrorize the people, turning them against you and sowing the dragon's teeth of further militant action and more war?

Think here of the Vietnam War. Had we had drones in the skies over the Ho Chi Minh trail, surely we'd have seen with greater clarity the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) coming. Surely we'd have killed more VC while losing fewer U.S. troops, at least in the short term. But would this technological advantage have translated into victory in Vietnam? Or would we have sunk even deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, bugging out not in 1975 but in 1985?

In our military's general embrace and praise of drones, we need to be careful not to lose sight of the larger realities of war. New weapons that keep us in a losing cause longer are nothing to praise. Weapons that generate resentment and blowback among peoples we say we're trying to win to our side are nothing to embrace.

In our eagerness to lower the immediate cost of war to ourselves, we may very well be elevating the long term costs of war both to ourselves and to others. But our military has great difficulty seeing this precisely because our focus is so tactical, so focused in the weeds. Much like our numerous drones, we focus on small slices of the battlefield, losing sight of the bigger picture, the larger battlespace, the reality that winning a war requires something more than a discrete set of killing operations.

Drones, in other words, are reinforcing the U.S. military's tendency to favor tactics and short-term expediency at the expense of strategy and long-term effectiveness. How long will it be before drones become merely a crutch that keeps us hobbling along in a losing cause? Or are we already there?

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in April 2012.

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent.

Which past president stood up most stalwartly for the anti-tax, anti-welfare, anti-union principles that animate today’s conservative movement? Of course, most activists on the right would confer that honor on Ronald Reagan. However, the only Republican chief executive with a major airport named after him often governed in ways that would place him on the tiny left fringe of today’s GOP: Reagan raised income and payroll taxes, increased federal spending on domestic programs as well as the military, and avoided attacking labor unions in the private sector.

Some on the right speak kindly of Calvin Coolidge. But those who praise “Silent Cal” for cutting taxes on the rich are understandably mute about his fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, his racist attitudes toward all non-“Nordic” races, and his contempt for women who dared to drive cars, ride horses, or engage in politics. Moreover, Coolidge was no union-basher. In 1926, he signed a landmark bill which established collective bargaining for railroad workers, then a key sector of the labor force.

Ironically, the White House occupant who best represented the views that now dominate the American right was a Democrat: Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic president from the eve of Civil War to Woodrow Wilson in 1912. When Cleveland, a rotund New Yorker, was first elected in 1884, his party’s base was remarkably similar to that of the GOP today: white Southerners from all classes and white workers everywhere who did not belong to unions. The Democrat’s standard-bearer ALSO expressed doubt that any “sensible and responsible” woman would ever want to vote....

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, "Engaging the Muslim World," is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website

Paul Ryan knows nothing about the world or foreign affairs. I presume he may have been abroad at some point somewhere. I don’t know. As is usual in American politics, however, cavernous ignorance is no bar to holding forth, if it is not in fact a qualification. After all, ignorance is compatible with untainted national chauvinism (he would say patriotism), whereas if you actually know something it is harder mindlessly to wave the flag.

Paul Ryan has been attacking President Obama’s foreign policy as weak and resembling that of Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis, and as ‘blowing up in our faces.’

But is it true that Obama’s foreign policy is ‘blowing up in our faces?’ And how could that have been prevented? Rembember, Ryan’s running mate, Mitt Romney, began calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down on Feb 1, 2011....

What could Obama have done to keep Mubarak in power, if that is what Ryan is advocating? Some honest journalist should ask Ryan if he believes the US government should have encouraged the Egyptian military to shoot down the Egyptian youth who were demonstrating, and how many exactly it would have been legitimate to massacre in that way....

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

At the end of World War II, the Americans and the British ruled, or heavily influenced by traditional right, or occupied, or sustained by force of arms righteously exercised, almost all the world except what was under the hobnailed jackboot of Stalin’s Red Army (largely supplied by the United States as it was). The masses of the world were generally uneducated and didn’t speak English, but most of their local leaders did. Latin America admired the U.S., as Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy gave back a good deal of sovereignty and ended the practice of having the United Fruit Company and other American corporations deploy the U.S. Marines around Central America. Most of the Latin American countries joined the war effort, if only to be in at the founding of the United Nations, and the whole hemisphere — except for Canada, a dominion of the British Commonwealth and autonomous but in close alliance with Great Britain — sheltered under the shield of the Monroe Doctrine, which under its more vigorous espousers had purported to authorize the U.S. to intervene anywhere in Latin America for almost any reason....

It would be foolish and futile to become too misty-eyed about the era of Anglo-American paramountcy. The multipolar world, with generally declining patches of poverty and illiteracy, is a better place, and it is much preferable to be concerned about the antics of almost stateless terrorists, horrifying though their activities sometimes are, than to have to worry about immense nuclear arsenals in the hands of the Great Powers and on trip wires of massive retaliation and Mutually Assured Destruction....

No sane person would suggest that the U.S. try to resurrect that degree of enforced respect, but it is becoming so routine to watch the burning of American flags, and it is so inadequate for America to respond to attacks on its embassies and the murder of a distinguished ambassador in Libya with milquetoastish platitudes from an administration that has laboriously accepted the legion of acts and conditions it has declared to be “unacceptable,” that it is time, in Monty Pythonese, for “something completely different.”...

Steven Conn, editor of the forthcoming To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press USA/September 14th 2012), is Professor and Director of Public History at Ohio State University.

The religious world was rocked this past week by a tiny piece of ancient papyrus which suggests that Jesus had a wife. Well, really... who among us thought that a nice Jewish boy who went into his father's business was going to stay single forever??!!

The controversy that this scholarly discovery is already causing and will continue to cause isn't simply about the specifics -- did Jesus marry? did he have a female disciple? -- but rather about the role historical research plays in confirming or refuting traditional religious verities. For well over a century, science hasn't been the only threat to religious literalism; history has too.

For example, when the epic of Gilgamesh was discovered and translated in the mid-19th century, many Christians and Jews were perturbed that it presents an almost identical version of Noah's flood and the garden of Eden as the one found in the Bible. Only Gilgamesh pre-dates that text. Genesis seems to be an act of plagiarism rather than divine inspiration.

The threat the historical research poses for religious truth is even greater for religious traditions of more recent vintage. Which means history has always been an existential threat to Mormonism, since so much of the Mormon theology is founded upon events that are historically verifiable -- or more to the point, refutable.

Forget the Mormon magic underwear -- after all, I'm not sure that believing in divine boxers requires any more credulity than believing in transubstantiation. A leap of faith is just that, and for the leapers it matters. But the Mormon story is predicated on a history that we know to be demonstrably, categorically wrong.

For starters, Joseph Smith claimed that the golden plates which were revealed to him were written in a "reformed" Egyptian hieroglyphic, and we know that there is no such language.

The actors in the Bible all belong to societies evident in the historical and archaeological record. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Jews all left written and other records. No one can doubt that they actually existed.

The book of Mormon, on the other hand, describes civilizations of "Nephites" and "Lamanites" living in North America, both groups having migrated -- who knows how -- from the Near East. When asked where the remains of those Nephite cities were, Mormons have pointed to the great Indian mounds found in the Ohio River valley and elsewhere. We know that those mounds were built by a variety of indigenous people including the Adena and Hopewell cultures, but archaeologists have yet to turn up any Nephites.

Worse, Mormon history posits that the Lamanites, an evil race which destroyed the Nephites, are the ancestors of Native Americans, though there is no linguistic or genetic connection between Native Americans and the peoples of the Near East. Never mind that in the Mormon world Indians are cast as cosmological villains.

Contemporaries of Joseph Smith in the 1830s and '40s accused him and his church of a variety of frauds and deceptions. From the very beginning, therefore, the institutional Mormon church has guarded its history very jealously and regarded historians with a great deal of suspicion. That hasn't changed much over the years. Elder Boyd Packer, for example, attacked any Mormon who might, "write history as they were taught in graduate school rather than as Mormons." A police investigation into a controversy involving historical documents "revealed the church's hierarchy to be obsessed with stopping any tampering with the church's official accounting of the past."

Article VI of our Constitution declares that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," and it seems un-American to challenge a candidate's religious beliefs, or to insist that he or she worship one god rather than another.

But in the case of Mitt Romney and his Mormonism, do we have a right to know what he believes about the past, about the history of North American settlement, the creation of the nation and the founding of his church?

Romney, of course, is no desultory Mormon. His is one of the founding families of the religion, he has been one of its bishops and he has contributed enormous sums to the church (though until we see all those tax returns we won't know just how much). What would we think about a president whose understanding of history is contradicted by history itself?

IRVINE: Four years ago, when the Beijing Olympic slogan was “One World, One Dream,” global audiences were wowed by a Chinese spectacle that began with a quote from Confucius describing the pleasure of welcoming friends from afar. Now, the sounds coming from China and grabbing our attention are not spirited drumming but angry chanting about settling scores. 

It’s worth comparing the recent street actions in China, triggered by an ongoing dispute over control of specks of land known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, the Senkaku Islands in Japanese, with the mesmerizing gala of the Beijing Games. The two spectacles offer a striking study in contrasts – and intriguing parallels.

Let’s start with contrasts. 

The 2008 spectacle, choreographed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou, was held in one locale and, though filled with historical allusions, included no nods to Japanese invasions or direct references to Chairman Mao. Today’s demonstrators, marching through streets across China, carry portraits of Mao and refer continually to past atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers....

Diane Ravitch won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2011 for her “careful use of social science research for the public good.”
 (July 2012)

According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.

None of this is true. All reports agree that the two sides are close to agreement on compensation issues—it is not money that drove them apart. Last spring the union and the school board agreed to a longer school day, so that is not the issue either. The strike is a clash of two very different visions about what is needed to transform the schools of Chicago—and the nation.

Chicago schools have been a petri dish for school reform for nearly two decades. Beginning in 1995, they came under tight mayor control, and Mayor Richard Daley appointed his budget director, Paul Vallas, to run the schools; Vallas set out to raise test scores, open magnet schools and charter schools, and balance the budget. When Vallas left to run for governor (unsuccessfully), Daley selected another non-educator, Arne Duncan, who was Vallas’s deputy and a strong advocate of charter schools. Vallas had imposed reform after reform, and Duncan added even more. Duncan called his program Renaissance 2010, with the goal of closing low-performing schools and opening one hundred new schools. Since 2009, Duncan has been President Obama’s Education Secretary, where he launched the $5 billion Race to the Top program, which relies heavily on student test scores to evaluate teacher quality, to award merit pay, and to close or reward schools; it also encourages the proliferation of privately managed charter schools....

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” and “Jerusalem: The Biography.”

MASHA GESSEN, a Russian journalist, was recently fired for refusing to cover President Vladimir V. Putin’s hang-glider flight with migrating cranes, an exploit that was much mocked. Last week, she received an unexpected phone call, which she recounted in a blog post for The International Herald Tribune, this newspaper’s global edition. “My phone rang. ... I listened to silence for two minutes.” Finally: “Don’t hang up. I will connect you.” Frustrated, she shouted: “Do you want to introduce yourself?” A famous voice replied: “Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich. I heard you were fired and that I unwittingly served as the reason for it.” He invited her to meet....

Educated Russians would have spotted similarities between this call and earlier Olympian interventions into the lives of writers by Romanov and Communist autocrats, illuminating rituals of Russian leadership and the relationship between power and art. This tradition flatters the writer in a culture where literature has special prestige. But the surprise also promotes the cult of the unpredictable czar who moves, like God, in mysterious ways.

Eighty-two years ago, Mikhail Bulgakov, novelist and playwright, had been fired from Soviet theaters, his works banned, when his phone rang: “Comrade Bulgakov? ... Please hold. Comrade Stalin will speak to you.” Then the famous voice began, “I apologize ... we shall try to do something for you.” Afterward Bulgakov phoned the Kremlin: was it a prank? It was Stalin. Soon, the theater employed Bulgakov again....