It has taken five and a half years, but at least some of President Bush’s aides have begun to acknowledge the patently obvious: There needs to be a serious effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Without one, the United States has no chance of salvaging its battered reputation in the Islamic world. No chance of rallying moderate Arab leaders to fight extremists or contain Iran. And no chance of ensuring Israel’s lasting security. We just hope that Mr. Bush will now make the long neglected peace effort a central priority for the remaining years of his presidency.

With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveling to the region next week, Mr. Bush should give her an explicit mandate to press Israel, and not just the Palestinians, for real compromises. He should also give her the authority to talk to adversaries, and not just friends, about how to support the effort.

For years, Mr. Bush’s advisers have woven an entire mythology about how Middle East peace required tanks on the road to Baghdad, rather than diplomats on planes to Jerusalem, Ramallah and Damascus.

So it was surprising to hear one of Ms. Rice’s closest aides, Philip Zelikow, the State Department counselor, tell a think-tank audience that some sense of progress on the Arab-Israeli dispute is “just a sine qua non” for getting moderate Arabs and the Europeans to cooperate on Iran and the region’s many other dangerous problems. “We can rail against that belief. We can find it completely justifiable. But it’s fact,” Mr. Zelikow said....

Of the numerous reasons that I found it compelling to speak with Princeton historian Sean Wilentz last winter, those that matter here are my fears of the state of historical pedagogy in the United States (Wilentz observes: “They’re not just interesting facts, they have within them historical importance, and what is historical importance? It’s what helps lead us from then to now.”) and the publication of what fellow historian Gordon Wood has termed a “monumental book,” The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. Wilentz explains that his book “can be read as a chronicle of American politics from the Revolution to the Civil War, with the history of democracy at its center.” The book is an account of how democracy arose in the United States, with three main sections focusing on the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, and the buildup to the Civil War. There are, of course, a prologue and an epilogue, and footnotes, of which, as you will see below, Wilentz is proud.

By the way, Wood makes a very important point in his laudation of The Rise of American Democracy:

"It is one of the many ironies of American history that the wildfire spread of democratic politics in both the North and the South eventually made it impossible to solve the problem of slavery peaceably. To learn how the triumph of democracy nearly destroyed the United States, this book is a good place to start."

In addition to American Democracy, which is out in paperback this month, Wilentz has published, among others: In The Kingdom of Matthias (co-written with Paul E. Johnson); The Key of Liberty (with Michael Merrill); Chants Democratic; Major Problems in the Early Republic; and The Rose and the Briar (with Greil Marcus), a collection of historical essays and artistic creations inspired by American ballads. He is also a frequent contributor to numerous American periodicals, including Rolling Stone.

* * *

Robert Birnbaum: We are talking about your immense tome and other things. Let’s talk about what I want to talk about before we talk about—

Sean Wilentz: I’ll twist it around later.

RB: You can answer however you want. For whom was this book written?

SW: Everybody. I have written all kinds of things over the last 30 years. For professors, fellow professors, for students, for the general public, for politically interested people. All kinds of stuff—musical stuff that no one in other crowds will ever see. So I have had the chance, actually I have been lucky enough to be able to write for different audiences and write in different kinds of ways when I do. This was an attempt to write for everybody, the unborn as well as the born.

RB: [laughs]

SW: [laughs] No, really, sometimes you want to be a writer—I don’t know if every writer does this but some writers, I certainly did—they do the Babe Ruth thing, they just say, “I’m going to hit it out of the ballpark,” and then people look at them like they are crazy and it’s an act of arrogance and hubris, and nine times out of 10 it fails. And maybe you don’t say it so much publicly, but you put [success] in your own mind, and that’s what I wanted to do. So that’s what I tried to do.

RB: Despite the fact that you hold an endowed chair at Princeton, a professor of long standing at a prestigious university, am I right in my assumption that you think of yourself as a writer who happened to find a comfortable sinecure at a university?

SW: [laughs] Well, if people thought of me that way, I’d consider it a compliment. I can’t say I started that way, and I can’t say it’s a sinecure because it’s a lot of work. ...

A week ago, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was asked to respond to a letter from historians and archivists questioning some recent policy shifts by the agency, an NEH spokesman called the letter “thoughtful.”

On Friday, the NEH released a formal response to the letter, calling it anything but thoughtful. Rather, the letter was characterized as containing “inaccuracies and distortions” and the scholars involved were accused of spreading “false and misleading information.”

The NEH response has further angered the historians — both for its substance and tone. Significantly, the endowment is going on record defending a policy in which what many key scholars consider a key part of peer review — analysis by experts — has been eliminated.

In addition, while the NEH says that complaints from the scholars about grant requirements were inappropriate, the endowment has changed the grant review criteria to explicitly state (as requested by the historians) that projects not be excluded for not being online and free.

Where this will leave the dispute is unclear — but if the NEH was hoping that its letter would reassure the historians, the agency is likely to be disappointed. Roger A. Bruns, president of the Association for Documentary Editing, the group that has led the protest to the NEH, said in an interview that he was stunned by the agency’s response. He said that while the agency was accusing historians of making distortions, it had not identified a single error of fact.

“Their policies are putting our projects in jeopardy, and all we were asking for was a meeting to talk about this, and they fire back with this insulting letter,” said Bruns. “They know that there are a whole lot of people concerned and complaining, and they don’t answer the concerns. I resent this response and don’t understand why they are doing this.”

The dispute that brought historical groups into conflict with the NEH concerns a relatively small, but important program — Scholarly Editions Grants — but scholars say that the underlying concerns affect the endowment’s programs as a whole....

Related Links

Historians and Humanities Endowment Clash Over Changes in Review Process for Grants (Chronicle of Higher Education)

A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.

The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.

One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands. ...

When Geoffrey Robinson last saw the archives that chronicle the creation of East Timor, they were stored in an unremarkable Dili warehouse: one large room of audio recordings, transcripts, and reports, protected by a key and padlock and a low-ranking archivist.

Set up in 2000, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, better known by its Indonesian acronym CAVR, collected records on the period from 1974, when Portugal began to relinquish colonial control, through the 1999 election that made East Timor a sovereign nation, free after 24 years of occupation by Indonesia.

"It's important legally, it's important historically to outsiders, but it provides East Timor a basis to understand its own history," explains Robinson, a UCLA scholar of political violence and Indonesian and East Timorese history. In October, he will go back to Dili to oversee a year-long project to make a digital copy of the archive that will be housed in the British Library, beyond the reach of Indonesian military personnel and members of former East Timorese militias who are implicated in crimes.

Under its Endangered Archives Programme, the library will support the work of Robinson and a Dili-based team to back up the bulk of the archive's contents. Violence and instability that broke loose again in East Timor this May, when then-Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri dismissed almost half of the country's military, served as a further reminder for Robinson of the archive's vulnerability.

Between 1974 and 1999, CAVR reports, over 100,000 East Timorese were murdered or died from hunger or the collapse of health care as a result of the occupation. The London-based human rights group Amnesty International puts the number at 200,000. For a country that now has a population of one million, the toll was enormous.

President Kennedy scribbled "Vietnam" over and over, drawing a box around the word each time.

President Eisenhower sketched a picture of himself looking larger than life, bare-chested, and with a head full of hair.

President Reagan doodled smiling cowboys alongside love notes to his wife.

Presidents Carter and Ford left no scribblings.

It's not the first thing a scholar might search for in the public record, but presidential doodles hold a certain fascination for the historically minded.

"Doodles are often the last remnants of unconscious, unscripted presidential writing," said David Greenberg, a historian who examined two centuries of scribblings by commanders in chief for a book appropriately called "Presidential Doodles."

The book includes the absentminded scratchings of 24 presidents — plus a note from President Bush — collected from public records and archives across the country.

Greenberg cautions against reading too much into a doodle, but he believes they offer a glimpse into the president's private side.

"So much of what we hear from a president is planned and vetted by focus groups. It's un-spontaneous. You see in these doodles the exact opposite. These doodles are done not only without regard to what the public is going to think but also what the president himself is thinking. It's often unconscious."

DANBURY -- Western Connecticut State University Professor Todd Brewster calls the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 eminent domain ruling the most controversial since the 1973 landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.
The decision, stemming from a New London case, gave power to cities to tear down homes for shopping malls and hotel complexes for tax revenue.

On Wednesday at 7 p.m., the lawyers representing the parties in Kelo v. New London, the bitter case that pitted the city of New London against a homeowner, will be at WestConn for a debate.

It will be held in Room 125 of the Science Building on the midtown campus on 181 White St.

Brewster, an award-winning journalist and historian from Ridgefield, will be moderator. He was named a "distinguished professor" at WestConn last year.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision, that the city of New London could use eminent domain to claim private property so it could build a corporate office park.

The decision means that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private economic development. It was a defeat for several New London residents whose homes were to be torn down to build an office complex.

A recent New York Times article about John McCain's growing "kitchen cabinet," contained a piece of information that might have been meaningless to many American readers, but resonated strongly with most British ones.

According to a McCain aide, the article said, one of the senator's unofficial advisors as he ponders a possible run for the White House is the British-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson.

Though relatively unknown in the United States, Ferguson is a controversial figure in the United Kingdom, where he continues to spend much of his time. Ferguson has been besieged by critics and admirers in Britain ever since the publication of his 2003 book "Empire" and its companion TV series.

For some time, much of Britain has regarded its imperial history with a mixture of shame and embarrassment. Indeed, the prominent think-tank, Demos, once suggested that Queen Elizabeth II ought to be forced on "a world tour to apologize for the past sins of Empire."

Ferguson stepped into this environment of national hand-wringing and self-hatred with a shocking proposition — that the British Empire should be regarded, like any empire, in a broad historical context. To even greater uproar, he suggested that it might actually have been of some global merit in that it helped spread democratic values around the world.

The public was enormously divided. To fans, Ferguson seemed a brave challenger of taboos, willing to take on issues most British citizens instinctively shy away from. To critics, he came across as a vile historical revisionist, an apologist for imperial crimes, and possibly just a poseur, adopting controversial positions solely for the sake of fame.

Indeed, theatre-going New Yorkers may have already encountered this take on Ferguson: He is widely regarded as the inspiration for the central character in Alan Bennett's drama, "The History Boys." This still-running Tony Award winner revolves around the recollections of fictional character, Tom Irwin, an amoral TV historian turned amoral political aide, famed for his willingness to argue the unthinkable.

And while many in Britain would raise eyebrows at the news McCain may be consulting with Ferguson, even in only a casual way, the link has received relatively little attention in America — although certainly, anyone who has seen the Bennett play might think that life is imitating art.

Writing on andrewsullivan.com in the eponymous blogger's absence, David Wiegel worried about what Ferguson's influence might mean for a possible McCain presidency. Wiegel called Ferguson a "foaming-at-the-mouth 'national greatness conservative.' " His piece concluded that, "a president with Niall Ferguson at his shoulder is a president who'll stretch our military even thinner across the globe."

This concern has been echoed by the London-based columnist Johann Hari, who wrote that Ferguson had been positioning himself to become "court historian to the imperial American hard right."

But are these conclusions fair? After all, as the prominent British historian Tristram Hunt observed, "You don't become a Harvard professor without being a historian of substance." Ferguson does indeed have highly regarded and nuanced works to his name, even while entering into some controversial areas of discussion and study.

For instance, Ferguson's 2004 book, "Colossus — The Rise and Fall of the American Empire," argued that the United States should face up to its status as a de facto empire. His intention, he said, was to encourage America to become an "effective liberal empire" that learned "humility" from the mistakes of its British forbear.

His resulting thoughts on the Iraq war received a fair amount of attention in Britain. Ferguson wrote that America's practice had all too often been to "fire some shells, march in, hold elections, and then get the hell out — until the next crisis." At the start of the war, he encouraged America to commit more resources to Iraq, and stay the course.

However, Ferguson has also expressed increasing dismay at the manner in which the war is being run, and often stresses that America must maintain its democratic credentials through its actions around the world.

This determination to protect American values may have been what brought him into McCain's unofficial orbit of influences. During the discussion last year about U.S torture practices, Ferguson wrote that, "The White House should shut up and back Sen. John McCain's bill, which would unequivocally ban torture by American military or intelligence personnel."

This was the second time in two months that Ferguson had mentioned McCain in his weekly column for Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper. The first occasion may even provide a potential insight into foreign policy under a putative President McCain.

In that passage, comparing America to ancient Rome, Ferguson noted the geographical similarity between present-day American foreign interests and the conquests of the Roman emperor Trajan. Quoting from the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon, Ferguson then turned his attention to how Trajan's successor, Hadrian, dealt with the "over-extension of the empire" that he inherited from his predecessor.

"By every honorable expedient, [Hadrian] invited the friendship of the barbarians; and endeavored to convince mankind that the Roman power, raised above the temptation of conquest, was actuated only by the love of order and justice."

Ferguson concluded this sounded like "a straightforward enough foreign policy for Mr. Bush's successor," before noting that he hoped that successor would be John McCain.

Neither Ferguson nor McCain responded to inquiries for this article, so the nature of their relationship, if any, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that McCain has tapped a controversial academic to be a member of his virtual "kitchen cabinet." There is, of course, an old saying that goes, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." Ferguson has shown he is more than able to stand the heat, and given his reputation, there will surely be much more of it to come.

First, a calming caveat: Saul Cornell doesn't want to take away your guns. He's neither antigun nor progun. He really isn't a gun guy at all. His thing is history.

Cornell, a professor at Ohio State University, passed through town the other day with much to say about regulating guns. Yet his aim isn't to take sides in the modern gun-control debate -- a squabble he thinks has strayed rather off-topic. It's far more interesting, he thinks, to look back to learn what this country's founders actually thought about gun regulation.

They couldn't imagine life without it, says Cornell. That's the point of his new book, "A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America." In it, Cornell excavates the foundations of the ! Second Amendment and offers some startling conclusions.

"As long as we've had guns in America," says Cornell, "we've had gun regulation." In fact, the Second Amendment's chief purpose is to assure such regulation. Without it, the founders feared, anarchy might take hold.

The amendment was born of the founders' desire for "a well-regulated militia." Having opted against a standing army, the Constitution's cobblers determined that every able-bodied man would serve as a member of a local militia -- prepared to respond in unison against invasion.

"It would have been impossible to muster the militia without a scheme of regulation," says Cornell -- and the early Americans had one. "Muster rolls" kept track of militia members and their firearms. And every hamlet in the land had its own de facto gun registrar: the local gunsmith, who knew every gun and gun-owner in town.

There's one right the Second Amendment wasn't written to confer: an entit! lement to take up arms against the government. "The founding f! athers d rew a distinction between a well-regulated militia, which operates under the authority of the state, and an armed mob," says Cornell. History couldn't be clearer about this point: "Once you have constitutional government," Cornell points out, "you have no right of revolution anymore."

Indeed, "All these things that the gun-rights community has championed in the name of the founding fathers -- opposition to registration, promotion of concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws, the notion that individuals have a right to take up arms against their government -- are antithetical to the original understanding of the Second Amendment."

They also contradict today's legal understanding of the amendment. "The reason the high court hasn't heard a case regarding the meaning of the Second Amendment in so long," says Cornell, "is that it's considered one of the most settled issues in American law." In other words, laws meant to curb gun violence are usually ruled con! stitutional. ...

Thomas Fleming, the author of more than 40 books, has written a children's book: Everybody's Revolution, published by Scholastic.

Fleming takes a multicultural perspective on the Revolution, emphasizing the contributions of a wide variety of groups. According to the book's description:

The dimensions of the patriot cause during the American Revolution were far more multicultural and multiethnic than we have for so long believed. Women, African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, European immigrants, and young adults played leading roles in the struggle for independence from Great Britain. Today it seems students and teachers want to know more about the past than what a few famous white men did. They want to understand how women and men of different cultures and backgrounds contributed to our early history, and to making America what it is today.

Disclosure: Mr. Fleming is a member of the board of directors of HNN.

Over at Sandstorm, I have a column on the intellectual history of the Islamism-fascism comparison in the social sciences. The comparison wasn't born in the White House, but has a long academic pedigree. There I quote Michigan professor Juan Cole's denunciation of "the lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism." But there was nothing lazy in the "conflations" made by Manfred Halpern, Maxime Rodinson, and Said Amir Arjomand, who spent a lot more time vetting their ideas than blog-hurried Cole spends vetting his.

The full Cole quote provides but one more example:

The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government. Hizbullah, for example, ran in the 2005 elections and had 12 members elected to parliament. Altogether, the Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal, who have a parliamentary alliance, have 29 members in the Lebanese parliament of 128 seats. Hizbullah and Amal both joined the national unity government, receiving cabinet posts. This is not the behavior of a fascist movement tout court.

Tout court? How about applying this to a certain Israeli party that has participated in elections, served in parliamentary government, joined parliamentary alliances and national unity governments, and received cabinet posts? A party that has even surrendered power to its opponents in free elections? This can't be the behavior of a fascist movement, right?

Wrong, if that party is the Likud, and our analytical guide is Cole. "Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist Revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism," Cole has written. He has described the party as "the proto-fascist Likud Party," and its previous government as "the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud Coalition." So here we have a peculiar kind of science, in which one set of criteria is applied to the Muslims, tout court, and a completely separate set is applied to the Jews.

Of course, Cole's opening premise is absurd. No one who has read and understood a college world history textbook would argue that a movement's participating in elections or accepting cabinet posts is overwhelming evidence that it isn't fascist. Both the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany contested elections before seizing power. But Cole's grasp of world history is so light that he's perfectly capable of forgetting this for at least as long as it takes to write a paragraph, especially if doing so serves his polemical purpose.

Not only is Cole unable to define fascism in a way recognizable to any historian of Europe (where it first arose), he doesn't even apply his own definition consistently in the Middle East. This is what Yale political scientist Steven Smith must have meant when he said that Cole's blog "opened people's eyes as to who this guy was, and what his views were.... It allowed us to see something about the quality of his mind."

[Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. ]

This is the second part of my radio dialogue with an icon of the Left, Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of Boston University, author of A People's History of the United States. (Read Part One here.) The intention of this ongoing series of what major leftists think is to enable people to see clearly what they believe. Then people can much better make up their minds about which side of the culture war they wish to identify with.

After Professor Zinn argued in Part I that America has not been a force for good in the world, I proceeded with the following questions:

DP: I believe that we [Americans] fought in Korea in order to enable at least half of that benighted peninsula to live in relative freedom and prosperity; the half that we did not liberate is living in the nightmare, almost Nazi-like, condition of the North Korean government. Why don't you see that as a great good that Americans did?

HZ: I think that your description of the North Korean government is accurate. It's sort of a monstrous government. But when we went to war in Korea the result of that war was the deaths of several million people. And I question whether the deaths . . . were worth the result. . . .

DP: If America had never intervened, do we both agree that Kim Il-sung, the psychopathic dictator of North Korea, would have ruled over the entire Korean peninsula?

HZ: I think that's probably true.

DP: Do you believe that that would be a net moral or immoral result for the Korean people and the world?

HZ: That would have been an immoral result, but the result of the war itself was also immoral -- I'm talking about the killing of several million people. And what I'm suggesting is that the answer to . . . tyrannies like that is not war, which in our time always involves the massive killing of innocent people. . . . I think we have to find ways other than war to get rid of dictatorships and tyrannies.

DP: I would love that. But this is where we often consider people on the Left, at best, to be naive. . . . Let's talk about that naivete. You believe that there would have been another way to get rid of the Korean communists -- whom we both agree are monstrous -- as opposed to the Korean War. . . . This is the naivete of the Left, that ugly things can be gotten rid of in sweet ways.

HZ: Not sweet ways. I wouldn't say that. And I wouldn't say either in totally peaceful ways . . . by struggle and resistance but not by war. We have historical examples of what I'm talking about. The Soviet Union, Stalinism, was not overthrown by war. . . . Stalinism was really replaced, in time, by the Russian people themselves. . . . What I'm suggesting is that there are a number of places in the world where we have had tyrannies that have been overthrown without war. . . .

DP: Yes, there are. No one would deny that. And there are historical examples of where war is the only way to achieve a moral end.

HZ: Well, I'm not sure that's the only way.

DP: Was there another way to have gotten rid of Hitler?

HZ: In the case of WWII, I don't know what it would have taken to get rid of Hitler. We certainly had to resist him, we certainly had to get rid of him. . . . What bothers me most today is that people use WWII as an example for what we should do today. It's a very different situation.

DP: No, we use it as an example of where war is the moral choice. Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice?

HZ: No.

DP: Never. Not even against Hitler?

HZ: Well, I'm not sure about WWII.

DP: Wow . . .

HZ: War has reached the point where when you wage war . . . there's always a war against innocent people. . . . Let's be very specific about today. Take the situation in Iraq. War is not a way to bring democracy to Iraq. We are not succeeding at it . . . we're killing large numbers of people.

DP: Why are we not succeeding?

HZ: Because there is so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of a foreign invader.

DP: No, there's so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of democracy. That's where you and I have a different read on the resistance. . . . You feel that they are resisting the United States, and I feel that they are resisting democracy by blowing up their fellow citizens and hoping for moral chaos and civil war.

HZ: Well there certainly is civil war in Iraq. And we have brought it to Iraq.

We have brought it by the occupation of our troops. . . . Iraq is in chaos. Iraq is in violence. And the United States military presence has done nothing to stop that. It's only aggravated it and provoked it. And the best thing we can do for Iraq right now is to get out of the place, and save the lives of our young people.

DP: What would happen if we did get out? Do you think that there would be fewer people dead or more?

HZ: I would hope that there would be fewer people dead.

DP: I believe if we left, the bloodbath would make what is happening now look like a very sad episode but not a bloodbath.

HZ: . . . The point is that war is the worst possible solution.

DP: That's where we differ. It isn't the worst possible. There are worse things than war. More people have died in North Korea . . . than died in the war that you thought we shouldn't have waged. . . . So it isn't the worst possible. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Japanese. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Nazis. Is it the worst possible in Afghanistan? Are we wrong there too?

HZ: It is the worst. In Afghanistan it was not a good idea to wage war on Afghanistan. Because the fact is that Bush did not know where Osama bin Laden was except that he was in the country. So what does he do? He bombs the country, kills 3,000 at least ordinary Afghans. That's as many as died in the Twin Towers. And today after these years of bombing Afghanistan, driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. What have we accomplished in Afghanistan? The Taliban is back.

DP: No, it's not back.

HZ: The Taliban now controls much of the country.

DP: But it doesn't control Kabul. It doesn't control the major cities. And women are now free to step out of their homes. Doesn't that matter to you? HZ: It matters a lot to me. But I don't think that liberation of women matters a lot to the Bush administration. . . .

DP: Whatever your view [about the war in Iraq] . . . would you say that by and large the people that we are fighting, the so-called insurgents, the people who blow up marketplaces and try to create civil war, are bad or evil people? Or would you not make a moral judgment?

HZ: I would certainly make a moral judgment about people who blow up things, who kill innocent people. And I would make a moral judgment on ourselves because we are killing innocent people in Iraq.

DP: So do you feel that, by and large, the Zarqawi-world and the Bush-world are moral equivalents?

HZ: I do. I would put Bush on trial along with Saddam Hussein, because I think both of them are responsible for the deaths of many, many people in Iraq, and so, yes, I think that. Killing innocent people is immoral when Iraqis do it, and when we do it, it is the same thing.

DP: Although we don't target them, but I won't get into that debate. I am just fleshing out your views.

HZ: Actually we should get into that. You know, as a former Air Force volunteer I can tell you, it is not necessary to target civilians. You just inevitably kill them. And the result is the same as if you targeted them.

DP: But we have a different punishment for premeditated murder and for accidental murder.

HZ: Yeah, but when you accidentally kill 100 times as many people as the other side kills in a premeditated way . . .

DP: But we haven't done that . . .

HZ: But we have.

DP: Not in Iraq we certainly haven't.

HZ: No, in Vietnam . . .

DP: Don't go to Vietnam every time I ask an Iraq question.

HZ: OK.

DP: Next, Israel and its enemies. Would you say that Israel and Hezbollah are also moral equivalents?

HZ: Well, first of all, I certainly oppose Hezbollah's firing rockets into Israel, and I think Israel reacted with absolutely unjustified immoral indiscriminate force. I mean, you look at the casualties on both sides, and the casualties among civilians in Lebanon is 10 times the casualties . . .

DP: Well, the casualties in Germany were 10 times those of the casualties in Britain. So are Britain and Hitler morally equivalent? You are making the assessment of morality on the basis of numbers killed.

HZ: No. I think regardless of the numbers, when you kill innocent people there is immorality. So there is immorality on both sides, but I think there is a case in the case of Israel where you have to get back to fundamental causes.

The fundamental cause of the violence on both sides is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and so long as that occupation continues . . .

DP: But they got out of Gaza. And according to President Clinton, the Palestinians were offered a Palestinian state with 97 percent of their land and 3 percent more from Israel.

HZ: Well that's according to President Clinton. But not according to a lot of people who have been studying the Middle East . . .

DP: A lot of people on the Left, but not a lot of people studying it.

DP: Professor Zinn, I thank you so much for your time.

HZ: Thanks.