Roundup: Historians' Take

Rashid Khalidi: Bad Faith in the Holy City of Jerusalem

[Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of Sowing Crisis: The Cold War & American Dominance in the Middle East.] The Israeli government’s announcement in March that it would further expand East Jerusalem settlements was just the latest in a decades-old series of calculated slights to the United States. Since 1967, virtually every time a U.S. envoy has arrived to discuss the fate of the West Bank or Gaza, the Isr

Daniel Pipes: Obama's Approach to American Muslims the Same as Bush's

[Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. This article is cross-posted at the National Review Online.]The New York Times ran a story today, "

Victor Davis Hanson: Why All the Wounded Fawns?

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] Why are charges of racism and political extremism suddenly in the air? Party politics is always the norm, but what is unusual this time around is the juxtaposition between

Raymond Ibrahim: Was Marco Polo an 'Islamophobe'?

[Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum, author of The Al Qaeda Reader, and guest lecturer at the National Defense Intelligence College.] If the same exact criticisms being made against Islam today were also made centuries ago, is it reasonable to dismiss them all as "Islamophobic"— that is, as "unfounded fear of

Moshe Dann: Is Obama Using Israel as a Scapegoat for His Foreign Policy Failures?

[The author, a former assistant professor of history, is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem.]Though needing to handle dozens of difficult issues around the world, President Obama seems obsessed with one: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.Obama’s administration has been on the warpath with Israel from the beginning, picking fights over issues that have been around for a long time. These include where Jews can live and build in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria (the

Benny Morris: U.S. Following the Path of the Munich Pact on Iran

[Benny Morris is the author of many books about the Middle East conflict, including, most recently, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War."] I take it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable

Stanley Kutler: A Supreme Court Choice We Can Believe In

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “Judicial Power and Reconstruction” and other writings.] Barack Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination has unleashed the familiar flood of commentary, much of it revolving around the political context, and hence much of it irrelevant, wrongheaded guesswork. A court vacancy triggers a select list of probable appointments, which usually grows when media pundits “hear” of a new name, often leaked to test the waters. Talk invariably c

Andrew J. Bacevich: Karzai Should Study Chiang Kai-shek to Stay in Power

[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Road to Permanent War,” will be out in August.] The American approach to empire has its peculiarities. Prominent among them is a variant of the “Great Man” theory of history. In their efforts to expand the Pax Americana while disguising its existence, U.S. officials are always on the lookout for some prominent local chieftain to help

Alexey Semyonov and Baktybek Abdrisaev: Another Chance for Democracy in Kyrgyzstan

[Alexey Semyonov is vice president of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes democratic development in the former Soviet Union. Baktybek Abdrisaev, a visiting professor of history and political science at Utah Valley University, was Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to the United States and Canada from 1997 to 2005. This column first appeared in the Washington Post.] Events in Kyrgyzstan have once again seized headlines. Five years ago, in March 2005, the Tulip Revolution b

Harold James: Obama Can Spur Asia to Greater Heights

[Harold James is professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University.] RICHARD Nixon has been dead for 15 years, but he is making another comeback in the US. The 37th US president believed that international monetary relations are unlikely to be transformed by talking. Instead, he thought that radical unilateral action was required. Today pressure is growing for the US Treasury to follow Nixon’s misguided example and issue a finding, due by today, that China is ma

Alan Brinkley: The [Tea] Party of Me

[Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” a forthcoming biography.] The Times/CBS News Poll shows that there is broad unhappiness with the state of the economy and the performance of Congress, but on the whole the participants seem to be responding fairly normally to a weak economy with high joblessness. The 18 percent of those polled who identified themselves as Tea Party acti

Rick Perlstein: The Same Old Grievances from the Tea Party

[Rick Perlstein is the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” and “Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.”] Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear. Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’ new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones est

Victor Davis Hanson: So What Happened to Iraq?

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.] Six years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Ayad Allawi, then prime minister of the appointed Iraqi interim government, was a puppet of the United States. Last month, though, the Allawi-led Iraqiya alliance won, by a narrow margin, m

Eric Gordy: Serbia’s Mixed Messages

[Eric Gordy is senior lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College, London.] A number of events in March-April 2010 might seem to provide confirming evidence to anyone inclined to think that the Bosnian war, ended or suspended by the Dayton peace accord in 1995, was still underway. The most striking took place on 1 March, when Bosnian vice-president Ejup Ganic was arrested on an international warrant while preparing to board a fligh

Wayne H. Bowen: President Obama and Africa: The Irony of Neglect

[Dr. Wayne H. Bowen is professor and chair of the Department of History at Southeast Missouri State University.] ...Africa is critically important to the United States, including in the struggle against radical Islamist terror. For all of the justifiable attention paid to al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the central fronts in the war on terrorism -- the continent of Africa has long been a nexus for recruitment, attacks and fundraising by Osama bin Laden's infamous terrorist netwo

Grace Elizabeth Hale: Confederate History is All About Race

[Grace Elizabeth Hale is an associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia and author of "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (Vintage, 1999)" and the forthcoming book "A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle-Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America," to be published this year by Oxford University Press.] It has been eight years since people in my state of Virginia got a chance to

Victor Davis Hanson: A Tour Through Recession America

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] The last seven days I tried to jot down what I saw in some slices of America in recession — and much of its seems at odds with our general government narrative.... Here fol

Tom Engelhardt: Gods and Monsters: Fighting American Wars From On High

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publi

Tom Engelhardt: U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publi

Victor Davis Hanson: The Ongoing Melodrama of Victims and Oppressors

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] President Obama, in the tradition of progressive Democratic leaders, believes government should ask the more economically fortunate citizens to be responsible for helping the less well