Roundup: Historians' Take

Neve Gordon: Israel seems more concerned with electoral politics and restoring its military reputation than stopping the Qassam rockets

[Neve Gordon is chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. For information about his new book Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008) and more see www.israelsoccupation.info.] The first bombardment took three minutes and 40 seconds. Sixty Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed 50 sites in Gaza, killing more than 200 Palestinians, and wounding close to 1,000 more. A fe

Tyler Cowan: Bailout of Long-Term Capital ... A Bad Precedent?

THE financial crisis is a result of many bad decisions, but one of them hasn’t received enough attention: the 1998 bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. If regulators had been less concerned with protecting the fund’s creditors, our current problems might not be quite so bad. Long-Term Capital was advised by finance quants, or quantitative analysts, who made a number of unsound, esoteric bets, including investments in interest rate derivatives. When Russia’s inabil

Martin Kramer: Hamas and the Bushes

[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.] It was December of an election year, and President Bush was winding up his term. The newly elected Democrat was waiting in the wings. In Israel, a prime minister who seemed committed to the "peace process" decided

Juan Cole: What's Israel's game plan?

[Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, e

Eileen Boris, Lisa Levenstein and Sonya Michel: A New New Deal Must Be For All

[Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara; Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Sonya Michel, University of Maryland, College Park are historians who have written on women's economic issues.] President-elect Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan has provoked comparisons with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Like Roosevelt, Obama is promising to pull the country out of a depression with massive job creation through infrastructure sp

Ashley Wayne Cruseturner: How Bill Clinton Inadvertently Saved George W. Bush's Presidency

[Ashley Wayne Cruseturner is an Instructor in history at McLennan Community College, Waco, TX.] Reflecting back on the star-crossed eight years of the George Bush administration, the outgoing chief executive might feel some gratitude to his predecessor. In a perverse way, Bill Clinton and his desperate campaign to retain power in the face of scandal probably saved the Bush presidency. The framers designed impeachment as the ultimate (as in last resort) "check"

Victor Davis Hanson: Caroline Kennedy’s Moment—A Sad Reflection of Our Times

The probable appointment of Caroline Kennedy, the 51-year-old daughter of former President John Kennedy, to fill Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat is both laughable and yet a parable for our bankrupt times. Consider aristocratic entitlement. Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard. She has had no real experience with the or

Tom Lewis: Obama should be the new Eisenhower

[Tom Lewis is the author of several books, including"Divided Highways," a history of the interstate highway system that was made into a PBS documentary. He teaches English at Skidmore College.] In his Dec. 6 radio address, President-elect Barack Obama vowed to" create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." The story of President Eisenhower's decision in 1956 to create the i

Mackubin Thomas Owens: Lincoln, Obama, and Bush

[Mackubin Thomas Owens is editor of Orbis and a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. His study of Lincoln's wartime presidency will be published early next year by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia.] ... [M]ost of the reason the press portrays Obama as "Lincolnian" has to do with the former's rhetoric. These days, there is a tendency to dismiss rhetoric as somehow unimportant. But Aristotle wrote a treat

William Lambers: School Lunches for Peace in Iraq

[William Lambers is the author of "The Road to Peace."] U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower once said, "The world cups its ear to hear the rattling of rockets. It listens less closely to the sounds of peace and well-being which emanate from the slow but steady improvement in world health and nutrition." These words ring true even today. When we listen to news reports from Iraq, seldom do we hear about the fight against hunger and malnutrition in the country.

Andreas Umland: Ukraine's Window of Opportunity

[Dr Andreas Umland is editor of the book series"Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society" (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.hmtl) as well as the Russian journal"Forum for the Contemporary History and Ideas of Easter Europe" (http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forumruss.html) and administers the website"Russian Nationalism" (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism .] As president Victor Yushchenko's rating plummets further there is a chance that Kiev's political elite may agree to form a pa

Mark Naison: Will The Recession End in June 2009 ? Who Are Economists Kidding!!

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] " If the recession ends in June 2009, as many economists are forecasting, it would have lasted 18 months, making it the longest recession in the post-World War II period".--AP, December 23, 2008 One of the most frustrating things about reading economic news these days is the disconnect between published reports on the health of the banking system, the housing market

John Brown: Thoughts on the So-Called 'War of Ideas'

[John Brown compiles the Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review. He is Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University.] "No matter how powerful our military is, we will not be powerful if we lose the war of ideas."- Senator Joe Biden, soon after 9/11; cited in Ira Teinowitz, "Congress will support the war of ideas" (Advertising Age, 6/17/2002)"We're in a war of ideas."- Donald Rumsfeld, cited in Bill Gertz, &qu

Thomas Fleming: Obama's from Chicago ... Why that Shouldn't Worry Us

[Thomas Fleming is a past president of the Society of American Historians. He is the author of a much praised memoir, Mysteries of My Father.] Good old Chicago. Thanks to garrulous Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, we have just learned that in the home town of President-Elect Barack Obama, who has promised us a regime dedicated to change, nothing seems to have changed. I write as lifelong student – and survivor-- of Democratic politics, Jersey City division. We

Tyler Cowan: Fiscal policy and the burden of proof

[Mr. Cowan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and at the Center for the Study of Public Choice.] I'd like to drive home the point that the case for fiscal policy has not yet been made by its advocates. I believe that most current advocates of a huge fiscal stimulus have two major arguments in mind.  The first is that "when resources are unemployed, in principle government spending can put them back to work, times are dire so we need this."  The s

Ami Pedazhur: From Munich to Mumbai

[Ami Pedazhur, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism.”] OW that India and the world are over the initial shock of the terrorist attacks last month in Mumbai, efforts to understand what happened and prevent future calamities are being hampered in ways familiar to Israelis like myself, who have lived through far too many such events: pointless eff

Jelani Cobb: The Barack Problem

[ Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman.] It's too early to know how Barack Obama will govern which is why each of his cabinet appointments has been followed by rounds of tea-leaf reading by pundits, pols and regular folk . But I think that his selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inaugural, maybe more than anything so far, highlights one of the central problems that Obama will face as president. The Warren pick is exactly the

Nick Turse: SaladShooters, Adult Diapers, and Tactical Ammo

Is it possible that one of the Pentagon's contractors has a tripartite business model for our tough economic times: one division that specializes in crock-pots, another in adult diapers, and a third in medium caliber tactical ammunition? Can the maker of the SaladShooter, a hand-held electric shredder/dicer that hacks up and fires out sliced veggies, really be a tops arms manufacturer? Could a company that produces the Pizzazz Pizza Oven also be a merchant of death? And could this company be a m

Timothy Gay: Bush is no Truman

[Timothy M. Gay is a writer and historian. ] THE PRESIDENT was so down in the dumps that aides decided to surprise him with a party. With the economy sputtering and his foreign policy under siege, the president's pals thought a light-hearted evening away from the White House would buoy the boss's spirits. Cabinet officers and cronies took turns toasting the chief executive, their playful gibes drawing cathartic laughter. Finally, the administration's gray eminence, the

Nasir Khan: The Kashmir issue and the violence in the Indian subcontinent

[Nasir Khan, Dr Philos, is a historian and a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx's Writings and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey. He has written numerous articles on international affairs and human rights. He has his own blog at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com through which he can be contacted.] Almost the whole world has condemned the Mumbai at