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The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

by Lawrence S. Wittner

On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money -- and the tax money of other nations -- went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 -- an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress.  After all, the increase in “real” global military spending -- that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates -- was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years. 

Updated OAH/NCPH 2012 Sessions List (Now with Room Numbers!)

by HNN Staff

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians starts in earnest this Thursday in Milwaukee. As always, HNN will be posting updates from the convention floor.Below is a list of interesting sessions at this year's OAH -- if you'll be attending one of this sessions, let us know how it goes on Twitter by tagging @myHNN.Full OAH Program

Channelling George Washington: Obamacare -- The Monster Law

by Thomas Fleming

“It’s the law. The monster law!  Why doesn’t someone make this the main issue about Obamacare?”By now I had become expert at detecting when President Washington was upset. It so happened that I was upset about the same thing. I answered him, perhaps too enthusiastically. “I’ve been having similar thoughts. What can we do about it?”“More to the point, why haven’t you done something about it already?”“It’s the usual historian’s excuse, Mr. President. I’m trying to finish a book. I sense you’ve  gotten some ideas about confronting the problem?”“First of all the problem should be identified. It’s time somebody made more Americans aware of the excesses of the Imperial Congress. Since President Nixon was driven from office -- deservedly, I should add -- Congress has seized vastly more power than the Constitution ever intended it to have. This is a prime example!”“You think it’s unconstitutional?”

What Susan Rosenfeld Gets Wrong About "Enemies"

by Tim Weiner

David Walsh, the editor of HNN, has invited me to respond to a review of my new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, by the former official FBI historian Susan Rosenfeld. I am grateful for the opportunity.It seems to me that official history is to history as military music is to music. It is used to make people march in lockstep. Official historians have unique access to the documents that are the foundation of good history. That does not necessarily make them good historians. I was educated by good historians in college. I try to hew to the standards I was taught -- and not only because my own mother has been a professor of history for nearly sixty years.

What History Should Teach Us About Blockading Iran

by Juan Cole

It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians -- and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own. Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.The United States is already effectively embroiled in an economic war against Iran. The Obama administration has subjected the Islamic Republic to the most crippling economic sanctions applied to any country since Iraq was reduced to fourth-world status in the 1990s. And worse is on the horizon.  A financial blockade is being imposed that seeks to prevent Tehran from selling petroleum, its most valuable commodity, as a way of dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear enrichment program. 

Child Rearing and the American Future (Let the "Hunger Games" Begin!)

by James E. Block

American children are in trouble. Each day brings increasing evidence of peer aggression (the new documentary Bully), autism spectrum disorders (the report just released by the Centers for Disease Control), and serious dependency and helplessness issues (an ongoing U.C.L.A. study). The unsurprising conclusion of the director of the C.D.C. is that children and families “need help.”But what kind of help? With the predictable failure of No Child Left Behind to conjure higher achievement out of thin air and news from the parental front that raising children is no longer joyous, those cultivating the young have again lost their way.

Tim Weiner's "Enemies" Wears Its Anti-FBI Agenda on Its Sleeve

by Susan Rosenfeld

In the Author’s Note prefacing his book on the FBI, Tim Weiner describes Enemies as the “history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a secret intelligence service,” its major mission, according to Weiner, for most of the past hundred years. The book chronicles the “tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties”—except that as Weiner portrays the FBI, with rare exceptions, there is no tug-of-war. “Security” far outweighs civil liberties and the Constitution. [1]This book is not an objective study of FBI history. Instead it selects examples that bolster the contention that the FBI put its wars against anarchists, Communists, the New Left, and foreign and domestic terrorists ahead of any consideration for the Bill of Rights. Weiner concedes that proponents from all these groups actually committed acts of espionage or violence. But for the most part, he features perpetrators who were never punished.

Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block

by Tom Engelhardt

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history.  Last words -- both eulogies and curses -- have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause.” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.

Vice Presidential Nominees Must Be Plausible As President

by Joel K. Goldstein

As Mitt Romney slogs on toward the GOP presidential nomination, political talk is turning to his running mate. That discussion has focused on conventional political factors thought to dictate vice-presidential selection. Should Romney select someone from a large swing state or target a particular demographic? Should he focus on energizing his base or on appealing to independents? Some of these factors may come into play, yet the recent history of vice-presidential selection suggests that the key requirement for a running mate is whether he or she is presidential.It's curious that this threshold factor is often overlooked. Most recent presidential candidates have recognized that good politics, as well as good governance, requires choosing a running mate who would be a plausible president. Since 1976, presidential candidates from both parties have almost always chosen running mates who would be plausible as president.

South Sudan Could Learn From America's War of 1812 on How to Build a Lasting Peace

by William Lambers

At a Senate hearing in March, actor and Sudan activist George Clooney was asked about how to keep Americans, especially young Americans, engaged with the conflict and hunger in South Sudan. Can people here in the U.S. feel a sustained connection to a country many thousands of miles away?Imagine for a moment a country that has recently gained its independence. War, territorial and boundary disputes, and the inability of the young government to cope with emergencies are the tragic reality. Cities and towns have come under assault from the nation's northern neighbor, forcing civilians to flee their homes in terror. Farmers have been forced away from their land by armies, thus ruining food production.What you just read would describe South Sudan today. The description could also fit the United States during the War of 1812.

A Small But Solid Victory for Liberal Education at Yale

by Jim Sleeper

Just as the Tunisian vendor who sparked the Arab Spring was provoked not only by one bureaucratic or police affront but also by a long train of abuses, petty and large, that had alienated many Tunisians from the government, so the Yale professors who passed a resolution decisively (100 to 69) over their President Richard Levin's objection, in his presence, on April 5 were prompted by a lot more than the resolution's explicit concern for abuses of academic freedom, civil liberties and human rights by the government of Singapore, with whose National University Levin and the Yale Corporation are setting up a brand-new undergraduate college.The faculty made clear that it was expressing larger concerns summarized two days before in a Yale Daily News column by Yale's Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Seyla Benhabib, the resolution's author (and my wife; this is a blog commentary, not only a report; I provide the links to other accounts below).

It's Not Road Rage, It's Terrorism

by Daniel Pipes

On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli doctor of American origins, went to the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and murdered twenty-nine Muslims with an automatic weapon before being overwhelmed and himself killed. This massacre prompted conspiracy theories and riots in Muslim circles, including accusations that the government of Israel stood behind Goldstein, an allegation that strenuous denunciations of his attack by the Israeli government did not fully deflect.Rashid Baz, who attacked a Jewish target in New York City in 1994.

Americans Elect Could Become a Viable Political Party

by J. David Gillespie

It may be that I just like duels. One of my favorite movie scenes is of the dueling banjoes in Deliverance. I find some fascination even in the historical accounts of the Burr-Hamilton affair, though it is a relief that such lethal blood sports no longer have the protection of law. This will be a dueling essay. It is about Americans Elect, the brightest, most glittering phenomenon situated outside the walls of America’s partisan duopoly in the 2012 election. For sparring partner, I choose Professor Robert Brent Toplin, a respected scholar whose article on Americans Elect appeared on HNN two weeks ago.

The Founding Fathers Had an Individual Mandate—to Buy Guns

by David A. Walsh

The acrimony over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has now (perhaps inevitably) drawn in the Founding Fathers. Writing for Slate, Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar cited the 1792 Militia Acts as a legal precedent that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, widely criticized for his bumbling under the onslaught of questions by the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, should have cited. The Militia Acts have their own individual mandate:Each and every free able-bodied white male citizen...who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years...shall...be enrolled in the militia....Every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges....” [emphasis added]

Power Pivot or Duffer’s Divot?: Obama’s Asia Policy

by Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine

As a founding father of the realist approach to international relations, Hans Morgenthau understood that a realist policy, while grounded in the play of power, should be tempered by prudence and historical experience. By this standard the Obama administration’s “pivot toward Asia” (announced in a string of statements, most notably the January 2012 strategic review) fails egregiously.

History Shows Brokered Conventions Go for the Moderate Candidate

by Nicole Hemmer

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will likely nab enough delegates in today's primaries to cross the halfway mark in his bid to clinch the Republican presidential nomination. As he inches ever closer to the finish line, two things have become clear. First, Romney is the only candidate able to capture the majority of delegates. And second, a still-sizable contingent of GOP voters would desperately like to stop him.That desperation has breathed new life into the idea of a brokered convention (in which delegates or party leaders rather than voters choose the party’s nominee), which has now become the main goal of both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, Romney’s two main rivals. Their hope: while no other candidate can amass enough delegates to win the nomination outright, they could block Romney from doing so. If they do, the choice moves from the voting booth to the national convention in Tampa, Florida.

The GOP Doesn't Have a Foreign Policy -- They're Just Against Whatever Obama is For

by Steve Hochstadt

It would be difficult to find a time in our recent history when the foreign policy of a presidential administration was as unsuccessful as under George W. Bush. Not just one, but two wars started and carried out for years without any success, Osama bin Laden still hiding after years of fruitless search (though under Bush's successor bin Laden is now hiding six miles under the ocean with a hole in his head), a worsening situation in the Middle East, and anti-American feeling growing all over the world.Not one mission was accomplished.It’s not surprising that Republicans since 2008 have been scrambling to figure out what they should advocate. The ideas that the Republican presidential candidates have proposed over the past year demonstrate the bankruptcy of their foreign policy thinking. These problems are exemplified by expressions of the candidates’ policy towards Israel.

"People in the Press are Just as Patriotic" as Everyone Else -- Interview with Anthony Lewis, Part 2

by Adam Eisenberg

For more than fifty years, Anthony Lewis has been a keen observer of the United States Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and the critical role the press plays as watchdog for our government.The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Mr. Lewis was "politely fired" from his first job as a local news desk editor for the New York Times. He bounced back quickly as a reporter for the Washington Daily News, and his reporting on abuses in the federal loyalty-security program in the McCarthy era earned him his first Pulitzer.The New York Times promptly re-hired Mr. Lewis. The paper sent him to Harvard Law School on a one-year Nieman Fellowship, and then returned him to Washington, D.C., where he effectively invented modern Supreme Court reportage. Among the many landmark cases he covered was Gideon v. Wainwright; the decision that established state courts must provide lawyers for all indigent criminal defendants. He chronicled the case in his book, Gideon’s Trumpet.

The Arab Spring Continues, Just Not on American TV

by Juan Cole

Friday is a traditional day of protest in the Arab world, and [last week] did not disappoint. In addition, there were some important developments in the two post-revolutionary societies of Egypt and Tunisia.1. Tens of thousands of Syrians demonstrated in a number of Syrian cities on Friday, including in Idlib province and in the capital The regime continued to rain mortar fire onto some districts of the rebellious city of Homs. Meanwhile, the European Union applied sanctions to first lady Asma al-Assad, now seen as a Marie Antoinette figure after her private emails on shopping were hacked and released.

April 1912 Didn't Just See the Sinking of the Titanic -- The Fortunes of the GOP Sank, Too

by Adam Burns

We stand a century on from April 1912, but the events of that fateful year are still all too familiar to us. Along with numerous books and TV shows, we have the re-release of James Cameron’s epic disaster movie Titanic (in 3D) -- set to coincide neatly, and quite predictably, with the centenary of the sinking of that great ship. However, the fact that most of the press focus in early 2012 has been on the fractious Republican Party presidential nomination battle, bears a more surprising correlation to the events of 1912, and one that the GOP might do well to remember.