Entries for September 2007

After listening to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to the House and Senate committees, I don't see any reason to revise what I wrote in this column, published September 3, or this one, published this Monday. Petraeus and Crocker made a strong case that the surge strategy has produced positive military results and that there has been progress in political reconciliation at the local if not so much on the national level. They argued persuasively that the consequences of imminent withdrawal would be ghastly.

My Creators Syndicate column for this week looks beyond the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to consider what the public envisions for the future.

More from the Bookshelf

For a lively account of Dwight Eisenhower's civil rights record–during his time in the Army and as president–be sure to get ahold of Kasey Pipes's Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality. Pipes, a staffer in the Bush White House, writes vividly and admiringly, but he doesn't flinch from reporting things that don't reflect well on Eisenhower. This book is a reminder of how very different white Americans' attitudes about race were as recently as half a century ago; wee are quite a different country today.

Morton Keller's America's Three Regimes: A New Political History. I was first introduced to Morton Keller's work as an undergraduate, when I was assigned one of his books (I can't find it on amazon.com), which was surprisingly sympathetic to 19th-century businessmen. It was out of line with the liberal orthodoxy of the history profession of the day and, as I recall, contained some pungent passages. Those seem to be features as well of America's Three Regimes.

Here are some of the books I've been reading this summer.

On Friday, Judge Royce Lamberth is due to announce the amount of damages owed by the government of Iran to the relatives of the victims of the terrorist attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983. The amount will be set by a special master appointed by Judge Lamberth. The amount is expected to be more than $2 billion.