Congratulations and Controversy
1) Rebecca Goetz has accepted an offer from the History Department at Rice University, where she begins as an assistant professor in the fall.Congratulations to Caleb and Rebecca!
2) Caleb McDaniel successfully defended his dissertation at Johns Hopkins yesterday. You can call him Dr. McDaniel now.
3) Caleb has accepted an offer from the History Department at the University of Denver, where he begins as an assistant professor in the fall.
The announcement from the Director of National Intelligence that his office has begun posting documents and audio tapes on this site is obviously good news for historians. Marc Lynch at AbuAardvark has wise cautionary comments, excerpted at Political Animal, and an initial reaction from reading some of the released documents. These documents are selectively released from an enormous trove. They are raw documents, with no attempt even to date them. As Marc says,
The only prediction I'm confident making: a lot of people are going to dive into these things, and find what they're looking for. Here's a line in a transcript which proves, proves, that Saddam ordered 9/11! Here's a document which proves, proves, that Saddam and Zarqawi never had anything to do with each other! Here's one that proves, proves, that Saddam had nukes! Here's one that proves, proves, that Saddam didn't have nukes! I'd advise people on both sides of the issue not to get too excited over individual documents...
Marc's caution about this release of documents is re-enforced for me by the fact that within the first 48 hours of the announcement of the documents' release, the template of the site has been changed. The site initially clearly distinguished between Al-Qa'ida documents seized in Afghanistan and Iraqi documents seized in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the template of the site no longer makes that distinction. All documents are now subsumed under the Operation Iraqi Freedom nomenclature. That change can only feed suspicions about what purposes this process of releasing documents is intended to serve.
Probably the week's most controversial article is: John Mearsheimer (Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard),"The Israel Lobby," LRB, 23 March. It's well worth reading; and its tough argument is generating considerable criticism. See, for example: David Bernstein, Daniel Drezner, Martin Kramer, and Shmuel Rosner. Thanks to Manan Ahmed and Juan Cole for the tip.