Free Republic

Secretary of State John Kerry went to Europe to talk about Mideast peace, Syria and Iran. What he got was an earful of outrage over U.S. snooping abroad. President Barack Obama has defended America’s surveillance dragnet to leaders of Russia, Mexico, Brazil, France and Germany, but the international anger over the disclosures shows no signs of abating in the short run. … Diplomatic relations are built on trust. If America’s credibility is in question, the U.S. will find it harder to maintain alliances, influence world opinion and maybe even close trade deals. …

Brazil and Germany today joined forces to press for the adoption of a U.N. General Resolution that promotes the right of privacy on the internet, marking the first major international effort to restrain the National Security Agency's intrusions into the online communications of foreigners, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the push. The effort follows a German claim that the American spy agency may have tapped the private telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and dozens of other world leaders. It also comes about one month after Brazilian leader Dilma Rousseff denounced NSA espionage against her country as "a breach...

One thing that the past few weeks have accomplished is the total destruction of Obama's "towering intellect" persona.This is one the standard lenses through which Obama is viewed, with differing but complimentary angles from each end of the spectrum: the liberal "reigning intellect of his age" as opposed to the conservative "master chess player with a plan for destruction."The basis of Obama's reputation for intellectual superiority lies in a mixture of Democratic propaganda and PC indoctrination. The Democratic stance has been steadily maintained for years and prevails in some circles impervious to embarrassment or shame. Obama was an Ivy-league man!...

ObamaCare is only one of His (and our) problems. Much has already been written about the wonders of ObamaCare and there seems to be little worthwhile to add. Well, there's this and of course this:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qtx_ZcHOjw&w=640&h=390] Video linkAnd this: Maybe He should just move on and issue executive decrees to nationalize all facilities where medical services are offered and to draft all physicians and other health care providers into a domestic peace corpse. He seems not to realize that His (and our) domestic problems are largely His own fault.Continued low employment and increased incivility are problems but, of course, President Obama...

India-Pakistan: Indian military authorities report a week-long series of gun battles has been taking place in the central region of the Line of Control in Kashmir. Some 30 to 40 fighters crossed the Line on 24 September, up to 12 of whom have been killed by Indian soldiers. Five Indian soldiers have been wounded. The infiltrators holed up in an abandoned village, which appears to be the location of the gun fights. Although General Officer Commanding of the Army's 15 Corps Lt Gen Gurmit Singh had said it will be premature to say whether the Pakistan Army was involved in...

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, responsible for enforcing economic and trade sanctions against Iran and Syria, is being hindered because it has been pared down to a “skeleton crew” by the government shutdown, a Treasury official tells ABC News. “This massively reduced staffing not only impairs OFAC’s ability to execute its mission, it also undermines [the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes] broader efforts to combat money laundering and illicit finance, protect the integrity of the U.S. financial system, and disrupt the financial underpinnings of our adversaries,” according to the official, who asked not...

America’s soft power, however, is more about what we do at home than what we do abroad...Liberals tend to emphasize what we do in the world over who we are in the world, because they’ve fashioned a culture that denies American exceptionalism.... It is time that conservatives take ownership of this idea and put the emphasis back on what really counts.

It’s a sad day for the United States when the president of any other country, but especially Russia, can outmaneuver our president and successfully claim the moral high ground on anything. But that’s exactly what happened thanks to President Obama's feckless “foreign policy by gaffe” – if you can even it call it policy – toward Syria in recent weeks. But in the course of seizing that high ground, Vladimir Putin got a couple of things wrong. He wrote a column in The New York Times Wednesday that concluded, “My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by...

In the Syrian rubble of Barack Obama’s foreign policy lies a moment of opportunity for conservatives. It is a moment for building a muscular foreign policy based on a recognition of good and evil; on an unapologetic conviction that the United States stands firmly on the right side of that ledger because it stands for the liberty and equal dignity of every human being; and, therefore, on an unwavering commitment to have our interventions guided solely by American national interests. It is a Ronald Reagan moment. Now, all we need is a Ronald Reagan. For now, we have only pretenders,...

Russia-North Korea:Russian officials said they interpret the white vapor plume at Yongbyon to signify testing of the electric power generation system, not a sign the reactor is nearing operational status. Their main point is that the reactor is in such a state of disrepair that it cannot be started safely. Comment:The Russian argument is a good reason to not try to restart the reactor, but it does not mean the North Koreans won't try just the same. Russia-Iran:Update.The Office of the Russian President said the report in yesterday'sKommersantwas untrue. At this time President Putin is not planning to offer the...

What Is Our National Purpose? I was listening to a radio program a couple days ago, which featured a story that arrested my attention and set some gears in motion in my overheated gray matter. For those of you in Rio Linda, California – that's a brain. The basic theme of the profile, had to do with the topic of 'depressed Latina teens'. The narrator told the story of one young woman, whose family was concerned when the teen's grades in school started slipping, she refused to leave her room to go to school and was withdrawing from the family....

In my soon to be 77 years as a citizen of the United States of America, having lived through Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the dark days of WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, 9/11 and all the other serious and profound events our beloved nation has been involved in over the last three quarters of a century, I have to say with all sincerity that I have never seen a president as confused, befuddled, impotent, insincere and as out of his depth as Barack Obama has become in dealing with the Syrian issue. When you're the leader of the free...

Americans and other Western peoples have been sacrificing fathomless amounts of our blood and treasure on behalf of the lives of hopelessly backward Muslim populations in Islamic countries for far too long. We’ve been devoting ridiculous levels of political energy toward involvement in the perpetual conflicts throughout the Muslim world, and we’ve had it. Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Qatar, Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, and now Syria…the list is getting pretty long. I know I’m mainly preaching to the choir here when I say that the Obama administration’s anti-American agenda, haphazard incompetence, and blatantly pro-Islamic priorities are...

The Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center, Shadi Hamid, tweets out about the Egyptian media depicting Obama as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Newspaper also claims that son of Muslim Brotherhood leader threatened Obama with release of “papers” revealing his MB membership.

As the US is on the verge of generating yet another self-inflicted wound in the Middle East, and another worldwide blow to its already depleted moral authority, many will wonder what prompts this sort of destructive behavior. While most everyone has a view, and while it is likely such easily predictable disasters stem from a combination of factors, there is one that is often overlooked. What is that one? Cultural Insensitivity. Somewhere along the way America’s various Administrations starting humming that irritating song from the Disney studios, “It’s a Small World After All”. It’s NOT a small world. It’s a...

President Bush knew how to build a coalitionGeorge W. Bush was widely mocked by the Left during the Iraq War, with liberals jeering at the “coalition of the willing,” which included in its ranks some minnows such as Moldova and Kazkhstan. Michael Moore, in his rather silly documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, went to great lengths to lampoon the Iraq War alliance. But the coalition also contained, as I pointed out in Congressional testimony back in 2007, Great Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, and 16 members of the NATO alliance, as well as Japan and South Korea. In Europe, France and...

Let’s count up the ways in which the Syria debate has exposed Barack Obama’s utter incompetence and lack of seriousness. 1. Failure to consult Congress. The Obama administration has built no consensus among Congress for any kind of strike. Generalissimo Pelosi wants a strike, but beyond her there is very little appetite for any U.S. action. Democrats are vocally skeptical. Republicans see a replay of Libya, just a couple of weeks before the first anniversary of the deadly attack in Benghazi. Even Dennis Kucinich is starting to make sense. There may be good reasons for striking Syria, but those reasons...

In a great article in the Independent, Robert Frisk points out that if Obama attacks Syrian leader Assad’s army, the US and Al Qaeda would be on the same side. However, Frisk incorrectly states that this would be the first time. Not so. As Gateway Pundit pointed out in prior posts, Obama was on the same side as Al Qaeda in Libya when bombing Gaddafi and his forces. Obama, also, sided with the terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt, even providing them with $1.5 billion in aid, and then taking it away after they were overthrown. Pundits have tried...

Resetting US foreign policy Jerusalem Post ^ | 08/22/2013 | CAROLINE GLICK Never since America’s establishment has the US appeared so untrustworthy, destructive, irrelevant and impotent. Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it. Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed. Since Obama and Clinton blamed much of the world’s troubles on the misdeeds of...

Since September 11, 2001, Western governments have developed a “fear factor” approach in how they deal with Islamist groups. Fear leads those governments, especially the United States, to do foolish things—like supporting apparently less-overt Jihadist Muslim groups, such as the global powerhouse of the Muslim Brotherhood. In doing so, they think they can kill two birds with one stone. To the Islamists, they can say: “See, we’re not anti-Islamist. We’re just against the bad guys who want to kill us.” To other Muslims, they can say: “Please tell those terrorists not to attack Western targets or people.” But it’s easy...