Free Republic

They DO have a strategy, but they prefer to appear indecisive. That’s because the strategy would likely provoke even greater criticism than the false confession of endless dithering. The actual strategy is detente first, and then a full alliance with Iran throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It has been on display since before the beginning of the Obama administration. During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies....

The bloody-handed butchers of ISIS behave like the worst Islamofascist gang we have seen so far -- worse than the Taliban, worse than Hamas and Hezb’allah, worse than Al Nusra, worse than the Muslim Brotherhood, worse than all the little maniac gangs of cutthroats who have been practicing Jihad on innocent men, women and children for decades. In addition to which, ISIS has better PR, spreading its graphic images of human butchery of Christians, Yazidis, and Shi’ites, and other “infidels” around the world with amazing speed. On top of that, ISIS has engaged in Blitzkrieg warfare, overwhelming the defenses of...

They DO have a strategy, but they prefer to appear indecisive. That’s because the strategy would likely provoke even greater criticism than the false confession of endless dithering. The actual strategy is detente first, and then a full alliance with Iran throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It has been on display since before the beginning of the Obama administration. During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies....

It may well be that ISIS is one of at least two too-clever-by-half operations masterminded by our enemies. At the beginning, ISIS spun off from Al Qaeda because, we were told, Zawahari was too moderate for them. AQ didn’t slaughter enough, didn’t crucify enough, wasn’t psychotic enough for their taste.

I will confess to a dark suspicion that when Robert Bergdahl, standing next to President Obama, said in Pashto to Bowe Bergdahl, “I am your father,” it was some sort of coded message. I mean, what in the world was that all about? Does any father have to say such a thing to a son? Did he think Bowe didn’t know who his father was? But then I started to ask questions of people who had followed the Bergdahl saga, and they calmed me down a bit. The elder Bergdahl seems a bit odd. Look at the pictures. “A hippy,”...

We all know the Muslim world is a political and cultural disaster zone.All you need to know is the spectacularly low level of book sales in the Arab world, and a similarly miserable record in winning Nobel prizes, whether in literature or hard science. A dozen years ago, a group of Arab scholars did a report for the United Nations [1] that ascribed the failure of Arab society to a lack of freedom, knowledge and womenpower. And things have gotten considerably worse since 2002; the authors could write that there were no ethnic conflicts then. That’s long gone.Never mind...

Somebody on Twitter posted an upbeat message saying the US delegation to the latest round of talks with Iranian officials was quite optimistic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a born optimist and I love optimism, but I’d rather revel in victory than hope for good news, and the Iranians have every reason to revel. The Obama crowd has just ok’d something the Tehran tyrants have desperately wanted since the eighties: spare parts [1] for their long-grounded American passenger aircraft. Boeing and General Electric were given export licenses by the Treasury Department and everyone involved has been chanting “we take...

No surprise that the intel guys, like their political bosses, reassured themselves that Russia wouldn’t invade. Even though they made the same mistake just a few years ago when the morsel was Georgia. Indeed, that kind of error, revolving around the phrase “rational actor,” is the trademark of Western confusion about the world. They refuse to see that our enemies are waging war against us, thus refuse to think about winning that war, thus lose many battles, and happily retreat. After all, if our enemies are rational actors, what could go wrong? We could even slash and burn our own...

Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian. —Heywood Campbell Broun [1]. I don’t think it’s hard to understand Obama’s foreign policy. Although there’s a lot we don’t know about him, his basic impulses are clear enough. He’s told us what they are (although, to be sure, he often misleads and obfuscates [2]), and his actions are in keeping with his announced impulses. Furthermore, there’s nothing unique or surprising about them — you can hear them in our classrooms and our college dorms, and read them in the establishment press...

Western diplomats at the Rouhani inauguration Sunday should challenge him to release political prisoners The inauguration of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran on Sunday has stirred considerable hope among some Western observers for the start of a new era of liberalization in the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rouhani may prove to be the reformer his supporters claim, but the luxury of such optimism isn't available to the hundreds of dissidents who have run afoul of the Islamic Republic and are trapped in its prisons. Since Mr. Rouhani's election in mid-June, the regime's executions of prisoners—a good barometer of a government's...

I don’t really follow North Korea (mostly, I try to stay up-to-date on a few countries that begin with the letter “I”), but it seems to me that we are looking at recent events in the wrong context. North Korea is a charter member of the Axis of Evil, and works hand in glove with the other surviving regime of that infamous trinity, Iran. I’ve been writing for years about the intimate relationship between the two, ranging from North Korean assistance in digging tunnels in Iranian mountains and in the Tehran subway system, to Iranian cooperation with North Korean missile...

In the end, Carter lost to Reagan because he dithered too much, because he was just too feckless, because our enemies were running amok, and Carter was trying to make a deal with them instead of acting the way most of us thought a real American leader should act. Then, as now, the media were overwhelmingly behind the Democratic incumbent, but the real world overwhelmed them. Then, it was American hostages in Iran. Now, it is American dead in Libya. Then, it was a mob of Iranian “students” shrieking “death to America” in Tehran and taking over the American embassy...

Rick Santorum doesn't fit any of the stereotypes of current foreign-policy ideologies. He's too idealistic to be a "realist," too conservative and too religious to be a "neocon," and too revolutionary to be a "paleocon." He's an old-fashioned, feisty patriot, in the mold of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Mr. Santorum's hatred of tyranny traces back to his grandfather Pietro, who took the family from Lake Garda in northern Italy to Pennsylvania's coal country to escape Mussolini's dictatorship in the 1920s. Pietro Santorum worked in the mines until he was 72 and, as Mr. Santorum often says, taught him "to...

Can we agree that Iran and Syria now constitute a single strategic problem? Surely Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, thinks so. Otherwise he would not have ordered the Revolutionary Guards to conduct a policy of all-out military, financial, and intelligence support for the Assad regime, combined with the usual deception (various public statements urging Assad to be reasonable and settle his differences with the protesters, a ridiculous fantasy). Khamenei knows that if Assad falls to anything remotely resembling a free, representative government, the consequences for Iran range from severely damaging to fatal. The Syrian crisis is only one very...

According to several recent reports, the Obama administration is now considering more forceful action against Iran in Iraq. This is as understandable as it was inevitable; as I wrote many months before the invasion of Iraq, it is folly to expect to maintain decent security there so long as the current regime remains in power in Tehran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen cannot tolerate the existence of a free, stable democratic society in its Shi’ite neighbor to the West, nor in Afghanistan to the East. The Iranian tyrant is threatened by an ongoing mass uprising by his own...

I was amazed when I read the Pawlenty speech on the Middle East. I hadn’t expected that a former Middle Western governor, from a blue state, would have had the passion and vision to deliver one of the most impressive analyses and tough-minded policy ideas within memory. And I love the title, “No Retreat from Freedom’s Rise.” Here are the key graphs: We have a clear interest in seeing an end to Assad’s murderous regime. By sticking to Bashar al Assad so long, the Obama Administration has not only frustrated Syrians who are fighting for freedom—it has demonstrated strategic blindness....

“I’m sorry, you know I can’t disclose my location.” It was the spirit of my long-deceased friend, James Jesus Angleton, whom I’d reached via ouija board for what I hoped would be a highly informative conversation, but the way he spat out that phrase suggested I may have asked the wrong question. I wanted to know if he’d had the chance to talk to Osama bin Laden’s ghost, and yes, I knew that if Angleton said “yes” it would finally tell me where he was residing. ML: “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way, but you know there are lots...

Syrians Gunned Down, International Community Yawns Assad’s not going quietly. This from the Reform Party of Syria: Dara’a. An eyewitness on BBC Arabic said that armed units speaking only Farsi descended upon Dara’a. They have smothered the walls of the al-Omari Mosque with their graffiti but several of them were captured. Another witness, Omar al-Masri, said that snipers took positions on rooftops and started shooting. He said Syrians converged in large numbers upon the rooftops and five snipers were captured. Al-Masri, confirmed the other eyewitness, and said that non-Syrians wearing all black were captured in al-Omari Mosque. They spoke only...

The Iranian regime is attacking on all fronts, thrilled at the downfall of the hated Mubarak, and buoyed by the paralysis of the West.  The failure to support democratic revolutions in the Middle East has convinced the mullahs in Tehran that they have no effective opposition, and they are trying to run up the score as fast as they can, on both regional and domestic playing fields.Last Tuesday, lots of would-be demonstrators turned out in the streets of  many Iranian cities, only to find themselves outnumbered by security thugs, both the usual collection of Revolutionary Guards, Basiji, plaincothesmen and women, ...

As I’ve remarked in the past–but you can’t say the truth too often, right? — nobody knows what a revolution looks like. And in fact that last clause may be very misleading, because there is no one thing that a revolution looks like. Some revolutions happen very quietly, like the Information Revolution. On the other hand, some very revolutionary-looking events, like lots of people in the streets calling for the downfall of a government or a regime, are just street theater. Ask the “revolutionaries” who filled the streets of Paris calling for the end of de Gaulle. Or the crowd...