Free Republic

During the height of tensions with Iran last year, the United States conducted an unprecedented series of war games. Over five months, from May until the end of September, 93 separate military exercises were held, with forces operating continuously in, above and around 29 countries.

Great music from Gordon Lightfoot about the "Rainy Day People" who help us instead of hurting us. On Canada's CTV Lloyd Robertson had a conversation with Gordon Lightfoot broadcast in December 2017.... Where do we go after impeachment? In 1998 Bill Clinton opted for military action in Kosovo and Serbia siding with its Muslim population against the Serbs. What will the Trump post-impeachment policy be?.... And back here in the USA Kelli Stewart, John Lamb and other activists taking a stand for the rights of parents in the Kylee Dixon Case in Oregon..... The Middle Finger In The Middle East,...

Go back over 40 years, to the start of Iran’s long conflict with the United States. On April 1, 1979, the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had returned to Iran from exile to assume command of the revolt, became Supreme Leader in December of that year. His rise was accelerated by the seizure on Nov. 4 of 52 American diplomats and citizens, and citizens of other countries, at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The hostage crisis became the means by which the Ayatollah crushed political opponents in Iran. Dealing with the hostage taking became...

Russia is to close its border with China as a measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, according to the country’s state media. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said Thursday morning that he had signed an instruction to close the state border in the Far East, Russian news agency TASS reported. “A corresponding instruction was signed today. Work on it is already in progress. We will inform all those concerned properly about the measures to close the border in the Far Eastern region and other steps the government has taken (to prevent the spread of coronavirus in Russia)” the...

55 years ago today was Sir Winston's funeral. He was the greatest leader of the 20th Century. He stood alone against Hitlerism. He saved the free world alone, holding out for months until other allies joined the struggle. Note the honor guard keeping watch over his casket, their chins tucked deep into their chests, their eyes sorrowful and downcast. Sir Winston was a commoner. He was half American. Note the marching sailors escorting his casket from Westminster to Saint Paul's That was never allowed for the funeral of a commoner. This was the first state funeral for a commoner in...

MOSCOW - As many as 35 Russian mercenaries are reported to have been killed in Libya while they were fighting for Khalifa Haftar, the military general most associated with the rule of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi, who launched an offensive earlier this year on the Libyan capital of Tripoli, home to the country’s internationally-recognized government, according to a Russian media. The mercenaries are thought to work for the Wagner Group, a military contractor run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman nicknamed Putin’s Chef because he holds lucrative Kremlin catering contracts. Asked by VOA about the reports of the fatalities in...

WARSAW, Poland — Over the next several days, world leaders will gather twice to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of Nazi Germany’s death camps. That there will be two competing ceremonies — one in Jerusalem on Thursday and the other at the Auschwitz site in southern Poland on Monday — underlines how politically charged World War II remains... Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. But the country had also signed a nonaggression accord with the Nazis shortly before the war began in 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It contained a...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Saturday that National Public Radio reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to him and broke an off-the-record agreement. “NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to me, twice,” Pompeo said in a statement. “First, last month, in setting up our interview and, then again yesterday, in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record.” Pompeo and his staff said Kelly agreed that an interview with the secretary would be about Iran but that she asked questions about Ukraine and United States Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Kelly revealed on NPR that Pompeo afterward berated her...

Economic sanctions against Iran are having an effect, experts who spoke with The Epoch Times agreed. Yet views diverged on the nature of the impact and on how big of a role sanctions have played in the Islamic regime’s reluctance to escalate after the assassination of a top general. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in Baghdad on Jan. 3 by a missile fired from a U.S. drone. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the strike a preemptive move to keep Soleimani from executing an “imminent” attack on American assets. In retaliation, Iranian leaders ordered ballistic missile strikes that on Jan....

A new poll shows Americans are more likely than not to support President Donald Trump’s decision to order a drone strike that killed an Iranian general, even amid widespread skepticism about his foreign policy overall. The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was taken about two weeks after the Jan. 3 strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. It found that 41% of Americans approved of the action while 30% disapproved of it. The rest didn’t express an opinion either way. …

U.S. troops last weekend reportedly found themselves in a standoff with Russian forces trying to gain access to key oil fields in northeastern Syria. The Saturday standoff — first reported by Turkish media outlets, citing unnamed local officials in the Turkey-Syria border region — seems to have ended without any shots being fired or any real risk of violence between the two sides. American military personnel reportedly stopped a Russian convoy near the town of Rmelan, and the Russian forces then apparently turned back and returned to their home base. Still, the near-clash serves as a reminder of the high...

The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watchIn the wake of the targeted killing of Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani, an interesting fight has broken out—after Donald Trump failed to brief them in advance of the strike, Democrats began fulsomely criticizing the president. This led Republican lawmakers to accuse their counterparts across the aisle of pro-terrorist sympathies. Maybe Republicans are still sore that Barack Obama compared them to Iranian hardliners like Soleimani for denouncing his signature foreign policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal,...

... On Thursday, the memorial site will be visited by the most senior Muslim figure to date: Sheikh Mohammed al-Eissa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League, who represents over a billion Muslims worldwide. Al-Eissa, who previously served as Saudi justice minister, will make his way to the former camp with David Harris, the director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). This joint visit by a high-ranking 54-year-old Islamic scholar and a 70-year-old descendant of Holocaust survivors is nothing short of remarkable.

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas. Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it. Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are...

The Russia watcher community is up in arms. On Jan. 15, in his state-of-the-nation address to the Russian parliament, President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly proposed a series of constitutional changes that appear to strengthen the role of parliament and elevate the status of the prime minister in the political system. The surprise is understandable. Changing the Constitution is something we would expect from Putin: after all, how else would he stay in power beyond his second term that ends in 2024? But there are less roundabout ways of getting there — scrapping the two-term limit on the presidency is one. Given...

Iranian authorities last week arrested Fatemeh Mohammadi, a woman who converted to Christianity, and was transported to a secret location. The Persian-language news agency HRANA first reported on Mohammadi’s arrest. According to the website Article 18, which seeks to promote religious freedom, “The 21-year-old, who after her conversion now prefers to be known as Mary, was reportedly arrested on Sunday near Azadi Square, where protests were taking place following the Iranian government’s admission of guilt in the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane.” Article 18 said, “A number of protesters were reportedly arrested on Sunday evening, as protests took place...

Corruption is changing. The old school corruption is where a politician takes a bribe or payoff. These days, the politician doesn't take it themselves, but steers it to an adult child or a best friend. And both political parties are doing it. It's really a question of the kind of leadership we're going to have.  It's impossible for our leaders to respond to what we want — to make good decisions — if a chief motivation is to enrich their families and themselves. When you trace the money, you often find it comes from foreign governments like China and from...

Russia’s defense ministry accuses Armia Krayova of ‘destroying Jews’ in Warsaw, amid feud with Poland over war’s historyRussia’s defense ministry on Friday accused the Polish resistance movement that staged the Warsaw uprising of 1944 of “destroying Jews,” in the latest salvo of Moscow’s feud with Poland over WWII history. The accusations were posted with a trove of declassified documents called “Warsaw Under Fire” on the 75th anniversary of Soviet forces’ taking the city after more than five years of occupation by Nazi Germany. The Russian defense ministry published a multimedia website Friday to mark the anniversary with scans of documents...

A year and a half into Donald Trump’s presidency, Henry Kissinger set out a theory. “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences,” he told the Financial Times. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.” A term has been coined to describe this notion: Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks calls them “Trumportunities.” It is the idea that,...

Washington (AFP) - The US Senate voted Tuesday to slap sanctions on companies working on Russia's Nord Stream pipeline, sending a bill to President Donald Trump that is sure to antagonize European nations counting on the project's natural gas. The measure, inserted into a huge annual defense spending bill, passed 86 to eight after easily clearing the House of Representatives last week. It aims to halt further construction of the $10.6 billion pipeline being built under the Baltic Sea and is set to double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany. The German-Russian Chamber of Commerce said last week the...