Free Republic

The death of a top Iranian military commander in Syria this week has dealt a "psychological blow" to elements backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to a U.S. intelligence official. The killing of a commander in the Revolutionary Guards Corps at the hands of ISIS also highlights the extent of Iranian involvement in Syria and the dire straits in which Assad finds himself, Washington-based analysts say. Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani was killed outside Aleppo, Syria, where he was advising the Syrian army in its fight against extremists, Iranian state media reported Friday. Iranian media carried messages of condolence from Iranian...

-excerpt- Iranians have never regarded clerics​—​except perhaps the most accomplished scholars​—​as ever being above sin. They are lawyers who, as the great poet Hafez famously remarked, “don’t practice in private what they preach in public.” excerpt- Khamenei’s nuclear fatwa was not to be taken seriously. It was meant partly for Western consumption. More important, it reflected the surreal Islam-vs.-the-West theater that is a never-ending spectacle in the Islamic Republic. America unleashed the atom bomb in war; the Islamic Republic wouldn’t do such a thing. The West is overflowing with homosexuals; in Iran, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad informed the students of...

WHATEVER happens in Iran in the aftermath of this month’s fraudulent elections, one thing is clear: we are witnessing not just a fascinating power struggle among men who’ve known each other intimately for 30 years, but the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The Islamic revolution in Iran encompassed two incompatible ideas: that God’s law — as interpreted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — would rule, and that the people of Iran had the right to elect representatives who would advance and...

'The United States is not at war with Islam and will never be. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject." So spoke President Barack Hussein Obama in Turkey last week. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to "Islamic terrorism," "Islamic radicalism," or "Islamic extremism" aren't in his speeches. "Jihad," too, has been banished from the official lexicon....Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group -- if it were, we...

For the second time since 9/11, Americans have been treated to the undemocratic phenomenon of private citizens assuming the responsibilities and prerogatives of elected officials. First we had the 9/11 Commission. Not content to present its findings and recommendations to the president and Congress, the commission went on a nationwide lobbying campaign to persuade America, and pressure its representatives, into accepting its "advice." Now we have the Baker-Hamilton Commission, officially known as the Iraq Study Group, self-consciously following in its predecessor's footsteps. From its paltry discussion of America's counterinsurgency in Iraq, to its recommendations about troop levels, to its scathing...

ABU MUSAB AL ZARQAWI is among the least interesting Islamic terrorists since modern Islamic terrorism took shape in Iran and Egypt in the 1950s and '60s. Compared with Osama bin Laden, with his elegant prose, his appreciation for redolent historical Muslim narrative, his seemingly conscious imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and his refined, almost feminine movements, Zarqawi was Islamist trailer trash, a crude man whose love of violence was unvarnished, organic, perhaps perversely sexual. But Zarqawi was a man of his age: He is a big red dot on the graph charting the Islamic world's moral free fall since modernity...

Journal Editorial Report (Paul Gigot) - FNC show page Meme: The Bush administration policies are a failure and Bush has bad poll numbersBush's bad poll numbers are sinking the RepublicansBush must clean house and replace those the MSM hates (because they're not listening to us!)The paleocons and country club Republicans have turned their back on Bush (the Nixon wing of the party tries to rise again) Topics: 'Civil War'? - Tune in this weekend for a discussion of Iraq and Harvard professors' campaign against Israel. (Opinion Journal web site promo)Is Iraq really headed toward civil war? An interview with Reuel...

President Bush doesn't lack for critics when it comes to his Iraq policies, but the smartest and most devastating of these is Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia. Yesterday, after reading a morning's worth of gloomy press accounts about the proposed Iraqi constitution, I thought it might be interesting to hear what Galbraith himself had to say. I finally tracked him down in Baghdad (at God knows what hour there) and found that far from lambasting Bush, Galbraith was more complimentary about what the administration has just achieved than anybody else I spoke to all day....

Soon the whole Middle East will see Iraq's national assembly at work. ALL RIGHT. LET US make an analytical bet of high probability and enormous returns: The January 30 elections in Iraq will easily be the most consequential event in modern Arab history since Israel's six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser's alliance in 1967. Israel's pulverizing defeat of the Arab armies dethroned Nasserism, the romantic pan-Arab dictatorial nationalism that had infected much of the Arab world, particularly its intelligentsia, during the 1950s and '60s. With the collapse of Nasserism, the overtly secular socialist-cum-fascist age in the Middle East closed--except in...

THE MIDDLE EAST HAS DEFINED the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration's evolving pro-democracy Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, and the downplaying of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation have overturned America's traditional approach to the region. Our European and Muslim allies in the Cold War, the transatlanticist foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and the Near Eastern cadres within the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have all been dismayed--in the case of France, Germany, and certain quarters at Foggy Bottom and Langley, appalled--by the post-9/11 actions of President...

WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN IRAQ? The U.S. presidential election will likely be won or lost over the war and its aftermath. If the United States fails in Iraq--if it is driven out by violence, and the country descends into internecine strife--then former ambassador (and current Kerry adviser) Richard Holbrooke may well be right: Iraq will be "a mess worse than Vietnam." It's a good bet that few people in the administration, as in the country at large, think the counterinsurgency is going well. It is quite striking to listen to President Bush's speeches about Iraq--about its centrality to the...