Free Republic

US Vice President JD Vance held a tense phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week, in which he chided the premier for making overly optimistic predictions about the war in Iran, Axios reports. Vance took Netanyahu to task over how likely the latter said regime change would be, the outlet reported. “Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements,” a US official tells Axios, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

@RepNancyMace Just walked out of a House Armed Services briefing on Iran. Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing. @RepNancyMace The justifications presented to the American public for the war in Iran were not the same military objectives we were briefed on today in the House Armed Services Committee. This gap is deeply troubling. The longer this war continues, the faster it will lose the support of Congress and the American people. @RepNancyMace Washington’s war machine is hard at work. They are try to drag us into Iran...

Many years ago, at the height of anti-Vietnam War agitation, leaders of the movement would say that they weren’t anti-war, they were on the other side. I was reminded of that, watching this video of left-wingers cheering for American soldiers to be killed: (video at source) There are quite a few people at this rally. Some are obviously Middle Eastern, while others look like mainstream Democrats. To the extent that people who attended this rally are not citizens, they should be deported. If they are naturalized citizens, they should be denaturalized. Whoever is left should be shunned and banned from...

Do politicians internalize the consequences of their war-related votes? A new paper published in the Journal of Political Economy finds that they do -- when their family is involved. In “No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress,” authors Eoin F. McGuirk, Nathaniel Hilger, and Nicholas Miller compare conscription-related voting records of members of Congress with and without draft-age sons. They find that legislators with sons eligible for the draft are 7-11 percentage points less likely to vote for conscription than their counterparts with daughters of the same age. The authors compiled a dataset of...