Free Republic

Award-winning journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave tells Newsmax that the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East could push the price of oil quickly to $300 or even $400 a barrel. Such a price would mean a gallon of gasoline costing as much as $15 at American pumps, perhaps higher depending on local, state and federal taxes, according to analysts interviewed by Newsmax. De Borchgrave, who has interviewed Moammar Gadhafi six times, also says the Libyan leader is manic-depressive who is going through a manic phrase where he is “taking on the world.”

WASHINGTON, July 5 (UPI)-- The regular army and the Revolutionary Guards appear to be at odds over their respective strategic readings of U.S. intentions. General Yahya Safavi, commander of the RG, evidently believes a military showdown with the United States is in the cards. "In time of war," said Safavi, "we can recruit an army of 12 million within 48 hours." And, "if God forbid, we face a disaster during war, each of our (RG) brigades will recruit 10 "Ashura" battalions from among the Basiji troops, and that way they will turn into a division...

If you liked the "cakewalk" through Iraq, you'll love a ride on the magic carpet over Iran. While Condoleezza Rice said this was not the time to try and come to a conclusion about what the next step on Iran's nuclear defiance might be, those who assured us Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a walk in the park are now telling us Operation Silence Mullahs would be casualty-free – at least for the good guys. A prominent "neocon," still in good odor at the White House and OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense), speaking privately, assured us that by...

In private huddles with American interlocutors, Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf agrees, in principle, with any U.S. concept or notional future option for the war on terrorism. No sooner is the U.S. visitor airborne than survival instincts dictate how fighting is done every step of the way. In Pakistan, the military ruler's "yes" or "no" is only an interim response. This convoluted modus operandi prompted President Bush, on his 24-hour, first-time visit to a Pakistani capital city in total lockdown, to say, "Part of my mission today was to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he...

The man in charge of hoodwinking the Western powers about Iran's now 18-year-old secret nuclear program believes the apocalypse will happen in his own lifetime. He'll be 50 in October. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Shi'ite creed has convinced him lesser mortals can not only influence but hasten the awaited return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi. Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect holds this will be Muhammad ibn Hasan, the righteous descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the 9th century, at age 5. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war, bloodshed...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- The man in charge of hoodwinking the Western powers about Iran's now 18-year-old secret nuclear program believes the apocalypse will happen in his own lifetime. He'll be 50 in October. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Shiite creed has convinced him lesser mortals can not only influence, but also hasten the awaited return of the 12th imam known as the Mahdi. Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect holds this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, the righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad. He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the 9th century, at the age of five....

Free elections, we have been told ad nauseam, lead to a healthy body politic called democracy. Unfortunately for those who see the cliché as an article of faith, free elections and democracy are not synonymous. Hitler won a free election - and went on to build the world's most formidable war machine in history's blink of an eye. A free election recently propelled Evo Morales, a man whose idols are Fidel Castro and his Venezuelan look-alike Hugo Chavez, and who represents the coca growers of Bolivia, to the presidency of his country. Freely elected Chavez is spreading his oil-at-almost-$70-a-barrel money...

If anyone has any doubt about the kind of nuclear work Iran has been doing for the past 18 years, it must be a case of naiveté compounded by gullibility. Nor should there be any uncertainty about what Iran's mullahocracy would do with a nuclear weapon.

Praised as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century, Ray Kurzweil was selected as one of "16 revolutionaries who made America," along with the great inventors of the past two centuries. Forbes magazine called him "the ultimate thinking machine" and The Wall Street Journal dubbed him "the restless genius." Kurzweil is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, With 12 honorary doctorates and the world's largest prize for innovation - the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT award. Kurzweil, now 57, published what is arguably the most blogged-about book of 2005, a 640-page blockbuster: "The Singularity Is Near," a road map to "a unique...

NEAR MIRANSHAH, North Waziristan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Pakistan. More than a year of intermittent talks with Osama bin Laden's clandestine network in Pakistan led to a 750-mile journey through territory forbidden to foreigners and two of the country's four provinces. The UPI team, in native kameez shalwar dress, included a Pakistani media consultant and personal friend, who asked his name be withheld pending a meeting with bin Laden; a driver; our security chief; and a constantly changing member of the secret network, as we moved from one relay point to the next. It soon became clear the operatives...

WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- Any seasoned reporter covering the Tet offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and presumably retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200 colleges and universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and invidious historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about what led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely. Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Narco-state conundrumBy Arnaud de BorchgravePublished June 2, 2005 Washington is not the only place were facts have fallen on hard times. It is now "quite impossible" for al Qaeda-linked terrorists to launch attacks across the 1,200 miles of mountains and valleys that separate Pakistan and Afghanistan. So said the commander of some 70,000 Pakistani troops deployed among 669 outposts.     From the highest eastern point at 21,000 feet in the Chitral area to the triborder region of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the average height is 12,000 feet. The foreign defense attaches who listened to Pakistani Gen. Safdar...

Al Qaeda has been dealt yet another "broken back," this time by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. President Bush delivered the first in a series of "broken backs" when he said three-quarters of al Qaeda's leadership had been killed or captured. Mr. Musharraf, in describing the helpless terrorist giant with a broken back, said: "Whatever they are now capable of doing is individual and group actions divorced from central command ... they are on the run in the mountains, not in contact with each other."

The current credibility scandal over a small Newsweek item about a Muslim holy book allegedly flushed down a toilet by a U.S. serviceman to cower a prisoner was a faint echo from a single sentence in Newsweek 42 years ago about a string of bordellos allegedly managed by the queen mother of Cambodia — and that changed the course of history. In early fall 1963, when I was Newsweek's managing editor for International Editions and foreign editor of Newsweek's U.S. edition, the magazine ran a long piece from a staff correspondent about Cambodia. Referring to Prince Sihanouk's powerful family, the...

The ingredients for a raging storm are gathering around the Pentagon. Any one, under the wrong circumstances and wrongly handled, will have destructive effect and could even reach tsunami proportions. Perhaps not since 1947-1949, when the Defense Department was created, has the Pentagon faced such challenges.

Washington, DC, Mar. 11 (UPI) -- The load for Customs and Border Protection is staggering: 80 million passengers flying in to the United States per year on 823,757 commercial airliners and 139,650 private planes; 330 million people coming across the Canadian and Mexican borders by auto, train and truck; another 18 million by sea; and almost 200,000 cargo ships unloading some ten million containers in U.S. ports -- all this per annum. About 10 million illegals are embedded among almost 300 million Americans and some four million each and every year are smuggled across the Mexican border -- about 14,000...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Imagine a world where Russia and the European Union of 25 nations, and Russia and China, and the EU and China, all find more in common with each other than with the United States? Unimaginable, you say. And you would be right. But the seeds of such an anti-U.S. entente were planted in Europe this week. In Brussels, President Bush told the EU3 - France, the UK and Germany - that it was their responsibility to quash Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the U.S. would not negotiate directly with the totalitarian theocracy in Tehran. The U.S....

Ana Pauker's Romanian legacy By Arnaud de Borchgrave UPI Editor at Large Washington, DC, Jan. 11 (UPI) Personally trained by Stalin, Ana Pauker, Romania's Communist tyrant, had earned her spurs the only way the Soviet tyrant trusted. She denounced her own Communist husband, who was shipped to Siberia to die in the gulag. This was Pauker's ticket to ride a Soviet tank into "liberated" Bucharest in 1944, where she replaced the recently departed Nazi Gauleiter for Romania. The personification of Communist evil, Pauker got her just desserts shortly before Stalin's death in 1953. After supervising the rigged "purge" trials of...

The killer wave that swallowed tens of thousands of Muslims was an act of Allah designed to punish the Christians. So went the convoluted logic of some Muslim imams in recent sermons from Saudi Arabia to the Palestinian territories. Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajiid explained God's tsunami punishment of Christians stemmed from "the Christian holidays [that] are accompanied by forbidden things, by immorality, abomination, adultery, alcohol, drunken dancing and revelry. A belly dancer costs 2,500 pounds a minute and a singer costs 50,000 pounds an hour, and they hop from one hotel to another from night to dawn. "Then they spend...

Don't hold your breath, but it begins to look like a new al Qaeda "MO" -- shifting the focus of terrorist attacks from the U.S. mainland to U.S. interests in the Middle East and European governments that support the United States in Iraq.     As Osama bin Laden surveys the international scene from his secret base in Pakistan, he has convinced himself the U.S. empire can be defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia much the way his mujahideen guerrillas defeated the Soviet empire in Afghanistan.     In his videotape released four days before the U.S. elections, bin Laden referred to the way...