Free Republic

President Bush has won the Battle of September. When he turns over the presidency on Jan. 20, 2009, there will likely be as many U.S. troops in Iraq as there were when Congress was elected to bring them home in November 2006. That is the meaning of Gen. Petraeus' recommendation, adopted by President Bush, that 6,000 U.S. troops be home by Christmas and the surge of 30,000 ended by April. Come November 2008, there will likely still be 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Will this make America safer, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked. "I don't know," answered the general. An...

Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from Congress to wait and see if his surge of U.S. forces into Iraq might yet succeed. But when Bush started to describe the ideological war we are in, one began to understand why we are in the mess we are in. "This war," said Bush, "is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us." But the "conditions" that...

Since 1927, the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, Time has devoted its final cover of the year to the Man of the Year. The Lone Eagle was first. In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR was the Man of the Year three times. Stalin, Truman and Churchill made it twice, though the selection of Churchill in 1949 seems dubious, as he had been out of power four years, while Mao was seizing China by the throat in the bloodiest revolution of the century. Hitler was chosen in the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938....

"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating," declares the Iraq Study Group in the lead sentence of its long-awaited report. It continues on in this grim vein: "A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian disaster. ... There is no guarantee for success in Iraq. The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. ... Pessimism is pervasive. ... Violence is increasing in scope, complexity and lethality." This is the portrait of a nation descending into hell. Yet the brutal honesty of the Baker-Hamilton commission about the situation in Iraq is accompanied by...

A few days back, the "Today" show, speaking for NBC News, declared Iraq a "civil war," and said the network and CNBC and MSNBC would henceforth use that term to describe it. President Bush and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow angrily objected. A civil war, said Snow, is when two identifiable armed forces war with each other for control of a government and nation. And Iraq is not that. Contradicting Snow and the president are most journalists and Colin Powell. Speaking in Dubai, Powell declared, "I would call it a civil war ... because I like to face reality,"...

November 1956, 50 years ago, was a month the drama of which many of us can yet recall. It was a defining moment of the Cold War. This was the month Eisenhower was re-elected in a landslide and in which he laid down, in simultaneous crises, the new ground rules of the Cold War, both to our NATO allies and Soviet adversaries. On Oct. 29, in a strategic thrust of which Ike had not been informed, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Egypt, seizing the Sinai. Israel then called on Britain and France to come in and separate the armies...

Does it matter who was the 300 millionth "American"? Indeed, it does. If it was a baby born to an American, that is wonderful news. If it was a baby born to an illegal alien, it means we have lost control of our borders. And as Ronald Reagan said, a country that can't control its borders isn't really a country anymore. And if it was a Mexican who slipped over the Rio Grande in the early morning darkness of Oct. 17, it may be a harbinger of the end of America as we knew her. If the people are not...