Free Republic

For the past three months, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East has been under attack, resulting in the death of hundreds of people and the displacement of nearly half of the camp’s 40,000 residents. Yet the United Nations Security Council has not held an emergency session to condemn the attack. Nor have the governments of France and Britain issued statements condemning the “atrocities” against the Palestinian refugees in the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon. For those who may wonder why there is no public outcry, the answer is simple. The army that is attacking the camp with...

The European Union has guidelines on ensuring protection for human rights defenders, whom it defines as people “combating cultures of impunity which serve to cloak systematic and repeated breaches of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Questions for students of a 101 course on the EU: how does the above definition square with recent developments in the Franco-Libyan relationship? With the EU’s robust relations with Egypt, despite its handling of dissidents? With Spanish Prime Minister Luis Zapatero’s words at the Arab League summit of 2005? In particular, how do the EU’s protective guidelines affect trade relations with Iran? This last is...

An interesting article appeared in the Sunday New York Times updating developments in Basra. Things are not going so well in this large city in southern Iraq, where various Shiite militias are battling one another for control of political power, oil, and various criminal enterprises. The British had prided themselves for years on having a better approach than their more heavy-handed American counterparts to counterinsurgency, but, lo and behold, four years into the war, the trends seem more positive in Anbar than in Basra. What went wrong?

As always in the realm of national security, we do not know what we do not know. But one thing we do know–perhaps not to a certainty, but to a high degree of probability–is that next year, or in the next few years at most, unless it is stopped by diplomacy or force, Iran will develop a nuclear weapon. We also know, or should know, that if we permit this catastrophe to happen, we will urgently need defensive weapons to protect ourselves and our allies. But are programs to develop such weapons on track, or are they being held back...

Yesterday, the coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe lost its majority in the Upper House of the Diet, the national legislature. The LDP, with junior partner New Komeito, won 46 seats; its chief rival, the Democratic Party, won 60. The Japanese sometimes complain that their country is not “normal.” Yet there was nothing out of the ordinary about Sunday’s landslide against the LDP, which has dominated Japan’s politics since 1955. Unlike Junichiro Koizumi, his charismatic predecessor, Abe presented a cold and diffident face to the average citizen. His central policy goals—improving relations with China...

It’s been a swift fall from grace for New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, who took office in January with 69 percent of the vote and (many think) visions of a future presidential run. Spitzer vowed, as a candidate, that “on Day One” of his administration, “everything changes.” But little has changed in scandal-rich Albany. Spitzer is now involved in an affaire some are calling Troopergate, and the governor is being compared to Richard Nixon. [Full disclosure: I worked as Policy Director for Tom Suozzi, the Nassau County Executive who ran against Spitzer for the Democratic nomination.] Spitzer stormed into...

The Miami Herald calls it one of the “biggest dust-ups of the presidential race so far,” and the sprinkling continues. At the YouTube Democratic presidential debate on Monday, Barack Obama was asked whether he would meet with the leaders of Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran without preconditions. “I would,” he replied, saying it was a “disgrace” that we were not. Hillary Clinton, for her part, demurred, saying that “Certainly, we’re not going to just have our President meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and you know, the president of North Korea, Iran, and Syria until we know better...

While Lebanon’s army is busy completing the “urban restructuring” of the refugee camp at Nahr el Bared (no doubt in full compliance with international and human rights law), UNIFIL forces in the South have sought to avoid future surprises by “turning to Hizballah for protection.” According to reports quoting UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hezbollah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were “escorted” on some of their patrols by Hizballah members in civilian vehicles. Too bad there were no such escorts on the day...

Hypocrisy is an abiding weakness of most politicians. Republicans tend to specialize in hypocrisy regarding sex and family—think of Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, or Robert Livingstone—while Democrats go in for financial or class hypocrisy—think of John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, or John Edwards. Recently, I went with friends to a talk by former Senator Edwards at New York’s Cooper Union, to hear, in the candidate’s words, how he plans to “dramatically reduce poverty.” Laudably, he wants to cut the current poverty rate of 12.6 percent by a third within a decade. But he offered few specifics. Those that were trotted out,...

This morning, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof launched a full-throated—and empty-headed—defense of free trade. Along the way he praised President Bush and attacked Senators Clinton and Obama. Their offense? The pair of presidential hopefuls engaged in “cowboy diplomacy” by co-sponsoring legislation that targets China for manipulating the value of its currency (he was referring to the bipartisan Baucus-Grassley-Schumer-Graham bill). The proposed legislation, in Kristof’s view, will antagonize the Chinese, politicize trade disputes, and betray President Clinton’s “outstanding legacy on economic issues.”

In his victory speech on election night this past May, Nicolas Sarkozy declared that under his reign, “the pride and the duty of France” will be on the side of “all those who are persecuted by tyranny and dictatorship.” Sarkozy appealed to “all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance and democracy” to join him. Specifically, Sarkozy pledged, “France will be on the side of the locked-up nurses in Libya.” Whereas his predecessor Jacques Chirac acted out of delusions of grandeur, Sarkozy’s goal is to restore identity to a nation imbued with failure and doubt. This...

Many Americans I know are dismayed by the British academic boycott of Israel. What, they wonder, lies behind the rise of such attitudes on British campuses? The truth is, however, we do not know the half of it. A case that has just ended at the Old Bailey criminal court in London—a case that has gone largely unreported—throws light on this dark corner of university life. This morning, the BBC’s flagship radio news program, Today, reported on the case. It involves a schoolboy and four Muslim students at Bradford University who have been convicted of “possessing articles for terrorism”—in other...

This morning, the New York Times reported that Chinese authorities, working with the FBI, seized more than $500 million of counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec software and arrested 25 people involved in the counterfeiting operation. “This is a real milestone,” said David Finn, Microsoft associate general counsel. Finn is right. The Chinese deserve great credit for busting a ring that looks as if it were responsible for at least $2 billion of pirated software sales. (As Gao Feng, Deputy Director General of China’s Ministry of Public Security, has said, profit margins for software piracy exceed those for drug trafficking.) Unfortunately, with...

First the good news. The United States, Britain, and France are asking the UN Security Council to instruct UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to find ways to stop weapons flowing into Lebanon. The text they are proposing also calls on Syria to do more to control its border with Lebanon and for Iran to abide by an arms embargo on shipments to Lebanon. Here is the critical paragraph: "The Security Council, in this context, expresses grave concern at persistent reports of breaches of the arms embargo along the Lebanon-Syria border. It expresses deep concern about reports, which have not been...

On Saturday, the New York Times criticized the Pentagon’s spending plans for buying, among other things, the F-22 stealth fighter, also known as the Raptor. According to the paper, that’s just concentrating on “the kind of weapons that might have made sense during the cold war but have little use in the kind of conflicts America is involved in and is likely to face in the foreseeable future.” The Air Force acquired the F-22 to penetrate the Soviet Union and face its fleet of Su-27 fighters. The Times reasons that, because the USSR disappeared, so did our need for the...

Earlier this summer, when Senate Democrats (with significant support from some Republicans) offered a bill that would expand federal subsidies for children’s health insurance , conservatives accused them of trying to bring government-funded health care in through the back door. Now, as if to prove the point, House Democrats this week are preparing to introduce a much more ambitious plan to fortify and expand the government’s role in health care. The New York Times reported that the plan, slated to be made public in the coming days, would not only vastly expand the scope of the State Children’s Health Insurance...

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll brings moderately positive news about public attitudes toward the war in Iraq. For the raw results, click here. For the Times write-up, click here. The percentage of the public saying that invading Iraq was the correct decision has risen slightly. Forty-two percent now say it was the right thing to do, while 51 percent say we should have stayed out. That’s a shift from the May poll that had found only 35 percent in support of the invasion and 61 percent claiming it was a mistake. In addition, the public assessment of how...

Author and veteran political observer Fred Siegel talks to contentions about Giuliani, Bloomberg, 9/11, and more: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/contentions/index.php/munson/693

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, both Clinton-era staffers on the National Security Council, have a short, sharp, sensible op-ed in the New York Times today. They make a good point–that the CIA should be more involved in the special-operations business–but they also self-servingly distort history along the way Benjamin and Simon point to the chronic difficulties the U.S. military has created for itself in mounting commando raids against terrorist targets. The occasion for their piece is the revelations now coming out about an aborted 2005 operation against a terrorist haven in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region to capture or kill Ayman...

Gordon Brown yesterday surprised commentators by refusing to rule out military action against Iran. “I firmly believe that the sanctions policy that we are pursuing will work, but I’m not one who’s going forward to say that we rule out any particular form of action,” the new British Prime Minister told a news conference. While Brown had previously seemed to follow his European partners France and Germany by playing down the idea of using force against Tehran, his line on Iran yesterday was compatible with the more hawkish position of President Bush. What are we to make of these maneuvers?...