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Memo to: Any Democrat Who Will Listen From: The Ghost of Harry S. Truman Re: Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? I don't know why the hell I keep sending these memos--none of you fellows (and women! I didn't forget!) who call yourselves Democrats nowadays ever read them. I can see you young folks sniggering--you think I'm out-of-date, that I've nothing to say to the modern voter. Nowadays the only people who ever seem to have a good word for me are Republicans--can you imagine that? Well, I have news for you Democrats with all your Third Way bilgewater: Loud...

National Review Publication Date: June 2, 2003 Memo to: Any Democrat Who Will ListenFrom: The Ghost of Harry S. TrumanRe: Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? I don't know why the hell I keep sending these memos--none of you fellows (and women! I didn't forget!) who call yourselves Democrats nowadays ever read them. I can see you young folks sniggering--you think I'm out-of-date, that I've nothing to say to the modern voter. Nowadays the only people who ever seem to have a good word for me are Republicans--can you imagine that? Well, I have news for you Democrats with all...

No to Roh That was vintage Bush in the Rose Garden yesterday. There he stood alongside South Korean President Roh, dutifully repeating the soothing phrases crafted for such occasions – bland reassurances that we are making “good progress” toward the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, the boom was being lowered on President Roh. For the real news of the summit was contained – not in President Bush’s words but in the official communiqué released at the same time. Bear with me: I know it is dull reading, but it’s very important. “In the context...

Damage Report Terrible as the atrocities in Riyadh were, the attacks also convey a hopeful message: al Qaeda has been weakened, and perhaps crippled, by America’s war against terror. For 18 months, we have been wondering when al Qaeda would launch another suicideterror attack inside the United States or in Europe – but when the moment finally came, al Qaeda was evidently unable to reach outside the borders of its home base, Saudi Arabia. The planning of the attacks showed considerable sophistication; yet evidently al Qaeda has failed in its plans to acquire weapons deadlier than ordinary explosives. This is...

British bookstores are daunting places for a North American writer. In the prime spots near the cash register stand great piles of books with titles such as Why Do People Hate America?, Stupid White Men, and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. When the British public want to read about the United States, it seems, they want to read about a rapacious country governed by a moronic president--ominous news indeed for the author of a positive assessment of the George Bush presidency. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, customers are queueing up to buy coffee-table books about Cotswold cottages...

Who knew that praising good could generate such ill will? Who imagined that when it came to judge a man it would matter so little who he really was and what he’d really done? To listen to some of the adverse comment on Bill Bennett, you’d think he was America’s premier finger-wagger and first-stone-thrower. The truth is that he became one of America’s favorite moral teachers precisely because he inspired rather than condemned. Yet even that is apparently too much for Bennett’s critics, to whom the very idea that anybody might praise some things as fine and admirable and good...

With the war in Iraq over, the administration is now considering nonmilitary ways of reshaping the rest of the region. Experience gained from relations with communist Poland, terror-sponsoring Libya, and apartheid-ruled South Africa offer valuable lessons for fostering greater freedom in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. So--what's next? Already you hear antiwar critics demanding to know who will replace Iraq in the Bush administration's gunsights. These critics fear that the administration is determined to launch an endless sequence of wars to reshape the whole Middle East. But while reshaping the region is very much on the administration's mind, more wars...

MAY. 1, 2003: THINGS TO COME While Donald Rumsfeld takes his victory lap in Iraq and Americans celebrate the capture of yet another al Qaeda creep, the British media are consumed by a controversy over ... chocolate. It’s worth paying attention--because a similar story will in all likelihood be coming on this side of the Atlantic very soon. Cadbury’s is the dominant British chocolate maker. Last week, they announced a new promotional scheme. In exchange for empty Cadbury wrappers, the company would offer schools athletic equipment. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it kicked off an incredible row in...

This is London I’m writing for the next few days from London, where I am promoting the UK edition of The Right Man. A positive book about President Bush is by no means an easy sell over here, where the public seems divided between those who laugh at the President as a tongue-tied buffoon and those who fear him as a backwoods Torquemada. Still, I’ll do my best. The big story over here is of course the news that Saddam Hussein’s most prominent British supporter, Glasgow M.P. George Galloway, appears to have received upwards of 375,000 pounds from the Iraqi...

<p>The swift military defeat of the Iraqi regime by U.S.-led forces represents a dramatic foreign policy victory for the evolving worldview called "neoconservatism."</p> <p>"Neoconservative ideas have penetrated very deeply and have tremendous influence," said Michael Joyce, who from the late 1970s until his retirement last year was the most powerful financial backer of the movement.</p>

In what may be the twentieth example of the genre in the past decade, a neoconservative has written a magazine article excommunicating from the conservative movement Patrick Buchanan and others who fail to embrace warmongering neoconservatism. A comedy skit could be made about these repeated efforts, as the excommunicated faction somehow fails simply to shut up and disappear as it is supposed to. David Frum’s National Review article (April 7) is longer than most of its kind but predictable in its wielding of the standard neocon rhetorical weapons: those who disagree with his faction are racist, nativist, anti-Semitic, and of...

Perle, Frum Combining by John F. Baker -- 4/21/2003 Two Washington insiders who have been strong supporters of the president and his war policy, Richard Perle and David Frum, are writing a book together that may answer some questions many people have now that we've taken Iraq: What's next in the "war on terror"? That's what they will discuss in the untitled book just signed by Random's Jonathan Karp, who hopes to publish at the beginning of next year. Karp bought North American rights in the combo from Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris. Perle is, of course, the hawkish...

WASHINGTON - As freedom comes to Baghdad, America's friends and enemies are wondering: Who's the next target in the war on terror? The right answer should be: the United Nations. The United Nations is now trying to insinuate itself into the reconstruction of Iraq. Earlier this week, Kofi Annan announced that only a UN resolution could give "legitimacy" to the American liberation of Iraq, and this view is echoed by liberal-minded pundits around the world. The truth is that the UN has no legitimacy to give. In the world's three-decade long struggle with terror and terror states, the UN has...

WASHINGTON - So -- what's next? The question may seem premature: Allied troops have barely begun, let alone won, the battle for Baghdad. Yet already you hear anti-war critics demanding to know who will replace Iraq in the Bush administration's gunsights. These critics fear that the administration is determined to launch an endless sequence of wars to reshape the whole Middle East. But while reshaping the region is very much on the administration's mind, more wars in the region are not. Instead, the administration's long-range thinkers are planning three different approaches borrowed from the recent past to the area's three...

That is what Paul Harvey calls it on his famous radio show, but it is what we are not getting in the case of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. Ramesh Ponnuru sketched the story out yesterday in NRO, but there is still more to be said – and much to be thought about. By all accounts, Jessica Lynch showed amazing courage and cool in a moment of terrible danger – and incredible endurance under torture. She has earned and more than earned the honors and decorations that the armed forces will now bestow on her. But there is a real possibility that...

Peter Arnett Bravo to NBC for sacking Peter Arnett. One footnote to this controversy: In his paean to Iraq’s “resistance” and “determination,” Arnett made a claim that you often hear even from uncompromised reporters – that the U.S. forces had been forced to change their plans. I have no idea whether this claim is true. Personally I doubt it. But even if it were true – so what? There are doomsters and defeatists out there who keep insisting that the U.S. and its allies can only claim victory if they meet an ever-lengthening list of conditions: “The allies win ONLY...

David Frum's Diary APR. 1, 2003: MONSTERS Peter Arnett Bravo to NBC for sacking Peter Arnett. One footnote to this controversy: In his paean to Iraq’s “resistance” and “determination,” Arnett made a claim that you often hear even from uncompromised reporters – that the U.S. forces had been forced to change their plans. I have no idea whether this claim is true. Personally I doubt it. But even if it were true – so what? There are doomsters and defeatists out there who keep insisting that the U.S. and its allies can only claim victory if they meet an ever-lengthening...

The war in Iraq has triggered an ideological war inside the American conservative movement and the Republican party. The ideological war may lack the deadly seriousness of the fighting on the ground. But if morale on the home front matters in wartime, and it does, then this ideological war has its significance too. Since 9/11, some of the most vociferous domestic opposition first to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and then to the Iraq war has come — not from the American Left as might have been expected — but from the American Right. "Cui bono? For whose benefit these...

A reader writes: "I've thought considerably about the D-Day invasion, which is widely agreed as a great triumph. But how would today's media reacted at the time to these issues? "- The anti-aircraft fire disrupted the paratroop droppings, spreading them for miles, and causing great confusion. "- The initial landings on the Utah beach were off the mark by about a half mile as a I recall. The strong tides carried the landing craft from the correct landing point. "- The Army Air Force bombers dropped their bombs inland from Omaha Beach, missing key German positions that later lead to...

MAR. 26, 2003: BACKSEAT DRIVING Back-Seat Drivers Can we all please stop nattering at the guys doing the driving? In six days, Alliance armed forces have reached Baghdad, fought and won at least three major battles (one of them in a sandstorm!), while suffering fewer casualties to date than were lost in the first Gulf War – a war that everyone now remembers as a decisive American victory. The Alliance has achieved all this without the massive preliminary air barrage of the Gulf War – and despite the added challenge of making the wellbeing of the enemy’s civilian population one...