Free Republic

My intention today is to write about Iran, but I'm not sure that is possible. However, explaining why it might be impossible is a good way to write about Iran. Almost all non-official electronic traffic from and within Iran began shutting down in preparation for Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution. "Opposition protesters clashed with security forces" (in the current media jargon), around Tehran and elsewhere, but almost entirely "off camera." We had reason to believe, going into the anniversary, that the regime was prepared to pour a bloodbath -- to execute the equivalent of a Tiananmen, should...

The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not "rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way." Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks. And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and...

Before we go anywhere, with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think something should be said in defence of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain has received a bad press, these last 70 years, though famously it was a good press after he signed the Munich agreement 71 years ago with Adolf Hitler, and flew home to England promising, "Peace in our time." Let us grant, the result of his policy of appeasement was not what he intended; and let us allow, that Hitler negotiated in bad faith.........

The American and British top commanders have recently grumbled, or more than grumbled, about indifferent political responses to their requests for more feet and equipment on the ground in Afghanistan. U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and U.K. Lt.-Gen. Jim Dutton, respectively commander and deputy of the NATO force, made very clear that al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be pursued effectively with missile strikes. Both seem to have been called on the carpet for speaking this truth too publicly Yesterday, it appeared that the U.S. defence secretary, Robert Gates -- a holdover from the Bush administration, reappointed to assure U.S. allies and...

The Dow has been tanking again, and new figures show the U.S. economy shedding jobs at an accelerating rate. One might criticize the U.S. government for the first trillion or two of “stimulus” spending, by observing that it hasn’t worked. But that would be too easy. Yes, it was crazy, in the middle of a crisis created by debt, to see how far they could run up debt. It was crazy to shore up nearly worthless assets, in the face of irresistible market forces. At a time when the entire investment system desperately needs to be de-leveraged, it was crazy...

[....]The outrage expressed, today, at the very existence of Sarah Palin, not only by progressive Democrats but by urbane "establishment" Republicans, is in many ways the product of this shift. Increasingly, I find, people on the left simply cannot accept any right-wing view as legitimate. The mere fact it can be so labelled puts it beyond the pale. We often read that the old categories of "left" and "right" have become irrelevant. It is an argument almost invariably propounded by the left. They have been freed, for more than a generation, from anything resembling serious public debate, and have thus...

Sarah Palin celebrated Bastille Day Tuesday with an op-ed against "cap and trade" in the Washington Post. Bless the editors of that newspaper for permitting it. Predictably, even Pavlovianly liberal, as they may be on almost any issue, there is a little streak of "wicked" mischief in them that makes their paper worth reading occasionally. Their op-ed policy is to run real conservatives from time to time -- including Charles Krauthammer, currently the doyen of "no we can't" opposition to the whole agenda of Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress.Whereas, other liberal newspapers -- the New York Times...

Now that all the obituaries have been written for the latest mass-uprising in Iran, it is time to revisit that continuing uprising. I was reading just yesterday a glib BBC report on how the mullahs had learned from the mistakes that cost the Shah his power in 1979. He was too lenient with the demonstrators of the day and let things, like mourning at funerals for the slain, get out of hand. The mullahs, we learn, have taken care not to repeat his mistakes, and have muffled the demonstrators through much more effective techniques, that maximize terror while minimizing fatalities....

No sooner had I filed my Saturday column about the abuse of fact and reason in President Barack Obama's Cairo speech, than I found myself reading the draft of another big Obama speech, delivered at the D-Day anniversary. The difference between the two speeches is worth the red flag. They are night and day. When we juxtapose one with the other, we learn something important about the speaker, and also about the foreign policy of his administration. The Cairo speech was full of grand historical statements that were, on a pedestrian factual view, quite ridiculous. Mr Obama declares three times...

I used the S-word in a column last week ("shamanism"), and received from my readers so many puzzled queries that I will now try to explain myself further. I said, alike of the post-Christian, self-styled "middle class" in the West, and of the post-Islamic "middle class" in such a country as Pakistan, that they are animated by "a touching faith, at its roots shamanistic." Both, alike, confuse words with things, and imagine by manipulating words they can manipulate reality. They believe things like public order and safety just happen without human intervention -- that they grow on trees, like money....

It is now spring; the vernal equinox was reached Friday morning. To celebrate, Barack Obama sent a video of himself to Iran. This was one of several end-of-week media performances, as Mr. Obama went back into "campaign mode" after a break of several months. The message of the polls is that he had better start selling his policies harder, because they are showing signs of not going over very well. Moreover, the unpolled elites, including those within the Democratic Party, have started to ask questions aloud about whether their man is competent; and as we know from painful history, such...

Talk about lipstick on a pig: the bailout measure, which began as a modest, $700-billion, three-page oink, reached the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday wearing about 450 pages of lipstick. Its maximum final cost was no longer calculable -- after bipartisan negotiations to add "sweeteners" to the thing, to buy it support from various congressional factions. Americans, and anyone else who happened to be watching (most of the world), got a good taste of what "Congressional oversight" means; to say nothing of the explanation of why, in opinion polls, the U.S. Congress enjoys even less popular esteem than President Bush....

The best, the most pointed and comprehensive opinion on the award of the Order of Canada pin to Henry Morgentaler, in the course of this long grim week, was by Ian Hunter in the National Post: “In old Canada, Morgentaler was prosecuted and sent to jail for performing illegal abortions. But that was in another era and, as far as I'm concerned, another country -- a country as dead as any of the recipients of Morgentaler’s attentions.” I shall say something about that award tomorrow. For today I want to focus on the New Canada -- the one that is...

With that arrogance and boorishness that is characteristic of diplomatic overtures from the Putin administration, the Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague this week to "think again" about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil. "We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," he said, according to the Reuters report. This is the kind of language that seems to appeal to Vladimir Putin himself -- the...

Like most people, I left high school biology class, where the works of Darwin and Mendel were taught, believing that I had learned the truth about man’s origin and evolutionary development. It was not until I encountered college and graduate school statistics that I realized that life could not possibly have occurred by chance on this planet, but I had a growing family to support and could not spend much time thinking about such grand questions. For all those years I got by with a vague concept that, yes, evolution was the answer, but it was God-directed. Then I stumbled...

So far as I can make out -- I am not writing from Iraq, but I do make a splendid effort to follow the plot there -- the Americans are finally doing what they should have been doing all along. They are taking the battle to the Islamist enemy, or rather, enemies, both Shia and Sunni. They are enlisting the help of tribal lords and other local allies against these enemies, de-emphasizing the grand “Marshall Plan” giveaways, and re-emphasizing small, visible, unbureaucratic improvements on that local scale. They have become less timid about inspections and searches, and thus have taken...

Defeatism leads to defeat David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 One really has to wonder about the efficiency of the British National Health Service after seeing how incompetently a group of Islamist doctors carried off their weekend car-bombing and fire-throwing attacks in London and Glasgow. Not one death; not even a successful suicide. We can thank the indiscretion of the British police for the information that the persons since rounded up were mostly doctors and laboratory technicians working for the NHS. "Of Asian origin." Am I jumping to conclusions by guessing that they were all...

The fuse is lit, and so begins the nightmare David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 Hamas seizing Gaza is only the beginning of a nightmare. One must look at the whole Middle East to distinguish the bomb from the fuse. What Hamas will do, by consolidating its power in Gaza, and becoming a true "free port" with terrorist infrastructure for the world's Islamist networks, is to perfect that fuse. As George Friedman has argued, it creates new possibilities for drawing Egypt back into direct conflict with Israel. But also, much more. There is an interesting...

The more I think about "global warming", in light of the most recent United Nations report, the more confident I become in averring that it is a fraud, a political stunt, a criminal imposture, that every intelligent journalist should be helping to expose. We need more reporting on the circular assumptions built into the IPCC's ludicrous computer models, on their use of misleading and conveniently changing baseline years, and on the trends within their own trends. (For instance, they have quietly reduced their middle-range prediction of temperature rise in the coming century by more than one-third; their mean sea-level rise...

By the word “Anglosphere” we mean the countries whose primary language is English, and whose legal, political, cultural, and religious traditions are directly descended from Britain and Magna Charta. Specifically: the U.K., the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- and there was a time when we might have mentioned South Africa, and the English-speaking elites of India and other parts of the former Empire. United by a language, to begin, but through that language with a common-sense view of the world that is distinguishable from continental Europe’s; the “west of the West”, as it were. Andrew Roberts is a British...