Free Republic

AS HILLARY CLINTON puts together what she hopes will be a winning coalition in November, many progressives remain wary — but she has the war hawks firmly behind her. “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” As the co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, Kagan played a leading role in pushing for America’s...

The Arab Spring is a series of events of truly world-historical importance. It has already reshaped the Arab World and the Middle East more fundamentally and more rapidly than any event in the past several centuries. Even the emergence of the modern Arab states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was more protracted and gradual. The suddenness and scale of the events of the past three years has a disruptive and transformative power all its own. The outcome of that transformation is far from clear at this point. It is, in fact, highly contingent on a series of...

At the White House on Friday, President Obama will meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Although Mr. Karzai will presumably take up his continuous complaints that America has "imposed" corruption on his country, the more vital subject for both parties will be the size of the U.S. military footprint beyond 2014. Administration officials are already leaking that the U.S. presence will be smaller than that requested by Gen. John Allen. The U.S. commander in the region has said that a force of 6,000 to 20,000 troops is needed. The White House has floated that 3,000 to 4,000 may be sufficient....

EXCERPT Though neocons formed a kind of Praetorian Guard around John McCain during his campaign, their truculent approach to foreign affairs sabotaged rather than strengthened McCain’s appeal. The best that Sarah Palin, a foreign-policy neocon on training wheels, could do was to offer platitudes about standing by Israel. It seems safe to say, then, that the neocon credo is ready to be put out to pasture. Or is it? One problem with this line of argument is that it’s been heard before—sometimes from the neoconservatives themselves. In 1988, after George H.W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan, neocon lioness Midge Decter fretted,...

Executive Summary Victory is still an option in Iraq. America, a country of 300 million people with a GDP of $12 trillion, and more than one million soldiers and marines can regain control of Iraq, a state the size of California with a population of 25 million and a GDP under $100 billion. Victory in Iraq is vital to America’s security. Defeat will lead to regional conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and increased global terrorism. Iraq has reached a critical point. The strategy of relying on a political process to eliminate the insurgency has failed. Rising sectarian violence threatens to break America’s...

The Nutroots are already gearing up. The next Big Lie they're going to breathlessly promote is that McCain was lying when he said, in a recent interview, that the U.S. troop "surge" led to the Anbar Awakening. The lefties (I saw some at DU, also you can Google) are saying that's a lie, McCain should know better, the Anbar Awakening happened in September 2006, well BEFORE the surge was even announced in January 2007. They're playing fast and loose with the facts. What they want you to believe is that because the Anbar Salvation Council was formed in September 2006,...

St. Cindy’s just about out of absolute moral authority so they brought along a father of a soldier killed in action to shield them from the flak they’ll be taking for this latest stunt. The occasion was a Heritage Foundation panel on the war led by Fred Kagan, one of the architects of the surge, and featuring leftist bete noire Michael O’Hanlon. The woman in the first clip in the black dress and glasses is Medea Benjamin, of course; she and the Pinkos have traded their standard gear lately for “civilian” clothing the better to infiltrate events like these. Most...