Free Republic

One troubling aspect of our near-war with Syria is the apparent zeal both political parties have for military action abroad. In fact, no sooner had we dodged the proverbial bullet in Damascus then America’s bipartisan saber-rattlers recalibrated their sites on the big prize, Tehran. Historically speaking, it’s really no surprise that Wilsonian internationalists like John Kerry gravitate toward government intervention. After all, that’s exactly what liberals do at home. What’s harder to explain is why conservative policy has become so hawkish given Republican Party tradition throughout the 20th century.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper and Luis Martinez report: Two days ago President Obama authorized the deployment to Uganda of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces “remove from the battlefield” – meaning capture or kill – Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA. The forces will deploy beginning with a small group and grow over the next month to 100. They will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries. The president made this announcement in a letter...

The Syrian regime, which has endured nine months of civil unrest spurred by the Arab Spring as it swept across the Middle East, has armed its medium-range missile arsenal with chemical warheads. According to a report published by the Sabah daily Sunday, Damascus armed 600 one-ton chemical warheads to use in the event of a foreign military intervention. Furthermore, President Bashar al-Assad ordered the deployment of 21 missile launchers along its border with Turkey. Syria’s medium-range missiles that can be equipped with chemical warheads have a range of up to 1,300 kilometers and would include the southern and central provinces...

In a wide-ranging interview on Meet the Press today, Ron Paul talked about his plan to cut $1 trillion in spending, his hope that the government will eventually get out of the housing market, and his frustration at the U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. Paul also lamented the “uselessness” of some of the arguments in the GOP primary debates. “I mean, arguing over who mows Mitt Romney’s lawn,” Paul said. “In the midst of a crisis, a sovereign debt worldwide crisis, the biggest in the history of the world, and the financial system of the world is about...

President Barack Obama delivered on another foreign policy promise on Friday with plans to pull the last U.S. troops from Iraq. But in a re-election campaign all about the weak U.S. economy, he may not get much credit. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi -- these are all dead U.S. opponents that Democrat Obama can claim a measure of credit for getting. Now add to that Obama's announcement on Friday that the eight-year war in Iraq is ending, fulfilling a campaign goal he made in 2008 when he declared the...

According to the media-approved version of history, President Bush was evil, beyond salvation. But reason submits that, according to uncensored accounts, Bush 43 was far more tolerant than campaigning journalists gave him credit for. Arguably, Bush had every right to be angry. From Decision Points comes this underreported insight (page 256): President Schuster [of Slovakia] had tears in his eyes as he described his nation’s pride in helping liberate Iraq. I kept that moment in mind when I heard critics allege that America acted unilaterally. The false charge denigrated our allies and p***ed me off. Another related myth foisted on...

The big Sarah Palin news today is that she has lost her longtime foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Scheunemann is a well-known neoconservative who worked for Jesse Helms and was intimately involved in the push for the Iraq war. He later became an aide to John McCain on the 2008 presidential campaign, where he met and linked up with Palin. He's been associated with her ever since. The question is: Why did they Scheunemann, who runs the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, leave Palin now?

Whatever else you think of Sarah Palin, she has, since the 2008 presidential campaign, been a clear voice in favor of a robust American presence in the world, a defender of the Afghanistan war, a friend of Israel and a counterweight to neo-isolationist elements on the right. But careful observers of Palin noticed that recently she was sounding more like Obama’s liberal critics than the VP candidate who echoed Sen. John McCain’s forward-leaning foreign policy. She put out a statement on Facebook last week on Libya that can only be described as incoherent. It was hard to tell if she...

President Obama just gave a weird speech. Part George W. Bush, part trademark Obama — filled with his characteristic split-the-difference, straw-man (“some say, others say”), false-choice tropes. [snip] Somehow, I don’t think Qaddafi will be impressed enough to step down; the European allies will be somewhat confused over the degree of future American support; the rebels will wonder whether they should take Tripoli or should settle for a zone of sanctuary; critics won’t know whether Obama will ever consult the Congress; we still don’t know why Qaddafi was worse than an Assad or Ahmadinejad — or who or what the...

Andrew Sullivan takes exception to my observations that we are on a fool’s errand in Libya and a dangerous one. The other day I took issue with neo-conservatives who had learned nothing from failed attempts to create Western-style democracies in Muslim cultures. I had pointed to recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza (let alone Turkey) and warned that our military invasion of Libya could lead to the creation of an al-Qaeda aligned totalitarian state. Here is how the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan characterized these thoughts: “It looks as if David Horowitz has left the neocons and become an anti-Islam...

In the 1980’s the United States funded Iraq’s Saddam Hussein yet considered Palestine’s Yasser Arafat and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi terrorists. And they were. But so was Saddam, who at that time was terrorizing his own people, gassing Iraqi Kurds while receiving America’s financial and political support. In the 1990’s, the US declared Hussein a menace and we apparently changed our mind about Arafat, who was even invited to the White House to shake hands with Bill Clinton. In the 2000’s George W. Bush went back to calling Arafat a terrorist, went to war with Saddam, who we also began calling...

In 1915, the US Marines invaded Haiti, occupying the country until 1934. US officials rewrote the Haitian constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly. They then held a "referendum" in which about 5% of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution – which conveniently changed Haitian law to allow foreigners to own land – with 99.9% voting for approval. The situation today is remarkably similar. The country is occupied, and although the occupying troops wear blue helmets, everyone knows that Washington calls the shots. On 28 November an election was held...

Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm's accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straightforward: crony capitalism. Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Victorian essayist, unflatteringly described classical liberalism as "anarchy plus a constable." As a romanticist, Carlyle hated the system—but described it accurately. Classical liberals, whose modern counterparts are libertarians and small-government conservatives, believed that the state's duties should be limited (1) to...

What if tomorrow morning you woke up to headlines that yet another Chinese drone bombing on US soil killed several dozen ranchers in a rural community while they were sleeping? That a drone aircraft had come across the Canadian border in the middle of the night and carried out the latest of many attacks? What if it was claimed that many of the victims harbored anti-Chinese sentiments, but most of the dead were innocent women and children? And what if the Chinese administration, in an effort to improve its public image in the US, had approved an aid package to...

In recent times, that is, during June of 2009, President Barack Obama has recoiled at efforts at fighting the oppressors in Iran. He has allowed the political situation in Iran to escalate into the crisis it is today. At the time of this writing, protests in the streets have broken out over the rigged election. The red flags should have been flying in the Commander in Chief’s face already. Iran has been advancing their nuclear weapon program at a dangerously rapid rate, constantly waving the fact at the West. The rest has been very well documented. Political corruption has been...

While much of the country’s attention is on other issues, a serious situation is developing in Pakistan that threatens to plunge us into another fruitless and bloody war. It is very frustrating to see that many who were so vehemently against the wars of the last administration have suddenly lost interest in foreign policy simply because we were promised change. Those still paying attention know that nothing could be further from the truth. Very little has changed, except perhaps rhetoric, but what does that matter when the bombing missions are only getting deadlier? Rather than drawing down violent military interventions...

Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention." When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of...

Our mixed economy rests on the effective discarding of the United States Constitution, which placed severe limits on government power and thus stood as a bulwark in defense of an economic system that was almost one of laissez-faire. The Constitutional protections were discarded by a process of pretending that the Constitution could somehow “grow” or “evolve,” which actually meant nothing other than choosing to ignore it. ...The present symbolism depicting the relationship between the government and the citizen is that the head of the government, the President of the United States, has at his disposal, with no objection from anyone,...

The Wisdom of Ludwig Von Mises "The credit expansion boom is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse. * * * * * * "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. * * * * * * "The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of...

Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man. From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in...