Free Republic

Tucker Carlson triggers man by his laughter. Tucker destroys him.

Here’s your shocker for the day: The neoconservatives are lying. Now before I tell you how I figured that out — apart from the fact that their lips are moving — I need to begin by parrying any manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I do not support or endorse Donald Trump, who is not a libertarian and who appears to have no clear philosophy of any kind. He would no doubt do countless things that I would deplore. Just like all the other candidates, in other words. My point is not to cheer for him. My point is that the...

Donald Trump’s runaway success in the GOP primaries so far is setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades. Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan — one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq War and an advocate for Syrian intervention — announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Max Boot, an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would...

28 Shares A Every day seems to bring an escalation of the Russian military involvement in Syria. First it was airstrikes from more than 30 warplanes that Russia has positioned in Syria. Now it’s cruise missile strikes from warships in the Caspian Sea. Soon, if hints from Moscow are to be believed, Russian “volunteers” — a.k.a. “Little Green Men” — will be showing up in Syria to engage in ground combat alongside Iranian and Assad forces. President Obama can pretend that this is no big deal and that Russia is getting sucked into a quagmire, but this is a serious...

In my post yesterday about the #NROrevolt Twitter rebellion by restrictionist Donald Trump fans against the pro-restrictionism National Review, I mentioned that there was a rich stream of apoplectically anti-Donald Trump commentary emanating from within the conservative media. I thought it might be useful to catalogue some of the vituperative and often entertaining arguments thus far into one place. (For a previous post on Trump's conservative-media supporters, click here.) The following list, encompassing neoconservatives, social cons, and libertarian-leaners, includes Bret Stephens, George Will, Glenn Beck, Michael Gerson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson, Mona...

In a compelling column, George Will – who knows a thing or two about conservatism – makes the conservative case against Donald Trump. Mr. Will refers to Trump as an “unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate” who is coarsening our civic life. He labels Trump “a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.” And he argues that Trump is an affront to anyone devoted to the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review and a giant in American conservatism. Just as Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, so should conservatives today...

WASHINGTON — A great deal of diplomatic attention over the next few months will be focused on whether the temporary nuclear deal with Iran can be transformed into a full-blown accord. President Obama has staked the success of his foreign policy on this bold gamble. But discussion about the nuclear deal has diverted attention from an even riskier bet that Obama has placed: the idea that Iran can become a cooperative partner in regional security. Although they won’t say so publicly, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surely dream of a “Nixon to China” masterstroke. They are quietly...

That's the heading on the first page of the court order obtained theGuardian. Top Secret is one of the highest levels of security classification in the U.S. government; the other initials indicate that this is "special intelligence," aka "signals intelligence," one of the most closely guarded capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community, and that it should not shown to any foreigners. Ironically and disturbingly, a British newspaper obtained this document. ... I have no idea who this intelligence officer is, but he (or she) has committed a serious crime by the unauthorized disclosure of such sensitive information. He needs to...

Likely we will never get to read the email exchanges between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, but we do have these, accidentally leaked to Mondoweiss, between the celebrated general and Romney the advisor and uberhawk Max Boot. The context is that in 2010 Petraeus submitted a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee which said that the conflict between Israel and Palestine presented challenges for America’s ability to advance its interests in the Muslim world.

Obama repeated Bush's mistake, and the power vacuum has been filled by jihadists. ...There has been a crippling and dangerous lack of security in Libya since Moammar Kadafi was overthrown last year with the help of NATO airstrikes. The Obama administration has waited to get serious about security in Libya. Good idea, but it's too little too late. Why wasn't such an initiative undertaken a year ago when Kadafi was overthrown?

We're in an era of "covert action." That phrase went into disrepute in the 1970s, when Congress's Church Committee exposed hare-brained CIA plots to eliminate foreign leaders, such as assassinating Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. President Ford banned assassinations, a chastened CIA cast many veteran officers into the cold, and Congress imposed new limits on covert activities. From then on the president would have to approve all operations in writing and notify senior members of Congress. There would be no more "wink-and-nod" authorizations. Covert action made a comeback in the 1980s, as the U.S. directed billions of dollars in aid...

The White House has been crowing that Russia’s decision last week not to sell advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran represents a big triumph of its attempt to “reset” relationships with Moscow. The reality is somewhat more complicated — and less to our liking. The fact is that Russia has flirted with selling the S-300 to Iran for years without ever actually going through with the deal, thus suggesting that the Russians were not truly planning to transfer the technology after all — they were simply hoping to get a good payoff from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other countries...

You gotta’ love the New York Times and its hyper-politically correct sensitivities about revealing the ethnic or religious backgrounds of criminal suspects. Thus we have today’s front-pager: “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues.” Who were these four, I wondered? Could they be Chrysler shareholders upset that they are getting stiffed in bailout proceedings? ACLU lawyers mad that President Obama has refused to release interrogation photos? Possibly Greenwich hedge-fund managers furious about plans to regulate their industries? Or maybe just random nuts who like to set off bombs for the fun of it? Nope. It turns out–get ready for...

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate with family-and a time to remember those who won’t have that privilege. I am thinking primarily of the 279,825 American service personnel who were, according to official Department of Defense statistics, deployed abroad as of June 30, 2008. Some of them are able to have their families with them — for instance those stationed in Germany. But most are on “unaccompanied” tours, whether in combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, or even in peaceful countries such as South Korea and Japan. (And even many of the troops nominally stationed in Germany are actually...

LEESBURG, Va. (JTA)—A McCain administration would discourage Israeli-Syrian peace talks and refrain from actively engaging in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. That was the message delivered over the weekend by two McCain advisers—Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Richard Williamson, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan—during a retreat hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy at the Lansdowne Resort in rural Virginia. One of Barack Obama’s representatives—Richard Danzig, a Clinton administration Navy secretary—said the Democratic presidential candidate would take the opposite approach on both issues. In an interview with the Atlantic magazine...

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama. A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he's saying -- whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, "Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in...

What's Missing Here? Max Boot One of the familiar tropes of the anti-war caucus is that Iraq had no links to terrorism prior to the American invasion but now it has become a breeding ground of terrorists who will destabilize other countries. The first part of the argument—the claim that Saddam-era Iraq was not linked to terrorism—should have been demolished by the recent Iraq Perspectives Project report. (Unfortunately, its findings were generally misreported by the MSM.) The second part of the argument—the claim that Iraq is exporting terrorism—has now come under serious assault from, of all people, the French. In...

Alarm over Iran helps Bush The U.S. has plenty of reasons to strike, but the administration pushes diplomacy. March 7, 2007 IS THAT trigger-happy gunslinger in the White House about to take aim at Iran? You would think so if you read the Guardian newspaper in Britain, which has written, "Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced." Not to be outdone, the competing Sunday Times has reported, based on a "source with close ties to British intelligence," that "up to five [U.S.] generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would...

The opinion writers for the New York Times do not seem to have gotten the news that the troop surge is working. (For the latest indication, see this USA Today story reporting that “the number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50 percent since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago.”) Columnist Nicholas Kristof writes today that “staggering on” in Iraq will only delay “the inevitable”—that is, our defeat. Oddly enough he buttresses this argument with an analogy to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He argues that...

Last week we sat down for an interview with Max Boot, a regular contributor to this blog and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Boot talks about “How Not to Get Out of Iraq” (his article in the September issue of COMMENTARY), General Petraeus’s September report, the war in Iraq, and more. Follow the Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/contentions/index.php/peach/790