Free Republic

For the seven disastrous years of the Obama administration, it’s become easier to be a mullah building nuclear weapons in Iran than a Jew building an apartment in his capital, Jerusalem. To get us to this point – a complete reversal of America’s long-standing and hard-won alliances – took more than just words from Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry. It took seven years of policy changes. America 2016 is a very different model year from America 2008. Obama didn’t just redesign the hood, change the fenders, or swap out the 350 hp V8 for an electric motor that thumps...

The terror attacks in Brussels on Tuesday pose the worst kind of foreign policy dilemma for President Obama, pitting his instincts that he’s doing all he can to defeat the Islamic State against intense political pressure for him to do more. Obama has been making the case for months that his strategy to defeat the Islamic State and protect Americans at home is slowly working. White House aides speak repeatedly of the 40 percent of the Islamic State’s territory taken back from the group in Iraq and the 20 percent wrested away in Syria. They cite the impact of more...

Prince Turki al-Faisal also lashes out at US president for accusing monarchy of fueling sectarian conflicts across Mideast A senior Saudi royal criticized President Barack Obama Monday for comments accusing the longtime US ally of feeding Middle East conflicts. Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, has long been a major ally of the United States but the relationship has deteriorated under Obama. Riyadh has been especially concerned by US support for Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, fearing its regional rival will be emboldened. In an opinion piece published in Saudi newspapers, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom’s former intelligence...

President Obama gave a pep talk to U.S. diplomats Monday, urging them to “finish strong” as his administration enters its final months, and defending his diplomatic “breakthroughs” with Iran and Cuba. “There are those who criticize our commitment to diplomacy, for investing so much effort in trying to resolve conflicts that seem intractable,” Mr. Obama said during a visit to the State Department in Washington. “Here’s the truth: conflicts and wars do not end on their own. Breakthroughs don’t just happen. Agreements don’t write themselves. It takes diplomacy, being willing to sit down with others.” Citing the Iranian nuclear deal,...

Obama became annoyed... President Obama’s favorite journalist Jeffrey Goldberg made headlines in Israel when The Atlantic published his latest article about the President. In his lengthy piece titled “The Obama Doctrine,” Goldberg gave an overview of Obama’s foreign policy and discussed the President’s disillusionment with the attempts to change the Middle East for the better. Yes, Obama really thought that his policies in this problematic region would bring a positive change when he entered the White House at the beginning of 2008. “This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East,”...

The messages from Washington ahead of Vice President Joe Biden's arrival in Israel next week show President Barack Obama's hostile policies toward Israel will maintained until he leaves office. In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration. In contrast, the administration is pressuring Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in its capital city and harshly opposes all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria. In other words, it is the...

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake. Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war, has said so. So has Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate in either party to have actually voted to invade Iraq (though she refused to admit her vote was a mistake until fairly recently). The only disagreements on the Republican side are about the degree and nature of the mistake. Catch Donald Trump in a glandular moment and he'll say that George W. Bush knowingly sent thousands of Americans to their...

John Brennan, the CIA director, told a Senate committee Tuesday that the violence and instability in the Middle East was the worst it had been in 50 years, painting a dire picture of a region he said was facing "unprecedented" bloodshed. Brennan spoke at the Senate Intelligence Committee's annual worldwide-threats hearing, emphasizing the threats the US faces as the Middle East devolves further into chaos. "The Middle East right now I think is racked by more instability and violence and inter-state conflict than we've seen certainly in the past 50 years," Brennan said. "And the amount of bloodshed and humanitarian...

ERBIL, Iraqi – Satellite photos obtained by The Associated Press confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to a field of rubble, yet another victim of the ISIS terror group's relentless destruction of heritage sites it considers heretical.

The Obama administration on Monday confronted the fundamental contradiction in its increasingly tense relationship with Saudi Arabia. It could not bring itself, at least in public, to condemn the execution of a dissident cleric who challenged the royal family, for fear of undermining the fragile Saudi leadership that it desperately needs in fighting the Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria. The United States has usually looked the other way or issued carefully calibrated warnings in human rights reports as the Saudi royal family cracked down on dissent and free speech and allowed its elite to fund Islamic extremists....

Having done a world tour on his way into the White House, President Obama's now planning an even bigger global victory lap in his final year in office. Too bad that everything in-between is a heaping mound of hot foreign-policy mess. The president has reportedly ordered his staff to set a heavy international schedule for 2016. What, to celebrate the arrival of world peace? The White House, Politico reports, means the trips to cement a legacy of "Trans-Pacific Partnership, increased attention to Asia, an opening of Latin America, progress against the Islamic State and significant global movement on climate change."...

More U.S. military personnel have been sent to Iraq and Syria. Trainers, Special Forces, and airstrikes haven't been enough. The administration continues its slow progression to renewed ground combat. President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize grows more tarnished by the day. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter informed Congress last month that a "specialized expeditionary targeting force" would be sent to Iraq on top of the 3500 personnel already there, with the authority to operate in Syria too. The president's promise not to commit "boots on the ground" already was trampled underfoot in October, when a Delta Force soldier was killed while...

2016 will be the Year of the Jackals… This is the year in which Obama’s foreign policy completely unravels, and the jackals of the world are unleashed upon the forces of good, forces that are sadly represented by feckless and politically correct leaders. It will be a year that is a decision point for the West and the free world, whether to completely collapse in the wake of Islamic extremism or to fight back and destroy ISIS once and for all. ISIS has suffered some losses in the Middle East, but their grip on Syria and much of Central and...

Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him. It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day...

In an exclusive interview, Chuck Hagel said the Obama administration micromanaged the Pentagon, stabbed him in the back on the way out -- and still has no strategy for fixing Syria. Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him. It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman...

The other evening in New York when Secretary of State John Kerry came to talk about President Barack Obama's foreign policy, everyone thought he had come to praise it. An hour and 6000 words later, it was clear that he had come to bury it. The expected encomium became an unintended obituary. Kerry started by building an edifice of excuses for what he knew, and didn't want to admit, was failure on a grand scale. To heighten his profile, Kerry told the audience that he had just had lunch with Henry Kissinger who had admitted that the world was more...

John Kerry just offered up such a load of horse manure that he outdid even the most outrageous of dhimmi fools (and there are a lot to choose from). Writing for Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield reports on a tweet Kerry sent out on Thursday that read: "The Middle East today is the home of populations that are energetic, youthful, forward-looking. It is in them that we place our faith." Seriously? Yes, the secretary of state – a professional fool – is serious. But Kerry wasn’t finished. He had more to say. And he said it (again, pathetically, using Twitter):...

About midnight, on October 21st, a man wielding a knife lunged at a border patrol officer. The assailant was shot four times. Did you hear about this incident? Probably not. That’s because the incident took place took place not somewhere in Israel, where all incidents of this type are recorded and broadcast around the world, but at the border crossing in Calexico, California, just across the border from Mexicali, Mexico. The reason the man was shot by a Border & Patrol Protection officer and, subsequently, died from his wounds, should be obvious. People wielding knives and lunging at police—or anyone...

RUSH: I want to start with Obama and Afghanistan. Remember the Democrats told us at their debate the other night, and Obama has pounded this home every chance he gets, that the number one threat facing the world is climate change. Now, all of a sudden, the president has decided that we're not gonna get out of Afghanistan. After announcing that Bush's war in Afghanistan is over, now Obama has decided to keep people there. And, my friends, I'm wondering what is really going on here. There's something that we're not being told. There's either some internal polling data the...

From reset to the Iran deal, Obama’s mistakes are so comprehensive they almost look deliberate. How did Vladimir Putin — with his country reeling from falling oil prices, possessing only a second-rate military, in demographic free-fall, and suffering from an array of international sanctions — find himself the new play-maker of the Middle East? Putin’s ascendency was not foreordained. It followed a series of major U.S. miscalculations and blunders of such magnitude that it almost seems they must have been deliberate. What exactly was our road to perdition in the Middle East?1. Reset with Putin When Barack Obama came into...