Free Republic

The question of how to handle Iran’s nuclear ambitions looms like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. As has become the norm with any crucial national security decision, there are multiple schools of thought on how to approach the mullahs’ desire to go nuclear. Do we impose sanctions on Iran? Do we use military force? Do we look the other way and hope the mullahs didn’t read Kim Jong Il’s playbook, entitled, ‘How to Fool The United States into Allowing you to Build Nukes Right Under Their Noses.’ Or was that Bill Clinton’s playbook? I forget. Anyway, since the answer...

Are the neocons losing it? William Kristol of the Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the anti-war right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat." But it is a March 20 essay in the Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes.. calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John...

-snip- Dissenters say our prosperity is hollow. While the economy appears healthy, a disease is eating away inside, a disease that Dr. Greenspan has been treating with oxycontin. The chairman, they say, was a friend to presidents and kept them happy and himself in power by the greatest expansion of money and credit in history. And just as the easy-money Fed policies of the Hoover-Coolidge era led to the crash of ’29, a day of reckoning is ahead. -snip-

"In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security," said resident Joe Biden in his State of the Union address. "This is a real test. It's going to take time." Thus did Biden frame the struggle of our time as the U.S. leading the world's democracies, the camp of the saints, against the world's autocrats, the forces of darkness. But is "democracy" really America's cause? Is "autocracy" really America's great adversary in the battle for the future? Not all autocrats, after all, are our...

Not so long ago, Democrats seemed the party of the future. "Inevitable!" predicted some pundits, for demography is destiny. Moreover, in 2020, Democrats, who had won the popular vote six times in seven presidential elections, swept the popular vote again, by 6 million ballots. And they captured both houses of Congress. The future did seem to be theirs. Progressives dominated the major culture-forming institutions of society -- academia, the media, Hollywood -- not to mention the vast bureaucracy of America's national administrative state. Their core constituencies -- women, the young, Blacks, Hispanics -- were growing as a share of the...

When the U.S. created NATO, a primary purpose of the alliance was to serve as a western wall to defend Germany against the 400,000 Russian troops on the eastern side of the Elbe River. Seventy years later, Germany has decided to double its dependence on Vladimir Putin's Russia for the natural gas needed to run the German economy, despite the opposition of her great protector, the USA. The Biden administration decided to waive sanctions on Matthias Warnig, the ally of Putin whose company, Nord Stream 2 AG, is laying the pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany that...

"Israel is Winning Battles, Hamas is Winning the War." So ran the headline in the Jerusalem Post atop an analysis of the Gaza war, which began, "The IDF is registering great achievements in Operation Guardian of the Walls, but meanwhile the house appears to be collapsing from within." Hard to disagree. Consider this New York Times commentary about Israel's prime minister from the runner-up to the Democratic presidential nominee in the primaries of 2016 and 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism ...(and) legitimized these forces ... by bringing them...

Friday, as the jury was being empaneled for the trial of fired police officer Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis City Council voted 13-0 to approve a record $27 million civil settlement with the family of George Floyd over his death in police custody. The jury will not likely miss this message sent by the city fathers: I.e., an atrocity was perpetrated by our police, and we are admitting our responsibility and doing our duty by offering these reparations for Floyd's cruel and unjustified death and the suffering visited on his family. Most Americans who saw the nine-minute tape of Chauvin with...

Our aim is to "starve the whole population -- men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound -- into submission," said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a million German civilians. Yet when we went to war in 1917, a U.S. admiral told British Prime Minister Lloyd George, "You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are." After the...

Moreover, while Fauci and Redfield are specialists in epidemics, Trump’s portfolio goes far beyond that. He is chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, responsible for the security and defense of the nation. His portfolio is broader and deeper than those of Fauci and Redfield. In the first hours of the Normandy invasion, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower must have been rightly alarmed about the high U.S. casualties on Omaha Beach. But he also had to concern himself with the failure to capture the Port of Caen to bring ashore the armor to stop any German counterattack that might...

TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust has challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II. Mohammad Ali Ramin, the head of the "World Holocaust Foundation" created after Iran's controversial Holocaust conference last year, said Austria, Germany and Poland in particular should supply documents. "They should hand over the proof for the dossier on the organized massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II to the independent international fact-finding committee affiliated to this foundation," the IRNA state news agency quoted him as...

Isn't it time for W to come off the sidelines, forgive the nickname for Jeb! and help Trump manage the politics of the moment, the hatred and vitriol aimed at him by, in some cases former members of his administration? Much like 9/11, this is a moment when the Nation must come together. We already know the left will never relent. Where are you, Mr. President?

New photos have emerged which for the first time show convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk at the Sobibor death camp, a Berlin archive confirmed Monday, although he always denied ever being there. Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of nearly 30,000 Jews at Sobibor by a German court in 2011. He died while his appeal was pending. According to the Berlin-based Topography of Terror archive, photos of Demjanjuk are among a newly discovered collection of more than 350 snaps which give "detailed insight" into the camp in German-occupied Poland. The photos surfaced from the estate...

"No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former Pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine." As President Donald Trump spent the early days of 2020 instigating and then backing down from a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Iran, corporate media in the U.S. turned to the very same people who promoted the country's worst foreign policy disaster in a generation to advocate for repeating the mistakes of two decades ago. The decision of networks and cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to bring on a stream of past advocates for...

Former Rep. Ron Paul said he wished President Trump would "flip-flop" his policy on Iran and criticized Trump's loyalty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia. "I think our country is not doing so well. Our foreign policy is in shambles," the Texas Republican said. "Unfortunately, the one place where I wish he would flip-flop every once in a while or change his policy completely is dealing with Iran. He is steady on it, he said it on the campaign. He's very loyal to Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia." Trump authorized airstrikes that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and...

On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani was a “big step back’ in President Donald Trump’s commitment to stop endless wars. Wallace asked, “Is the president pulling us out of endless wars in the Middle East, or with his action this week, did he take a big step back in?” Pompeo said, “Endless wars are the direct result of weakness, and President Trump will never let that happen. We are going to get our facilities as hardened as we can possibly get them...

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us. But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war. When one looks at the numbers -- unemployment at or below 4% for two years, an expansion in its 11th year, the stock market regularly...

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph. By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests -- to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial -- had been withdrawn. And though the protesters' demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks. Beijing wanted no reenactment of Tiananmen Square, the midnight massacre in the heart of Beijing that drowned in blood the 1989...

A week from now, the 29 member states of "the most successful alliance in history" will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO. Instead of a "summit," the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda? Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget. French President Emmanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered "brain death." Macron...

The Fatah movement headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas emphasizes its continued adherence to the "national struggle" as a means to counter all the "colonialist" plans which they believe seek to undermine the existence of the "Palestinian people" and their cause. Such "colonialist" plans range from the Balfour Declaration to US President Donald Trump's peace plan. On the occasion of the approaching 102nd anniversary of the statement by former British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour in support of the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, the Fatah movement called the Balfour Declaration a "historic crime" against humanity...