Free Republic

Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. Today, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H....

April 10, 2003, 7:45 a.m.Hall of ShameMedia recriminations after VB Day.By NR Staff o many pundits, pols, and, yes, celebs, said so many wrong — and downright silly — things about the war in Iraq, prewar. We knew that back then, but now that Baghdad has effectively been liberated by the U.S.-lead Coalition, we provide a handy snapshot of what was said by some of those who should be looking down and making their apologies. Included here are Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and Barry McCaffrey, the latter one of the retired-general second guessers Vice President Dick Cheney dubbed “embedded...

All The News That Fits...Their Agenda By William A. Mayer In what reads like a stupid April Fools joke, Bernard Weinraub and Thom Shanker are continuing Howell Raines’ and his New York Times’ war on the Bush administration and in particular on Operation Iraqi Freedom [the entire Time’ lead page is veritably reeking with negativity and sophomoric second guessing] with an article entitled Rumsfield’s Plan For War Criticized On Battlefield. The piece creates a mood of despair, an impression that battlefield leaders are in near rebellion against the Pentagon and that the Joint Chiefs are fractured along intricate lines...

Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times, is accused of running an anti-President Bush PR campaign in an op-ed page article in The New York Sun's July 19 edition. The piece was written by Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at the New Republic, who was recently barred from further contributions to The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Sullivan accuses Raines of using the "newspaper's resources to the pursuit of a single ideological theme, e.g., that President Bush is a corrupt businessman, who supports thieves who have employed accounting fraud to steal shareholders' money." "Usually, this is done...