Free Republic

There’s nothing really new in the uproar surrounding the loss of a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle over Iran this past weekend. Media hysteria over the downing of a single U.S. aircraft has become a commonplace schtick in coverage of American wars over the past three decades. During WW II, the U.S. lost over 23,000 planes in combat. I kid you not, playmates: 23,000+ – and that’s only combat losses. Overall losses, including accidents, amounted to 65,164. The media talking heads would have had to be carried out in straitjackets if they’d been active at the time. Losses dropped sharply following...

When an Irish Republican Army bomber came within a few feet of assassinating Margaret Thatcher in a hotel room in Brighton, England, in 1984, the terrorist group acknowledged the attempt with an official statement.“Today we were unlucky,” it said in a declaration addressed directly to the British prime minister. “But, remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky every time.”Blood-chilling and callous as its language was (the bomb killed five members of the governing Conservative Party), the boast was a brutally accurate meditation on the nature of asymmetric warfare. In conflicts between two sides that...

President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is not going well. He began the conflict with a promise to use an air campaign to initiate regime change in as little as “two or three days.” But about three weeks in, Iran’s government, military and security forces remain highly functional. No popular uprising has emerged. And Iran’s government has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices surging and Trump into a panic. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is one of the analysts who saw this situation coming a long way off. An expert...

Three weeks into a military engagement in Iran, a war Republicans will not call a war, the American and Israeli militaries have all but wiped out Iran's capacity to make war. We have killed their leadership, the replacement leaders, and militia members on the ground. We have destroyed their missile launchers and the factories in which they made the missiles. But Iran still has one of the most powerful weapons in the world on its side, and it is ruthlessly deploying it – the American press corps. "Families mourn as dead are laid to rest in Tehran," blared the front...

Footage has emerged of President Donald Trump warning of the threat posed by Iran's Supreme Leader and America's goals in a war with the nation, 39 years ago. The video captured an interview with late journalist and television personality Barbara Walters in December 1987, where Trump appeared to predict the current crisis in the Middle East and laid out his war plans if he were president. At age 41, Trump said: 'The next time Iran attacks this country, go in and grab one of their big oil installations and I mean grab it and keep it and get back your...

Twice on Monday, President Donald Trump said he’d wrangled a confession of sorts from an Oval Office predecessor who he said had expressed regret in a private conversation about not attacking Iran the way Trump has been doing for more than two weeks. But there’s just a little problem: Representatives for the four living former presidents — three Democrats and one Republican — said none have been in touch with Trump recently.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump increasingly has been knocked on his political heels. He’s grown more agitated with news coverage and has failed to find a way to explain why he started the war — or how he will end it — that resonates with a public concerned by American deaths in the conflict, surging oil prices and dropping financial markets. Even some of his supporters are questioning his plan and his overall poll numbers are declining. Meanwhile, Moscow is getting a boost...