Free Republic

Sarah Palin is often cast as a reincarnation of Pat Buchanan, who tapped into the nationalist, even nativist, sentiment that's always been a strand of American political life. But in one important respect, as Josh Rogin points out today, Palin is the anti-Buchanan: She's emerged as the spokeswoman for a hawkish, confrontational, Cheneyite foreign policy that would make Buchanan shudder. She just posted a rather long foreign policy speech to Facebook, and it's worth a read. And she's fighting an important battle inside the loosely organized conservative grass roots to head off calls from some tea party types and fiscal...

``I can't tell you,'' Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, ``how much I resent being called a Wilsonian.'' As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades. The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal...

Are the Jacksonians Sated?   By Michael J. Totten  Published   03/22/2004       TCS    A curious thing seems to have happened since Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown in Iraq. America no longer feels like a country at war. It isn't over by a long shot. There's a bloody insurgency around Baghdad that still needs putting down. Al Qaeda is still out there somewhere, sinister and nebulous as ever. Afghanistan is mostly lawless, and we're still exchanging barbs with Iran and North Korea. But it feels different now. The barbarous acts of terror in Madrid had a far greater impact...

Following my recent anti-war columns, a few readers have asked this legitimate question: How does the United States government promote democracy and freedom in places such as Iraq, where dictators abuse their people and run things with an iron fist? A similar question plagued America's sixth president, John Quincy Adams. In an 1821 address, he, the secretary of state at the time, responded to critics who had asked, "What has America done for the benefit of mankind?" "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be....

The buzz in Washington and beyond has been that President Bush's attack on Iraq came straight from the playbook of the neoconservatives, a group of mostly Republican strategists, many of whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. The neoconservatives differ from traditional conservatives in favoring a more activist role for government and a more aggressive foreign policy. Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the neoconservatives have offered a sweeping new vision for U.S. foreign policy: to restructure the Middle East and supplant dictators around the world, using pre-emptive attacks when necessary against any countries seen as potential threats....