Free Republic

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside. Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they...

Supporting the troops means more than wishing them a safe return. It means believing in their mission. If that grows hard with each day of new attacks by insurgents, that is a call to all of us to show but a fraction of the steel spines our fighting forces muster each day. If they can dodge insurgents' bullets and car bomb shrapnel, the least we can do is refresh our familiarity with what wars are. They are hard, sometimes long and always bloody. This Christmas finds thousands of our military friends and family stationed in barren locales, enduring those hardships...

Few people speak with as much passion and authority as Natan Sharansky about the irresistible power of freedom to transform oppressed populations. Ever the optimist, however, Sharansky believes that democracy is a distinct possibility among Arab states and in a future Palestinian state. There is no choice, he says: “In an age of weapons of mass destruction and global terrorism, the dangers of ignoring the absence of democracy in any part of the world have increased dramatically.” "You, Mr. President, are a dissident among the leaders of the free world.”