Free Republic

With that arrogance and boorishness that is characteristic of diplomatic overtures from the Putin administration, the Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague this week to "think again" about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil. "We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," he said, according to the Reuters report. This is the kind of language that seems to appeal to Vladimir Putin himself -- the...

The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements. In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of...

We're headed in the wrong direction. Americans across lines of race and region, in red states and blue states -- moderates, independents, liberals and increasing numbers of conservatives -- have now come to understand that. In Washington, the Bush administration and the DeLay Congress stagger from scandal to failure, adrift when we need direction. We have lost a sense of common purpose -- a sense of the better angels of our nature. I remember immediately after Sept. 11, when Americans asked what they could do for their country. "Go shopping," the president recommended, as he pushed for another tax cut...

What follows is a fair summation of about 20 or so dialogues I had recently with a series of Europeans — a good cross-section really of Scandinavians, British, Germans, Greeks, and Dutch. Questions and answers are taken almost verbatim from our exchanges.Europeans: What we object to most is the unilateralism and the language of the Bush administration, more so than any particular policy decision. Can't they tone it down?Dumb American: Maybe this cowboyism is akin to a similarly southern-accented president's previous failure to consult both our Congress and the U.N. when we bombed Milosevic? Or are you guys ticked off...