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Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained...

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 United States plans to sell Gulf countries at least $20 billion worth of military hardware in the coming years, and will sign 10-year military aid packages with Egypt and Israel, valued together at $43 billion. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Washington is "working with these states to give a chance to the forces of moderation and reform."Oddly, on Friday the New York Times published a story roundly criticizing the Saudis for their "counterproductive" attitude in Iraq. Senior U.S. officials were quoted as saying that the kingdom had tried to discredit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by handing...

In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the cold war being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain’s death—which, he famously said, had been “greatly exaggerated.” Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of Bush are now at it...

Women vote and run in Kuwaiti poll for first timeThu Jun 29, 2006 4:16 AM ET By Haitham Haddadin and Yara BayoumyKUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwaitis voted for a new parliament on Thursday with women running and casting ballots for the first time in a national poll in the Gulf Arab state."I don't know how to describe my feelings, I am so happy, it's a beautiful day as women practice their right," female candidate Hind al-Shaikh said. "I hope a woman makes it."Parliament passed a law in May 2005 giving women the right to vote and stand as candidates in elections...

Some people just don’t get it. Five years on, some people remain unaware that this is war; that we are facing an enemy that will do anything in its power to destroy us. The fact that on any given day we are free to fly around the world, drive our cars without restriction and buy as much food as we like in rich variety seems to have confused them. The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like...

KUWAITIS go to the polls next week to elect a new National Assembly, which will in turn approve a new prime minister and Cabinet. The Kuwaitis will be making history for a number of reasons. This is the first election in which women are allowed to vote. And - much to the chagrin of Islamists, who insist that women are unfit to play any role in politics - a number of women are standing, often on platforms of radial social and economic reforms. With a native population of 1 million, Kuwait is one of the smallest states in the Arab...

For Washington insiders, the US-Australia alliance is one of the great successes of the Bush presidency's troubled foreign policy, writes Greg Sheridan RICH Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state, lists four important accomplishments for US foreign policy under George W. Bush. The first is the US-Australia alliance. It has grown immeasurably closer under Bush and John Howard. The Australian Prime Minister, Armitage says, got everything he wanted from the alliance and the Americans are certainly happy with what they got from it. And Howard is one of relatively few democratic political leaders who has not suffered at all...

When President Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to run the CIA, the press focused on disapproving Democrats and even some Republicans who were dubious about confirmation. A month later, when the Senate confirmed Hayden by a 78-15 vote, the story was given much less emphasis in the media, which had moved on to other stories critical of the Bush administration. Similarly, when Bush nominated one of his aides, Brett Kavanaugh, to the federal judiciary, the press was filled with reports about Democrats threatening a filibuster because Kavanaugh once worked for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the case against President Clinton....

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as...

Bush is the Next Reagan Jun 4, 2006 Slater Bakhtavar - Persian Journal The same people who heavily criticized former President Reagan for his tough stance against Communism and for his aggressive push for democracy in Eastern Europe are now attacking President Bush for his tough stance against fundamentalism and his aggressive push for democracy in the Middle East. -They argued then that Communism would never fall - it did They argue now that Islamic Fundamentalism will never fall - it will -They argued then that the Soviet Union is too strong - it wasn't They argue now that the...

John Samples is director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once remarked that conservatism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty. For American conservatives, the past begins and often ends with the founding era and its greatest fruit, the Constitution. The Constitution established a constitutional republic dedicated to liberty and limited government under law. James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, never took constitutional government for granted. His famous Federalist No. 10 analyzed the dangers to...

"Iran Is Not Iraq" Much of the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush Doctrine.by William Kristol 05/08/2006, Volume 011, Issue 32 "We are committed to a diplomatic course [to stop Iran's nuclear program] that should, with enough unity and with enough strength and with enough common purpose, make it possible to convince the Iranian government [to change its course]. . . . "Let me go right to the crux of the question. The United States of America understands and believes that Iran is not Iraq. The Iraq circumstances had a...

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...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - 0622iraq-aidconf Iraq won wide and concrete support from the international community Wednesday, prompting bursts of optimism for the country as it struggles to rebuild its security forces in the midst of withering terror attacks. No new money was offered at a meeting that was never intended as a donors conference, but the gathering was applauded as proof that sharp differences over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could be put aside to help Iraqis now. "It's a good day for Iraq," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said joyfully. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, clearly moved, called it a...

President Bush's ambitious vision of global democratic reform has begun to dominate the administration's foreign affairs agenda, in some cases pushing aside urgent international issues. So far, the president's plan has been driven mainly by high-level rhetoric, symbolic gestures and a handful of modestly funded development programs. But collectively, this mix has started to shift the focus in relations with key nations. In the four months since Bush unveiled the approach in his second inaugural address, nearly every meeting with foreign officials and many of the changes taking place within the Bush administration, including several key appointments, has reflected the...

When President Bush began the war on terror he also began the process of planting the seeds of Democracy in the Middle East. No President has succeeded in sucessfully bringing Democracy to the region, but now we have had elections in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq. We have seen Syria pull out of Lebanon and we now have Lebanon's long-awaited legislative elections. They will begin Sunday in Beirut and in other regions over the following three Sundays in a four stage process. . .

“When the people realize they have the power to expose the deceit underlying a government prone to repression, it is the beginning of that regime's end,” Peter Ackerman – Fletcher School graduate and Tufts trustee – wrote in an op-ed published in The Boston Globe. A resilient, yet experimental venture by the Bush administration into uncharted waters has proven largely beneficial as democracy sweeps several countries once occupied by tyrants. The winds of change are blowing across the world as jubilant demonstrators are taking back their God-given right to freedom once usurped by fascist dictators. An unshaken vision of...

SHUNEH, Jordan (AFP) - The son of Libyan leader Moamar Kadhafi said his country will soon have an embassy in Washington and expected the US to reciprocate, adding the two had "excellent" intelligence cooperation. "By the end of this year we will have an embassy in Washinton and the United States will have an embassy in Libya," Seif al-Islam Kadhafi told a conference on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in this Dead Sea resort. Relations between the former foes have been improving since Tripoli agreed to a settlement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and renounced weapons of mass...

A new look for President Bush's global war on terrorism sits atop Condoleezza Rice's early to-do list at the State Department. Expect fairly soon some useful new handles on the problem and a more coherent overall strategy to guide the struggle that the bureaucracy abbreviates as GWOT.

Does the Bush administration really believe, as its leadership has kept repeating since right after 9/11, that Islam is a "religion of peace" not connected to the problem of terrorism? Plenty of indications suggested that it knew better, but year after year the official line remained the same. From the outside, it seemed that officialdom was engaged in active self-delusion. In fact, things were better than they seemed, as David E. Kaplan establishes in an important investigation in U.S. News & World Report, based on over 100 interviews and the review of a dozen internal documents. Earlier arguments over the...

A new UN report, written by Arab scholars, notes "the acute deficit of freedom and good governance" in the Arab world. But, as one author says, "The Arabs, according to international surveys, have the greatest thirst for freedom and are the most appreciative of democracy out of all people of the world."

POLITICAL reform and popular participation in decision-making are no longer optional in the Middle East but are necessary and almost inevitable, HH the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani said yesterday. “The absence of democracy and the slackening in political reform have led to most of the economic and social suffering, especially in the region,” the Emir said in an address read out by HH the Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Thani at the opening session of the Second Doha Development Forum (DDF 2005) at the Ritz. The session was attended by a gathering of political leaders, intellectuals, economists...

Franklin Roosevelt's biographer assesses our consequential president. The American, and to an extent the international media, many rubbing their eyes with disbelief, are starting to contemplate the possibility that George W. Bush may be a president of great historical significance. Disparaged by opponents as an accidental president, or even the beneficiary of a stolen election, and regarded even by many of his supporters as a man of insufficient intellect for his office, the ambitions he has revealed for his second term have prompted comparisons (in the Financial Times and elsewhere) with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, the President says, "fascinates" him....

breaking...

Rival Kyrgyz MPs battle for power Arguments break out in the assembly building in Bishkek Rival parliaments are meeting in Kyrgyzstan amid rowdy scenes and confusion over who has the right to be part of the interim government.The country's electoral body on Sunday backed the parliament elected in February's disputed polls that led to the removal of President Askar Akayev. On Thursday, the Supreme Court annulled the polls and said the previous parliament had authority. The acting president, Kurmanbek Bakiev, supports the court ruling. However, the new head of security, Felix Kulov, told deputies gathered in the capital, Bishkek,...

* Al Qaeda — which operated as an efficient organ of command and control — has been smashed to pieces. Just two of its former top 20 leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be still alive and free — and those two are in hiding, seemingly without regular organizational contact with Islamist cells anywhere in the world. Since December 2001, the two have managed to send a total of six authenticated messages from their hideouts.... * Targeted governments have begun to fight back. In Pakistan, more than 13,000 schools suspected of propagating extremist ideas have been...

Something Napoleonic about Bush   Students and future historians, remember you read it here first   Jaithirth Rao   The last time I wrote in defence of George W. Bush I got three broad categories of feedback. The leftist dimwits were angry, apoplectic, incoherent and best ignored. My supporters, the right-thinking conservatives were complimentary in that delightful understated way which is God’s gift to us conservatives. What surprised me were the mid-fielders who wrote in telling me that while they were not in complete agreement with me (doubtless they will be if they keep buying the Indian Express and reading...

It was a popular line of the Left for the last couple of years. So let's just see what else has happened on Bush's watch: 1. Afghanistan held its first-ever modern democratic election. 2. Iraq held a true democratic election for the first time in 30 years. 3. The Palestinians freely elected a leader. 4. Saudi Arabia will hold its first ever national election in November. 5. Lebanon is paving the way for free elections. 6. Libya scrapped its WMD programs. 7. Egypt is now allowing challengers on the ballot, paving the way for the first-ever multiparty presidential elections. ...to...

The battle for the streets of Lebanon reached new heights yesterday when hundreds of thousands of anti-Syria protesters, some with Lebanese flags painted on their faces, swamped the centre of Beirut. Few had any doubt that it was the biggest demonstration the city had ever seen, or was likely ever to see, easily outstripping last week's pro-Syria rally, which drew a crowd of about half a million. The Lebanese opposition had been stunned by the size of Hizbullah's rally last week and spared no effort to out-do it yesterday. Buses were chartered to bring demonstrators to the capital from around...

3/14/2005 Filed under: RevolutionsMiddle EastSyria Lebanon — “HUMAN TSUNAMI” COVERS BEIRUT UPDATE: Scroll to the end for all latest updates on the protests!Hizb’allah is showing up less and less in the wire — which may or may not be good. But right now, the focus is on the opposition and what moves they will make in face of the pro-Syria protest last week that brought Kharami back to the premiership. Yesterday, protestors got a little creative, by coordinating with each other to make a giant flag using colored boards. Various opposition groups as well as Hariri’s Tayyar Al Mustaqbal (Future...

An emboldened Lebanese opposition mobilized more than 800,000 people to demand an end to Syrian military domination of Lebanon, hurling a potent challenge to the Syrian-backed government here. Beirut city official Mounib Nassereddine said the estimate of 800,000 did did not include demonstrators who were still arriving from all parts of the country ahead of the rally. Thousands of Lebanese had made their way throughout the morning to the capital by car, bus and boat, heading for Martyrs Square and the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, assassinated exactly one month ago in a bomb blast. Lebanese television aired...

Bush gave a transformational speech Tuesday at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC. I am sure we will see the Europeans and their like minded US compatriots in the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media claim what he said there was just blather and nothing new if they comment on it at all. But this speech was quite a thing, really. Along with affirming that the USA has entered into a new century with a new foreign policy direction that Bush is not going to waver from, he also aimed a shot across the...

For those who have been keenly following the war against the terrorists as well as those who finance and rouse them, Stephen Schwartz needs no introduction. Journalist and an author (most recently of "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror"), he has been a vocal opponent of Wahhabism and an unmasker of many tentacles of the Terror International. He contributes frequently to Frontpage Magazine, the "Weekly Standard" and Tech Central Station. Today, I wanted to ask him about his take on the progress of the war on terror, what to do about Saudi Arabia,...

The leaders of about half of Egypt's rickety opposition parties sat down for one of their regular meetings this week under completely irregular circumstances. In the previous few days, President Hosni Mubarak opened presidential elections to more than one candidate, and street demonstrators helped topple Lebanon's government. The mood around the table in a battered downtown Cairo office veered between humor and trepidation, participants said, as they faced the prospect of fielding presidential candidates in just 75 days. "This is all totally new, and nobody is ready," said Mahmoud Abaza, deputy leader of the Wafd Party, one of Egypt's few...

Condi Rice is heralding a shift in long-term US policy to transform the Middle East Timothy Garton AshThursday February 10, 2005The Guardian We are told that Condoleezza Rice received her unusual first name because her parents liked the Italian musical term condolcezza , meaning "with sweetness". What might condoleezza mean? A gifted Italian translator emails me that "it doesn't immediately suggest sweetness to an Italian ear". Yet there's no doubt that the new US secretary of state has conducted an impressive charm offensive during her lightning tour of Europe. She has presented a more elegant face, spoken a more nuanced...

There's an obscure branch of mathematics known as "catastrophe theory," which looks at how a small perturbation in a previously stable system can suddenly produce dramatic change. A classic example of the theory is the way a bridge, after bearing immense weight for many years, can suddenly collapse because of a new stress. We are now watching a glorious catastrophe take place in the Middle East. The old system that had looked so stable is ripping apart, with each beam pulling another down as it falls. The sudden stress that produced the catastrophe was the American invasion of Iraq two...

Saudis Join Call for Syrian Force to Quit LebanonBy HASSAN M. FATTAH Published: March 4, 2005 EIRUT, Lebanon, March 3 - Saudi Arabia told Syria on Thursday to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, adding substantially to Syria's international isolation just a day after Russia joined Western nations in making a similar call. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, went Thursday to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, hoping to secure Saudi support before a coming Arab summit meeting. But Saudi officials told Reuters and The Associated Press that Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdel-Aziz had delivered an unusually blunt rebuff. Egypt, the other key...

WASHINGTON, March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- In the first substantial shift of public opinion in the Muslim world since the beginning of the United States' global war on terrorism, more people in the world's largest Muslim country now favor American efforts against terrorism than oppose them. This is just one of many dramatic findings of a new nationwide poll in Indonesia released today. "In a stunning turnaround of public opinion, support for Bin Laden and terrorism in the world's most populous Muslim nation has dropped significantly, while favorable views of the United States have increased," said Kenneth Ballen, President of Terror...

<p>Where are we? At this midpoint of the Bush administration, engaged as we are in conflict throughout the world, are we winning?</p> <p>The great democratic crusade undertaken by this administration is going far better than most observers will admit. That's the good news. The bad news is a development more troubling than most observers recognize: signs of the emergence, for the first time since the fall of the Soviet empire, of an anti-American bloc anchored by Great Powers.</p>

Some ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students that one cannot understand an event simply by attempting to reconstruct a chain of causality leading up to it. Instead, one must immerse oneself in the context, to fully understand the moment in which the event took place. If you get the context right, you can understand what came before and what comes after. That sort of understanding is important both for historians and leaders. If that ancient wise man were alive today and were asked to summarize the unique characteristics of this historical moment, he would say "revolution."...

WITH anti-Syrian protesters massed in the heart of Beirut last night and the US redoubling its insistence that Syrian troops pull out of Lebanon, the regime in Damascus - which handed over Saddam Hussein's half-brother to authorities in Iraq at the weekend - has begun making extraordinary concessions under pressure. As Israeli Government officials provided comprehensive briefings to foreign diplomats yesterday, linking Syria to Friday's suicide bomb attack at a crowded Tel Aviv nightclub that disrupted almost three months of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the picture of Syrian discomfort was complete. A military regime long used to coercing and...

Lebanese government quits Prime Minister Omar Karami announces government's resignation amid growing protests in the wake of former Prime Minister Hariri's killing By Roee Nachmias and Ali Waked Lebanon's Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami, who has been facing growing popular pressure following the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, said on Monday his government was resigning. Resigning Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami Photo: AFP "Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead," Karami told parliament in Beirut....

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that the liberation of Iraq was changing minds in the Middle East. Before March 2003, the authoritarian regimes and media elites of the Middle East focused the discontents of their people on the United States and Israel. I thought the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime was directing their minds to a different question -- how to build a decent government and a decent society. I think I overestimated how much progress was being made at the time. But the spectacle of 8 million Iraqis braving terrorists to vote on Jan. 30 seems to have...

Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. HISTORY IS BEST VIEWED IN the rear-view mirror. It's hard to grasp the significance of events as they happen. It's even harder to forecast their meaning when they're only scheduled to happen. And once they occur, it's usually the case that possible historical turning points, tipping points, inflection points, or just points of interest turn out in the cold glare of history to have been of merely passing importance.But sometimes not. Just...

President Bush’s moral-high-ground, idea-driven foreign policy was well represented in an uber-speech he delivered in Brussels and throughout his trip to Old and New Europe this week. He again pulled from Natan Sharansky’s big thought on the transforming power of democracy and freedom, stating in Brussels that “Regimes that terrorize their own people will not hesitate to support terror abroad,” that “the false stability of dictatorship and stagnation can only lead to deeper resentment,” and that “Lasting successful reform in a broader Middle East will not be imposed from the outside. It must be chosen from within.” So, while...

Inasmuch as President Bush's speech in Brussels yesterday was part of a renewed U.S. effort to mend ties with disaffected Europeans, it was also an unequivocal declaration of U.S. foreign policy. His firmness is welcome. American audiences have heard much of this speech before; however, for Europeans the president's message is clear, if not new: Advancing freedom in the world is our policy " take it or leave it. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic will bemoan the president's rigidity as diplomatic suicide. When Mr. Bush singled out Iran, Syria and Russia, while adding a few coarse words for...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) said on Wednesday Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a "very destabilizing" force and that it was important for the world to speak with one voice against Tehran's program. Reuters Photo   "The Iranians just need to know that the free world is working together to send a very clear message: Don't develop a nuclear weapon," Bush said. "And the reason we're sending that message is because Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a very destabilizing force in the world," he said during a meeting with Poland's president. Bush...

In the main speech of her first tour as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice yesterday invited Europe to join America in advancing the cause of freedom. Addressing a student audience in Paris, Miss Rice sought to move beyond the deep differences that scarred transatlantic relations during George W Bush's first term. She called for a new partnership that would work to consolidate democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, Georgia and Ukraine, and to help restore full sovereignty to Syrian-dominated Lebanon. "After all, history will surely judge us not by our old disagreements, but by our new achievements," she said. In extending...