Free Republic

Russia may launch an attack on Ukraine on Saturday, February 19, 2022. The attack would likely begin with an air and missile campaign targeting much of Ukraine to decapitate the government and degrade the Ukrainian military as well as the ability of Ukrainian citizens to prepare to resist a subsequent Russian invasion. US and allied governments have been warning of such an attack for some days, pointing to the size of the Russian forces concentrated on Ukraine’s borders.[1] Western officials have additionally said that Russian troops have moved to jumping-off positions for an invasion over the past 24 hours. The...

President Obama just announced that he is bringing a counter-terrorism strategy to an insurgency fight. He was at pains to repeat the phrase “counter-terror” four times in a short speech. Noting that ISIL is not a state (partly because the international community thankfully does not recognize it), he declared, “ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.” Neither of those sentences, unfortunately, is true. ISIL is an insurgent group that controls enormous territory in Iraq and Syria that it governs. It maneuvers conventional light...

President Obama has said many times that America must succeed in Afghanistan. He is right, and he deserves our full support in that effort. Afghanistan is in many respects harder to understand than Iraq was. Even with a good strategy and sufficient resources, success will almost certainly come much more slowly. But as a great man said two years ago, hard is not hopeless. The keys to finding the right approach lie in nine fundamental principles. 1. UNDERSTAND WHY WE’RE THEREAfghanistan is not now a sanctuary for al-Qaeda, but it would likely become one again if we abandoned it. Mullah...

The president's nomination of generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to take command of U.S. Central Command and Multinational Force-Iraq, respectively, was obviously the right decision. By experience and temperament and demonstrated success, both men are perfectly suited to these jobs. Given the political climate in Washington, however, their nominations are likely to be attacked with the same tired arguments war critics used to try to drown out reports of progress in Iraq during the recent Petraeus-Crocker hearings. So before the shouting begins again, let us consider in detail one of the most important of these arguments: that no one...

Losing wars is always bad. One of the major reasons for America’s current global predominance economically and politically is that America doesn’t lose wars very often. It seems likely, however, that the American people are about to be told that they have to decide to lose the Iraq war, that accepting defeat is better than trying to win, and that the consequences of defeat will be less than the costs of continuing to fight. For some, the demand to “end this war” is a reprise of the great triumph of their generation: forcing the U.S. to lose the Vietnam War...

The campaign to oust Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld continues unabated at The Weekly Standard, with the latest salvo being fired by Frederick Kagan in his article Fighting the Wrong War. Mr. Kagan attempts to make a reasoned, thoughtful counter to Rummy’s defenders, but instead discusses key issues in generalities rather than specifics, and fails to place events of the 90s and today within an accurate historical context. Kagan charges Rummy’s defenders with evasion, and an over-reliance on “deflecting all criticism from him [Rumsfeld] onto the Clinton administration.” In a sense, he is right that what has occurred in the past...