Free Republic

Author’s note: On May 24th, the start of the Memorial Day weekend, I sent the protest reproduced below to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. If Boycott NYT readers also find this award outrageous, the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism is Nicholas Lemann (lemann@columbia.edu). The address: Columbia School of Journalism, 2950 Broadway, NY, NY 10027. My journalistic colleagues (and there really are some good ones though most are even older than me!) characterize the Pulitzer Committee as “stubborn as mules and dumber than rocks.” The reason: the committee never acknowledges a mistake or rescinds an award, no matter how egregious...

Gen. Petraeus’ Place in History by Col. Ken Allard (US Army, ret.) Gen. David Petraeus and FSM Contributing Editor Col. Ken Allard were fellow instructors at West Point in the mid-80’s. Close friends ever since, Gen. Petraeus was a key source for Allard’s 2006 book, Warheads, describing the re-creation of the Iraqi Army and how American forces were adapting to counter-insurgency warfare. What were Allard’s reactions to the General’s Capitol Hill testimony this week? There he was, this generation's equivalent of George Marshall, the brilliant proconsul testifying before Congress to underline the improbable but now indisputable victory over al Qaeda....

Remember the Real HeroesCol. Ken Allard (US Army, ret.) With the Final Four here this weekend and San Antonio Spurs playoff hopes riding high, you're likely to hear a lot of nonsense being talked about "heroes." Let an unheralded college forward, a Tony or a Manu hit a 30-foot jumper at the buzzer and "heroics" will be the preferred term, from headlines to conversations around the office coffee pot.  Sorry to differ, but athletic prowess makes great players, not heroes. So may I tell you about some folks who truly deserve that term? And why the words "unsung" and "hero" go...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — Short of troops and facing mounting costs in Iraq, the Bush administration is turning to the United Nations for help, but the U.N.’s record in military operations is not encouraging, analysts say. SOME CRITICS fear that a bulky, unwieldy U.N. force, divided by language and culture and dependent on the United States for equipment, supplies, intelligence and transportation, would be more hindrance than help and could even drag the Iraqi operation down into a bloody stalemate. “If it looks like war, then it does not look like the United Nations,” said Kenneth Allard, a retired Army...

<p>From 1991 to 2003, Saddam's security forces killed hundreds of U.S.-linked Iraqi agents, intelligence sources say. Sometimes security officials ferreted the spies out and executed them, and sometimes they made what amounted to lucky kills, executing spies along with non-spies during broader purges.</p>