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Among American conservative and hawkish political circles, it’s an article of faith that much of Western Europe is anti-American. Whether it be dislike for President Bush, opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the American refusal to be governed by international institutions, the growing Eurabian alliance or simple resentment of U.S. military and economic superiority, many of our Western European allies seem often to be more like enemies. None more so than France, with whom our country has developed a shared hostility in the post-9/11 world.   So it was with great surprise that I found myself in the company last...

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, [...] the Project for the New American Century issued a letter to the president calling for a dramatic reshaping of the Middle East as part of the "war on terror". [...] the group's remarkable string of successes has gradually given way to a steady decline [...] events in the Middle East seemed to be going their way, at least during the first few months of Bush's second term. The unexpectedly smooth Iraqi elections in January 2005, the outbreak of the "Cedar" revolution in Lebanon (and other "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan), and...

Every year in Israel some 70,000 people buckle down and study for the standardized Psychometric exam, a crucial step in their hopeful pursuit of higher education. Examinees from every sector in the country take the same exact test but when the results are analyzed the gap between the Jewish and Arab averages is significant. The National Institute for Testing and Evaluation reports a 94 point gap between the two sectors' averages, with the Arab average standing at 469 and the Jewish one at 563. Psychometric scores range between 200 and 800, and are curved based on the current year's scores...

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled. Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes...

The announcement by McCain, who has put together campaign organizations in many of the states with early nominating contests, was widely expected. The intentions of Giuliani, who has been less active in early organizing, had been less clear. Giuliani's campaign team said the committee was simply an opening move designed to keep his options open, with a final decision still to come. "This filing affords him the opportunity to raise money and put together an organization to assist him in making his decision," Giuliani adviser Anthony Carbonetti said.

Howard Phillips, Chairman of The Conservative Caucus, a non-partisan public policy action organization founded in 1974, issued the following statement concerning the nationwide defeat of Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives: "The November 7 election results are, to a significant degree, attributable to the policies of the Bush Administration in many areas, in addition to Iraq. These include: advocacy of amnesty for illegal aliens, failure to enforce existing immigration laws which require penalization of corporations which hire illegal aliens, promotion of a North American Union (NAU) scheme to merge the United States with Canada and Mexico,...

TO: My Fellow Neoconservatives FROM: Joshua Muravchik RE: How to Save the Neocons We neoconservatives have been through a startling few years. Who could have imagined six years ago that wild stories about our influence over U.S. foreign policy would reach the far corners of the globe? The loose group of us who felt impelled by the antics of the 1960s to migrate from the political left to right must have numbered fewer than 100. And we were proven losers at Washington’s power game: The left had driven us from the Democratic Party, stolen the “liberal” label, and successfully affixed...

To still the siren of the heart and defer to the head is to seldom be wrongly led. So many wrong things feel so right. "You know, I really told my mother-in-law off the other day and, boy, did it feel good." Of course, what has changed? Your mother-in-law is still the nag she always was. One change, though, is that now your family politics has descended into the abyss. This occurs to me when I hear my political soul mates talk of sitting on their hands this election cycle. I hear pundits and plebeians both make pronouncements about how...

Editor's Note: On Friday, Vanity Fair issued a press release highlighting excerpts of a piece in their January issue on “neoconservative” supporters of the war in Iraq who today, unsurprisingly, have some negative things to say about how the war is going and how the Bush administration has been handling it. In the wake of the press release – which has gotten considerable play on the Internet – some of those “neoconservatives” highlighted in the article have responded to the excerpts and its misrepresentations, in some cases, of what they said. We collect some of those reactions — including from...

Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting. Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war, Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article that could influence Tuesday's battle for the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster. Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. "I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which...

It's blocked, but here is the URL - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

Of the hundreds of thousands of words employed in this year's election campaign, none is more likely to have an impact on post-election politics than Dick Armey's characterization of Christian evangelicals in the Bush Republican Party as "thugs." Armey is no outsider taking shots at a GOP in trouble. He was an architect of the 1994 GOP campaign that brought Republicans to power in Congress, was House GOP majority leader, and is an evangelical himself. But Republicans now in control in Washington are guilty of pandering to Christian conservatives, especially to evangelical leaders like James C. Dobson, founder of Focus...

Iranian hardline newspapers said there were signs of an Israeli-US plot behind remarks by Pope Benedict XVI that linked Islam to violence and created a wave of anger across the Muslim world. The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States -- the Islamic republic's two arch-enemies -- could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel's offensive on Lebanon. "The reality is that if we do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to be ignorant of Islam, then his remarks against Islam are a dictat that the Zionists and...

Conservatism 101: A checklist WILLIAM RUSHER In the last couple of decades, the conservative movement has grown so large and subdivided into so many factions, that even discriminating observers can be forgiven for confusing one with another. Just who are these "neoconservatives" who are allegedly so influential in the Bush administration, and how do they differ from ordinary, garden-variety conservatives? Where did the "paleoconservatives" come from? What exactly do they stand for? I offer the following definitions to navigate through the swamps of terminology. Back in the late 1950s, most of the conservative movement could and did meet for lunch...

by Mark Finkelstein August 24, 2006 - 22:56 Don't laugh. If Lenora Fulani could flirt with Pat Buchanan in 2000, why not a Buchanan-Matthews ticket in 2008? After all, the pair share a powerful unifying distaste for neo-cons. On this evening's Hardball, Matthews pleaded with Buchanan to take back the Republican party from neo-conservatives. Matthews: "Pat, when are the traditional conservatives in this country who believe in less government, less role in the world, like yourself, though you might be more extreme than some, George Will, Bill Buckley, when are you guys going to retake your party from the neo-conservatives...

"Joe, why are you doing this?" That is a question Joe Lieberman will hear again and again from old friends, as he mounts his "independent" campaign for the Senate seat his own party voted on Tuesday to take away from him. And there is no compelling answer Joe can give. Joe insists he's a progressive Democrat in the mainstream of the party and has a voting record to prove it. But Ned Lamont is a progressive (i.e., liberal) Democrat, and the Connecticut party chose him as its Senate nominee, not Joe. Joe could say Iraq is the dividing line and...

Polls had Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman falling far behind anti-war challenger Ned Lamont as today's state Democratic primary approached. But it was not all bad news for the embattled senator. At least Tom DeLay was still rooting for him. The former House majority leader from Texas is a Republican who may not agree with the Bush White House's favorite Democrat on every issue. But DeLay thinks Lieberman is right-on when it comes to foreign policy. "He's very good on the war," DeLay said during an interview last week on the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" program. With the Connecticut...

Pat Buchanan's Rampage By Burt Prelutsky Pat Buchanan, not satisfied merely looking like a Herblock depiction of a bigot, a man who never allows an opportunity to slam Israel slip through his fingers, has been on a rampage because Israel has finally gone after the murderous thugs and sadists of Hezbollah. The fact that the terrorists don't wear uniforms means that every time the Israelis kill one of them, Buchanan and his ilk get to insist that Israel is targeting civilians. Buchanan's concern for civilians isn't nearly so evident when it's Jews who are targeted by Hamas, Hezbollah and the...

I was one of a number of Jewish conservatives who spoke out in defense of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of The Christ. (See "More Power To Mel," published in FrontPageMag.com on February 10, 2004.) For that, I have no regrets. I believed then – and continue to believe – that The Passion is not anti-Semitic. However, based on what followed Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest on Friday, I’m convinced that the actor/director himself is an anti-Semite. According to various news reports, when he was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy in Malibu for DUI, Gibson was enraged. At one point, he reportedly...