Free Republic

Thomas Joscelyn has an excellent piece on the death of Imad Mughniyeh, and his possible connections to Al Qaeda and the terror attacks of 9/11: Death by Car Bomb in Damascus. Late Tuesday night in Damascus, Imad Mugniyah, senior terrorist of Hezbollah, was killed in a car bomb explosion. It was a fitting death for a founding father of Islamic terrorism, a man who himself had built many bombs. If you had not heard of Mugniyah before, there is a good reason. Terror chieftains like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri seek the limelight with their frequent and widely...

THERE IS A LEFT-WING conspiracy at loose in the world, dedicated to undoing conservative governance, only the people who see it aren't sure what it is. John McCain is in it, of course, in fact he is the cause of it, as making him president is the ultimate goal. He is blamed for running, (and perhaps, for breathing), but beyond him the face of the threat is less clear. In fact, the faces are those of other conservative stalwarts, who were their heroes and brethren until--until, say, just after the Florida primary, when McCain emerged as a serious threat. These...

PRESIDENT BUSH SAYS the presidency is still "a joyous experience" for him. "People ask if I would do it again. I would." And one reason for his upbeat mood in talking to a dozen journalists Wednesday is progress in Iraq, including revenue sharing by the central government with the provinces. Another is the beginning of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, though Bush cautioned that the creation of a Palestinian state won't come any time soon. Reconciliation between Shia and Sunni is occurring in Iraq, Bush said, but it's "bottom up reconciliation," not top down from the central government of Nouri a-Maliki. However, the...

Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously remarked that the reason the White House ramped up the case for the Iraq War in September was that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." To judge from recent developments, Americans may look back on August 2007 as the month the country again turned toward war—with Iran. The same network of think-tank analysts, media outlets, and government officials who brayed for war in Iraq have set their...

It's hard to believe that, not so long ago, neoconservative foreign policy thinking overflowed with ideas and idealism. The descent has been steep, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the pages of The Weekly Standard--particularly in William Kristol's editorials, which have come to consist of stubborn denials of any bad news, diatribes about internal enemies, and harangues against the cowardice of Republican dissenters. Kristol's sensibility is perfectly summed up in one representative passage from a recent issue. The topic was The New Republic's decision to publish an essay by Scott Beauchamp, an American soldier serving in Iraq, detailing...

The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp -- author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns -- signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods -- fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source. Separately, we received this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad: "An investigation has been completed and...

Mike Fumento was a guest on the Mike Rosen show on 850am KOA here in Denver Wednesday (Nov. 23rd) to talk about his recent October 2006 trip to Ramadi, Iraq. Mike talks about the REAL story from the one of the most dangerous places in the country. Rosen Replay 11/22/06 10-11AM (about 45 minutes, MP3) Guest: Mike Fumento, journalist for "The Weekly Standard" talks about his latest article, "Return to Ramadi."Click here for part one of the interview Rosen Replay 11/22/06 11-11:45AM (about 30 minutes, MP3) Mike Fumento continued. Click here for part two of the interview --- Mike Fumento's...

Surrender as 'Realism' Retreat would win us no friends and lose us no adversaries. Foreign policy realism is ascendant these days, we are told. This would be encouraging if true, because our foreign policy must indeed be realistic. But what passes for "realism" today has very little to do with reality. Indeed, if you look at some of the "realist" proposals on the table, "realism" has come to be a kind of code word for surrendering American interests and American allies, as well as American principles, in the Middle East. Thus, the "realists" advise us to seek Syria's help in...

The Weekly Standard is bold in stating and supporting its ideology. Only it is not the traditional limited government conservatism devised by the movement's founders. The WS forthrightly informs its readers that George W. Bush is a "big spender," subheading a recent piece informing its readers that, "under Bush, the era of small government is over." Moreover, there is not much limited government conservatives can do about it. "Governing majorities can't stand still" the executive editor informs, they must spend more and more money on national problems because "that's what the public expects." Bush and the GOP Congressional leadership will...

July 18, 2006 -- 'GROTESQUE" was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's characterization of the charge that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was responsible for the current Middle East conflagration. She is correct, up to a point. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Rice called it "short-sighted" to judge the success of the administration's transformational ambitions by a "snapshot" of progress "some couple of years" into the transformation. She seems to consider today's turmoil preferable to the Middle East's "false stability" of the last 60 years, during which U.S. policy "turned a blind eye to the absence of democratic forces." There is,...

SHAME ON Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing publishing mogul, is hosting a fund-raiser in July for her Senate reelection campaign. Her explanation is that Murdoch, based in New York, is an important constituent: ''I'm very gratified that he thinks I'm doing a good job." Murdoch runs Fox television, home of Bill O'Reilly and company. No far-right media enterprise has been more relentlessly dishonest in its efforts to destroy American liberalism in general and the Clintons in particular. Fox was prime cheerleader for the bogus Whitewater investigation and the impeachment campaign against Bill Clinton. Fox exists to oppose every...

The Weekly Standard turns 10. The Weekly Standard: A Reader, 1995–2005, edited by William Kristol, New York: Harper Collins, 534 pages, $27.95 When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, a frenzied guessing game began as to which major government program would be first to fall victim to Newt Gingrich’s merciless axe. Some observers wondered if one of the earliest casualties might be not a line item in the federal budget but rather the burgeoning conservative alternative media that aided the GOP during the previous year’s campaign. The idea was that these outlets would be victims of their own...

There's a fascinating article in the Weekly Standard which grants a glimpse into the shadow war between state-sponsored terrorists and their pursuers. The accounts, based on documents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, describe Saddam Hussein's support for the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines. Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a...

Okay. Let's not talk about substance--since the pro-immigration forces have in fact been winning that debate easily. Let's talk about ballot boxes John McCain, lead sponsor of a bill that resembles the Senate Judiciary Committee bill, has a pretty impressive electoral record in Arizona, a competitive state. George W. Bush, a pro-immigration Republican, has won two presidential elections--as did another pro-immigration Republican, Ronald Reagan. The American people are worried about immigration. In a Pew Survey released last week, 52 percent of Americans saw immigration as a burden, while 41 percent said it strengthened the country; 53 percent support sending illegals...

The Document Refuseniks There is an effort afoot to discredit any material that may undermine the narrative that "Bush lied us into war" and that Saddam's connection to al Qaeda was tenuous at best. Consider this quote from an AP wire story today: [John] Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute, dismissed the documents: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there." Prados knows "it's not there," even if...

TO ACCOMPANY the editorial in the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, we have reproduced the page with the Mohammed cartoons from the September 30 Jyllands-Posten. Readers should be able to see what this controversy is about. More important, in light of recent instances of capitulation to the threats of radical Islamists, and in response to eloquent pleas by individuals like Walid-al-Kubaisi in Norway to publish the cartoons in order to protect freedom of expression, we wanted to do our small part to stand against intimidation by extremists.--William Kristol

In discussion with a leftist friend he mentioned how badly the main stream media had done in buckling under to the pressure of the Muslim world by NOT actually reprinting the cartoons. Thus, we have another term for the Mainstream Media, the Dhimminized Press. Anyway, I was interested if people would list media who HAVE stood up to the attempted intimidation and printed the pictures.

--> Weekly Standard Prints Mohammed Cartoons The Weekly Standard has reproduced Jylland-Posten's Mohammed cartoons, accompanied by this Editor's Note from William Kristol: TO ACCOMPANY the editorial in the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, we have reproduced the page with the Mohammed cartoons from the September 30 Jyllands-Posten. Readers should be able to see what this controversy is about. More important, in light of recent instances of capitulation to the threats of radical Islamists, and in response to eloquent pleas by individuals like Walid-al-Kubaisi in Norway to publish the cartoons in order to protect freedom of expression, we wanted to...

PRESIDENT BUSH is a book reader. Last year, he read three books on George Washington and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave him a book on the peace talks after World War I entitled Paris 1919. This year, he's delved into the new biography of Mao Zedong with simple title Mao. Presumptuous though it is, I have a recommendation of another book for him to read. It's War Footing, edited and partly written by Frank Gaffney Jr., the president of the Center for Security Policy. True, Bush is already on war footing. But this book is filled with fresh ideas...