Free Republic

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said recently that “we are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war.”  Citing fresh examples of North Korean belligerency, Islamic terrorism in India, ongoing fighting in Afghanistan, insurgency in Iraq, support for Hezbollah terrorism by Iran and Syria, the related fighting between Israel and Lebanon, and the arrests of terrorists aspiring to murder Americans, Gingrich analogized the current state of affairs to the Great War and World War II.  In politics, the term “war” is sometimes used metaphorically in ways that do not shed precise light on the...

The Shiite mullahs who rule Iran and have seized the leadership of the Islamofascist war against us are as dangerous an enemy as America has ever faced. Although we have chosen to be deaf to them, their war aims have never been secret. They have been shouting them out on the world stage to a billion listening Muslims, ever since they handed us the first of many humiliating defeats in 1979. These Persian mullahs and their followers aim to restore Islamic supremacy in the 21st century by leading all Muslims everywhere to victory in a great global jihad against America,...

I really try to avoid vanity posting but in this case I have to. I watched with fascination the documentary Obsession on Google video. The documentary about the Islamic war on the West quickly moved up the most viewed and rated films until it was removed by Google. I wonder if there is a connection that it was replaced with a Moonbat film titled 911 Cover Up which is now rated as #4 on the list. There is something very wrong here that people need to know. Below are the inks to Google's video home page and to the disgusting...

The Shiite mullahs who rule Iran and have seized the leadership of the Islamofascist war against us are as dangerous an enemy as America has ever faced. [snip] In the 1980s, Iran’s mullahs created Hezbollah, a Shiite Arab terrorist group in Lebanon, and used it to drive us from that country the way they drove us from Iran, but this time, they didn’t just humiliate us and mock our impotence; they tortured and murdered our embassy people in Beirut, and blew up 241 of our marines. [snip] We should not wait, passively, for the Iranians to unveil their surprise. We...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran has freed a son of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from house arrest, a German newspaper reported on Wednesday. Die Welt said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard released Saad bin Laden on July 28 with the aim of sending him to the Syria-Lebanon border. It linked the reported move to the outbreak of war between Israel and Lebanese-based Hizbollah.

Sometimes the DUmmies come up with a proposition so absolutely ABSURD that it falls into the category of the comical. In this case it is this PROPOSITION, "Should religion be outlawed as it seems to be at the epicenter of most of the worlds strife." Even FUnnier than the fact that a DUmmie made this proposal is that the other DUmmies have joined in the chorus of agreement. So let us now watch the DUmmies once again toss all reason to the wind in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble correspondent, praying fervently that the DUmmies continue...

AUSTRALIANS who might go to fight in Lebanon with Hezbollah have been warned that they might be breaking Australian law because the organisation is officially banned here. Prime Minister John Howard, asked yesterday what would happen to Australians who fought with Hezbollah, said they could breach Australia's counter-terrorism laws, but added: "I'd have to get advice on that." Last night a spokesman for the Prime Minister said Mr Howard had not yet received the advice he sought on the movement. Mr Howard said Australians going to fight for Israel were clearly in a different position. This week dual national Asaf...

Readers of The Corner will have noticed some to-ing and fro-ing about whether we are currently in the middle of World War 4 with Norman Podhoretz’s August 2004 essay on this subject much in play. Well, you know how I hate to be a party pooper, but I think this is all nuts. I do understand that our civilizational confidence is going through a rough patch — that the West is currently indulging itself, in the way that people and civilizations will indulge themselves when they believe they can afford to, in guilty agonizings about our past imperialism, colonialism, slavery,...

Newt Gingrich said what we all fear: "We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war." The former Speaker of the House and possible Republican candidate for president explained on NBC's "Meet the Press" what he described as the theaters of this war, North Korea's test missile, terrorist bombs in India, continued war in Afghanistan and the threats against Israel from the alliance of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. Gingrich warned of a Puget Sound calamity. "You know, before the show, we were talking about Seattle and the extraordinary port facility there. Can...

A Brief History of MADness Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. It is a doctrine that came into being during the Cold War. The superpowers on the world stage consisted of two nations: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The USA: a capitalist constitutional republic that believes that the government should serve the people, protecting the inalienable rights given to us by God. The USSR: a union of countries ruled by communism that believes that the government dictates what is best for the people, and that the government determines the rights of the people. Two polar opposites. Both were...

In this war, in contrast to WWII, the West is still confused about who the enemy is. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Winston Churchill said these words on November 10, 1942, after the allied victory over Gen. Rommel's Nazi army in what he called "the Battle of Egypt." The war against militant Islamism, by contrast, does not generally pitch armies against each other. But it is no less of a war; the jihadis seek to subjugate both Muslim nations and the...

The Bush administration should stop repeating that it is fighting the war on terror for truth, justice and the American way. Instead, the president and his staff should be blunt and explain that, since Sept. 11, it has had to choose between options that are bad or far worse.By all means, the administration should invite critics to suggest constructive alternatives to the way it's handled this war. But it should also point out that those who have honed in on flaws in current U.S. anti-terror policies have so far been bereft of other workable ideas.Take the uniform-less and stateless terrorists...

Last week's headlines prove the point: North Korea fires missiles, Iran talks of nukes again, Iraq carnage continues, Israel invades Gaza, England observes one-year anniversary of subway bombing. And, oh, yes, the feds stop a plot to blow up tunnels under the Hudson River. World War III has begun. It's not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993. What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the...

July 10, 2006 -- THE British military defines experience as the ability to recognize a mistake the second time you make it. By that standard, we should be very experienced in dealing with captured terrorists, since we've made the same mistake again and again. Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield. Only in the rarest cases should they be taken prisoner. Few have serious intelligence value. And, once captured, there's no way to dispose of them. Killing terrorists during a conflict isn't barbaric or immoral - or even illegal. We've imposed rules upon ourselves that have no historical...

The present fighting is part of a fourth war for Iraq: Gulf War I, the twelve years of no-fly zones, the three-week war in 2003, and now the three-year-old insurrection that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein.But this last and most desperate struggle, unlike the others, is being waged on several fronts. First, of course, is the fighting itself to preserve the elected democracy of Iraq. Twenty-five-hundred Americans have died for that idea — the chance of freedom for 26 million Iraqis, and the more long-term notion that the Arab Middle East’s first democracy will end the false dichotomy of...

What Muslims think Daniel Pipes, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 27, 2006 To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other," it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain). The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its...

How do Muslims worldwide think? To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain). The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three...

In the short-term, the ongoing war with Islamic fascists from Afghanistan to Iraq, and in peripheral areas from Canada and Manhattan to Madrid, Bali, and London, seems surreal. Not to mention frustrating: almost every day the press highlights another furious outburst from some entertainers or intellectuals who are just enough on the fringes of American popular culture to warrant momentary coverage of their lunacy. Neil Young is worried about the reception of his new album? He hypes George Bush’s malignancies. The Dixie Chicks and Madonna are bothered about being pegged abroad as part of George Bush’s empire? Presto, they call...

There was an awful inevitability to what happened to those two American soldiers. Did anyone believe for one moment that they would be treated with respect according to the Geneva Convention? Only the fact that these fanatics have been on the run prevented a more spectacular staging of their deaths.

As with the formulaic type scenes of Homeric epic, there now arises a sense of familiarity with the current outcries over Haditha. We do not really know yet what happened in that terrorist-infected hellhole, but it seems not to matter. Those who customarily decry the supposed loss of civil liberties are now the first to rush to judgment—reminding us that it is not always principle per se that they embrace, but a partisanship to be advanced at all costs. Like Abu Ghraib, the killings will be used to vilify the military, and, ultimately, to curtail the American effort in Iraq—despite...

President George W. Bush's May 27 commencement address to the 2006 West Point graduating class made it clear he knows the War on Terror will grind on for years. Last year, I criticized the Bush administration for neglecting -- at least in public -- the "multi-administration" character of the War on Terror. In the July 25, 2005, issue of The Weekly Standard, I wrote: "Al-Qaida's jihadists plotted a multigenerational war. In the early 1990s, our enemies began proselytizing London and New York mosques and, in doing so, began planting cadres throughout the world. Even if Washington leads a successful global...

Why did the United States suddenly reverse course and agree to negotiate directly with the Iranians over their development of a nuclear arsenal?There are a few reasons. It's an election year, and the Bush administration knows the American public is in no mood for even a hint of more hostilities in the Middle East. After failing to talk sense to the Iranians, the embarrassed multilateral Europeans want us to buck up their dialogue. The Russians and Chinese - for both commercial and mischievous reasons - have warned America they'll stonewall at the United Nations unless we begin horse-trading with Iran's...

Our World: The path to our destruction Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 5, 2006 Allegedly spurred on by images of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, and angered by what they saw as the mistreatment of Muslims at home, they became increasingly aggressive in their beliefs, according to media reports. This is how London's Sunday Telegraph explained the decision of 17 Canadian Muslims to stockpile three tons of ammonium nitrate and plot acts of war against their country. These men - all Muslims - who reportedly planned to blow up the headquarters of Canada's Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in Toronto,...

Imagine if we’d reported and opined on WWII the way we do now.I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall conducted the Second World War brilliantly, despite “thousands of mistakes.” But I can also envision how our present intelligentsia and punditocracy would have sized up their sometimes less than perfect efforts or applied their own reporting to the struggle against Japan and Germany. So imagine something like the following op-ed appearing, say, around May 1, 1945.The Present Debacle May 21, 1945 — After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on...

Not too long ago, there was a lot of giggling on the right side of the blogosphere when it learned about a book called Why Mommy is a Democrat, which its publisher proudly boasts is “A Different Kind of Children’s Book.”  The book’s point is that, just as a child views Mommy in a saintly light, he should project that view onto Democrats because they share Mommy’s values.  For example, just as Mommies do, Democrats make sure people share.  And so that no one misses this message, the well-dressed, silver-haired, obviously Republican white folk in the background walk by a homeless...

"Every Year is Worse Than the Previous Year": Captured Internal Al-Qaeda Documentation of Failure from Iraq, Found April 16 A glance at the reality of Baghdad in light of the latest events (sectarian turmoil) 1. It has been proven that the Shiites have a power and influence in Baghdad that cannot be taken lightly, particularly when the power of the Ministries of Interior and Defense is given to them, compared with the power of the mujahidin in Baghdad. During a military confrontation, they will be in a better position because they represent the power of the state along with the...

We live today in an age of small wars.1 In contrast to the last World War, which ended six decades ago and encompassed dozens of nations, spanning continents and seas, the current age is characterized by a different kind of armed conflict. The primary enemy confronting countries is no longer other countries, but guerilla armies and terrorist organizations–armed groups whose power is measured not by the amount of force they can bring to the battlefield or by the quality of their weapons, but by their ability to wear down the other side and break its will to continue fighting.Because of...

Beijing builds ties with Latin countries China is expanding military and economic ties throughout Latin America, taking advantage of a wave of anti-American candidates who have come to power and a U.S. law barring military training and aid to a dozen Latin countries. "China's profile in the region has been ratcheting up sharply," said Thomas Shannon, assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Shannon traveled to China last month to discuss with Chinese leaders their country's growing role in the United States' backyard. He was the first U.S. official in his position to do so. "We thought it was...

United 93, the just-released movie about the passengers who fought back against their hijackers on 9/11, is being recognized as one of the most terrifying films to come out of Hollywood in recent years. My colleague Peter Simpson, the Citizen's arts and entertainment editor, was so affected after Monday's advance screening that he wrote a front-page assessment for the next-day's paper. The horror, he correctly noted, stems from the astonishing realism and the awful sense of inevitability: The audience knows how the story ends. My other colleague Jay Stone gave United 93 five stars in his review yesterday. I too...

We North Americans tend to see events in Latin America as single trends. In the 1970s, there were military and authoritarian governments. In the 1980s, populist governments produced hyperinflation and economic stagnation. In the 1990s, there was the Washington Consensus: electoral democracy, strong currencies, freer trade, privatization of state-owned firms. Now we tend to see a trend toward leftist populism personified by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. But that's not the whole picture. For that, keep in mind the statement that Ronald Reagan made after his first multicountry trip to the region, a statement that almost every American tourist finds himself mouthing:...

In his opening remarks welcoming Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House on April 20, President George W. Bush said: "The United States and China are two nations divided by a vast ocean -- yet connected through a global economy that has created opportunity for both our peoples. The United States welcomes the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous, and that supports international institutions. As stakeholders in the international system, our two nations share many strategic interests. President Hu and I will discuss how to advance those interests, and how China and the United States can...

China, Saudis sign weapons-for-oil deal SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Monday, April 24, 2006 ABU DHABI — China and Saudi Arabia have signed defense and security agreements that strengthened the strategic relations between the two Asian powers. The accords were signed during the visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Riyad over the weekend, Middle East Newsline reported. Hu, arriving on April 22, has sought to offer Chinese weapons and technology in exchange for greater access to the Saudi crude oil market. "This will further strengthen the friendship between our two countries and our two peoples as well as expand strategic...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 13, 2006, 7:43 a.m. Dead-end Debates Critics need to move on. Currently, there are many retired generals appearing in frenetic fashion on television. Sometimes they hype their recent books, or, as during the three-week war, offer sharp interviews about our supposed strategic and operational blunders in Iraq — imperial hubris, too few troops, wrong war, wrong place, and other assorted lapses. Apart from the ethical questions involved in promoting a book or showcasing a media appearance during a time of war by offering an "inside" view unknown to others...

THE success of PhD papers by Oxford University students is usually gauged by the amount of dust they gather on library shelves. But there is one that is so influential that General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is said to carry it with him everywhere. Most of his staff have been ordered to read it and he pressed a copy into the hands of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Baghdad in December. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title taken from TE Lawrence - himself no slouch in guerilla warfare) is a study...

JERUSALEM – Global civilization is on the verge of "World War III," a massive conflict in which the Islamic world will attempt to impose its ideology on Western nations, according to Meir Amit, a former director of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. Amit, one of the most esteemed figures in the international defense establishment, warned Islamic nations and global Islamist groups will continue launching "all kinds of attacks" against Western states. He urged the international community to immediately unite and coordinate a strategy to fight against the "Islamic war." We are on the eve of war with the Islamic world, which...

"...with any luck the 2008 Presidential campaign will be the first since September 11 to move beyond the 'stolen election' of 2000 and openly debate what course we should follow in the long war ahead. It's a debate that will touch on everything: military preparedness, our core beliefs, demography and the structure of civilization itself because we have finally come to accept that in the end nothing will be the same in the way that it was." -- The Belmont Club I wish I could be confident that both parties will nominate candidates with a serious outlook on the war...

Victor Davis Hanson: Nothing in this war is much different from those of the past.If I could sum up the new orthodoxy about Iraq, it might run something like the following: “I supported the overthrow of the odious Saddam Hussein. But then the poor postwar planning, the unanticipated sectarian strife and insurrection, the mounting American losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction — all that and more lost my support. Iraq may or may not work out, but I can see now it clearly wasn’t worth the American effort.” Aside from the old rehash over disbanding the...

This will be my 11th consecutive column, directly or indirectly on the “Danish cartoons” issue. The cartoons themselves were a red herring from the start -- a fake issue, trumped up by fanatical Muslims seeking grievances to abet a confrontation, and thereby extract concessions from the West. It is a fire, still being stoked around the world by radical “Islamists”, using shameless lies and misrepresentations. (See my previous columns.)The reason I have written so copiously on this subject -- not the cartoons themselves, but what I have called the “organized apoplexy” in response to them -- is because it is...

Next week a vastly important book will be published: "Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways" by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the very liberal civil libertarian, anti-capital punishment Harvard Law School professor. And but for my lack of his legal scholarship, there is nary a sentence in the book that I — a very conservative editor of the Washington Times, and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich — couldn't have written. The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation,...

How many times have we heard the following whining and yet received no specific answers from our leaders? "Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?""Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it.""Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?""Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?"In fact, the United States has a perfectly sound rationale for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear proliferation. At least six good reasons come to mind, not counting the more obvious objection over Iran's violation of...

Unenlightened - As extremist Muslims react to the Danish cartoons, the Enlightenment doesn’t look so bad, huh? THEODORE DALRYMPLE Where do you get a Danish flag to burn when you live in Damascus or Karachi? I am not sure that I would find it easy to come by one, and I live in France, a fellow member of the European Union. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a French flag to burn in the streets of my nearest town (though I confess that I am not an experienced flag-burner). Moreover, Damascus is not the kind of place...

I believe the current riots over cartoon images, the incessant terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories, the growing Muslim willingness to go on rampages over even the most unfounded allegations, the fanatical Iranian drive for nuclear weapons, and the ubiquitous rise of virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Christian threats and worse, and the refusal or inability of common Iraqis to drive out the suicide bombers are all an attempt by Messianic Muslims to hasten the arrival of the Islamic "Rapture"...

Why did the successful war in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein with a democracy lose the majority support of the American public? Despite steady U.S. military progress against jihadists, and the bold endorsement of peaceful self-rule by 11 million Iraqis, public approval was slowly eroded by an accumulation of hits......Perhaps most of all, public ambivalence about the Iraq war is due to generalized ignorance of military history. Without guidance from the past, too many people are shepherded through the experience of war by nothing deeper than the rollercoaster emotions whipped up by 24-hour news coverage of explosions and suicide bombings......

What if the world went up in a mushroom cloud over a cartoon - or because of a photograph of some reveler dressed up like a pig? Well, of course, that would be absurd, a comedy, a Clouseauean flick about a bumbling inspector, right? No, that would be a documentary about the end of civilization circa 2006 - unless we come to our senses. The cartoon implosion now rocking the Muslim world - featuring embassy burnings, threats of 9-11 sequels and the Arab street equivalent of the Terrible Twos - is based on equal parts fake photographs and a default...

There’s No Clash Here Only one civilization cares to put up a fight. By Lee Harris Does the so-called "cartoon war" represent the clash of civilizations? I wish I could answer "yes," but I can't. In order for there to be a clash of civilizations, it is necessary for there to be two civilizations, both of which are prepared to defend their deepest cultural values. Those in the Islamic world who are violently protesting the Danish cartoons clearly represent a civilization that is keen on maintaining its own deeply held traditions and convictions, as the Muslim rioters are prepared to...

I keep wondering why I'm getting flashbacks to the 1960s. I never took any hallucinogenic drugs. And yet I keep hearing people on TV saying we need to bring the troops home now. Of course, back in the 60s, the people saying that were all wearing long hair and, if they were of the guy persuasion, beards; now it's people in suits. So it occurred to me that maybe they're the ones having the flashbacks. They really think this war is Vietnam. Having romanticized the anti-war movement of the 1960s, they think they're wrapping themselves in the mantle of heroes....

<...snip...> Because bin Laden has failed to repeat 9/11, he oddly feels he must explain to his American targets why he has been unable to kill them. In a "Wizard of Oz" pay-no attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain moment, he offers us this: "The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures." Second, al-Qaida's talking points seem to derive from American anti-war rhetoric, as bin Laden and Co. desperately cling to the notion that our resolve may yet crumble. Whether domestic critiques of the Bush administration's anti-terror policies are heartfelt or gratuitous, accurate...

It doesn’t always make sense. The United States is engaged in the most radical and dangerous gambit in the Middle East since the end of the Ottoman Empire. Established powers are not often inclined to tamper with the status quo abroad, and so do not support the weaker and disenfranchised. They usually prefer to prop up whoever ensures order and stability. But after September 11, the old safe way was seen as dangerous, and the new dangerous way as ultimately more safe. America not merely reversed its own past practice of supporting autocrats who pumped oil and kept Communists...

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map." So rants Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Given his apocalyptic rhetoric, we can understand why President Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. He'd be able to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, threaten the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region — and, of course, destroy Israel. In...

Four years after the September 11 events, while many of the initial assumptions of the global war on terrorism have undergone an agonizing reappraisal, a new Washington consensus about the nature of the challenge facing the West and the moderate Muslim world has yet to emerge. Can the notoriously dysfunctional interagency process ever be fixed by organizational tinkering alone, without the elaboration of a common conceptual ground? However lively it may be at times, the Beltway’s ongoing “Operation Infinite Conversation” is no substitute for strategizing. Does it make sense to keep framing the issue in terms of “terrorism” when the...