Free Republic

@nickgillespie 'I am sure as hell not going to tell a single person to go there and die in a foreign country. I learned that lesson with Iraq and I am never going to go through that again.' @greggutfeld

Former President George W. Bush’s administration sold the 2002 plea deal with John Walker Lindh, an American who joined the Taliban, as a victory in the war on terror that would make the American people safer. But 17 years later, Lindh is out of prison, and his praise for terrorists while in prison has experts concerned he might still pose a threat. .... McNulty said the government was “quite confident that if we had gone to trial, we would have prevailed on all counts,” transcripts show. McNulty was specifically asked if the government could have proven that Lindh conspired to...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Iraqi officials that U.S. intelligence showed Iran-backed militias moved missiles near bases housing American forces. Pompeo made the disclosure to Iraq’s top brass during his surprise visit earlier this month, Reuters reported. The revelation comes just hours after all non-emergency personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq was ordered to leave the country. He asked the military officials to keep the Shi’ite militias in control as they are expanding their presence in the country and now are part of the country’s security apparatus. The top diplomat warned that otherwise, the U.S. would have to...

After six and a quarter years on the job, Dean Rusk, the U.S. secretary of state for eight years in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said that so far during his term in office, there had been 64 or 65 revolutions, successful or failed, throughout the world. Rusk mentioned it in reference to reports from Athens at the time about a colonel's coup against the leftist government. He didn't mention his own government's involvement in many of those coups and revolutions, including the one in Greece. The "State team" - a term used to refer to the local embassy, military...

President George W. Bush’s presidential center and other business groups are denouncing a pending regulation by President Donald Trump that would open tens of thousands of U.S. jobs to young American graduates.(...)

FULL TITLE: Neil Bush: Cruz Isn't Singling Out Muslims, "He's Also Talking About Extremists In The Christian Faith" Neil Bush appeared on CNN Wednesday morning following Jeb Bush's endorsement of presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz. Neil is the brother of Jeb and former President George W. Bush. He is also part of Cruz's finance team. Bush was asked to respond to Cruz's plan to surveil Muslim Americans after the Brussels attacks. "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized," Cruz said Tuesday. Bush said Cruz is not racially profiling and told CNN...

Is an Obama Doctrine in foreign policy developing before our eyes? The president and his aides wave off the idea, at least if it means seeing the U.S.-led military intervention in Libya as a one-size-fits-all model. In a 2005 pledge that some called the Bush Doctrine, our last president also declared the United States to be on the side of democracy activists everywhere. Obama has already used more military force in a country of secondary strategic interest than Bush ever did. Right now, Obama and his staff are too focused on winning the war in Libya to spend much time...

“What I want to say is that he was never an extremist, neither in his private nor political life. He believed that a modern moderate Islam could work in Afghanistan. He said that the extreme left or right failed in Afghanistan, since both had neglected the needs of the people. Therefore, we could not govern Afghanistan like any traditional Muslim country.” -Ahmad Wali Massoud regarding Ahmed Massoud Shah of the Northern Alliance. In 1996, funded financially and backed morally by their allies in Pakistan, the Taliban (”Students of Islamic Knowledge Movement”) emerged as the prominent force in Afghanistan after the...

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says President Barack Obama has come to accept much of the Bush Doctrine out of necessity, despite what he campaigned on in 2008. Rumsfeld said that Obama needed to keep the Guantanamo Bay detention center open because of national security concerns, and it was the best solution among a host of bad options. “They ended up keeping Guantanamo open not because they like it — we didn’t like it either — but they couldn’t think of a better solution,” Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday. Rumsfeld then listed a handful of other...

In the hit movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the Nazis coveted the ark because they believed that “an army carrying the ark before it would be invincible.” Interestingly, from 1945 until 1949, we Americans developed a revolutionary new weapon, which was equivalent to the “Ark of the Covenant” in that popular movie. An American army, carrying the nuclear ark before it, could have easily conquered all mankind had we chosen to. At the very least, as Gen. Eisenhower remarked in 1946, “If we were ruthlessly realistic, we would not permit any nation with whom we are not firmly allied...

There was something quite Roman in the killing of Osama bin Laden, something reminiscent of the manner in which the Romans eventually dealt with a rogue’s gallery of charismatic tribal enemies—Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Boudica, and others—all of whom claimed victory over the Romans and invulnerability from their global reach, only to be eventually defeated, forced to kill themselves, executed, or killed in battle. The killing reminds us that there are official rules we cite and unofficial ones that, thankfully, we actually follow. Pakistan is to be praised publicly as a partner, even as privately it is recognized as the...

U.S. Drone Strike in Yemen Reportedly Was Aimed at Radical Cleric Seen as Post-Bin Laden Threat Published May 06, 2011 | The Wall Street Journal A U.S. drone strike in Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric who is suspected of orchestrating terrorist attacks on the U.S, but the missile missed its target, Yemeni and U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. The drone strike comes less than a week after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Usama bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan. Had the drone strike in Yemen been successful, the U.S. would...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- A U.S. drone strike in Yemen on Thursday targeted senior al-Qaeda figure Anwar al-Awlaki but narrowly missed its target, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The drone strike happened at around 3.30 a.m. local time in the Nisab District of Shabwah Governorate, located in southern Yemen. Two al-Qaeda mid-level leaders were killed in the strike, the state-run Saba news agency reported earlier. According to the Wall Street Journal on Friday, the strike was aimed at U.S.-born radical Islamic preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who has become a senior figure in the al-Qaeda militant organization in recent...

As lefties gloat over the political implications of Osama bin Laden’s demise, and the media ramp up an “Obama bounce” meme, conservatives should politely but persistently shift the conversation from politics to policy. In my latest column for Townhall, I draw on a number of fascinating news accounts elucidating how the our military and intelligence community finally nailed bin Laden. US officials describe a “mosaic” of intelligence that ultimately led a team of Navy SEALs to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan — suggesting that it took many years and myriad sources to pinpoint bin Laden’s precise location. As we now...

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gadhafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the U.S. has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism. A strange moral inversion, considering that Saddam's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gadhafi's. Gadhafi is a capricious killer; Saddam was systematic. Gadhafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a "Republic of Fear." Moreover,...

History is hard when you have a thrill running down your leg.... For a show that prides itself on its knowledge of news and history, Hardball with Chris Matthews made some embarrassing errors last night, including the fact that Ron Reagan Jr. apparently doesn't understand the Bush Doctrine. Chris and Ron, his guest "expert" on Afghanistan, came up with two historical inaccuracies within minutes of one another. When conservative guest Frank Gaffney said he hoped Afghanistan could be pacified, as Germany was after World War II, Matthews snapped: Matthews: There were no American soldiers killed after V-E Day, and...

Somehow NRO is having some trouble posting my full reply to my friend Andy McCarthy. I’m sure it will be fixed soon, but in the meantime, here it is: Nothing is better than getting honest criticism from a serious person. It’s almost impossible to find it nowadays, and I’m very grateful to Brother Andy for his kind words and trenchant comments. Ditto to Mark. How did these lawyers learn to write so well? I thought they beat that out of you in Law School… Bush Doctrine: As I remember it, we declared war on terrorist groups and on the countries...

FORMER President George W. Bush's policy of en couraging Middle East democratization has just produced spectacular results in the Kuwaiti general election. In a major victory for the secular reformists over the Islamists, women -- four of them -- were elected to the 50-seat national parliament for the first time. The Islamists' share of Sunday's vote dropped almost 30 percent from the last general election, held just more than a year ago. The radical Muslim Brotherhood lost three of its four seats, while the hard-line Salafis dropped to two from four. The election of women represents a political earthquake in...

Have you ever made the point that President George W. Bush kept this country safe after 9/11, only to have a liberal respond: "Nuh-uh! You can't prove Bush kept us safe!" This fallacious posturing is rooted in the ridiculous assumption that, because terrorists have not conceded that Bush defeated them, we cannot not say "Bush succeeded in keeping America safe after 9/11." I reference Article I, Section 53 of The Holy Doctrine of Liberalism, which clearly states, "Insist everything George W. Bush ever did was wrong, or you run the risk of accidentally validating conservatism." I'm here to tell you...

Vice President Joe Biden warned Saturday that the US stands ready to take pre-emptive action against Iran if it does not abandon nuclear ambitions and its support for terrorism. But in his first major policy speech as President Barack Obama's No 2, Biden also declared the US open for talks with Iran and Russia to repair relations. And he reached out to the world with a promise that the Obama administration will work with allies to solve global problems. "We will draw upon all the elements of our power - military and diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement, economic and cultural...