Free Republic

Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained...

With that arrogance and boorishness that is characteristic of diplomatic overtures from the Putin administration, the Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague this week to "think again" about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil. "We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," he said, according to the Reuters report. This is the kind of language that seems to appeal to Vladimir Putin himself -- the...

The United States plans to sell Gulf countries at least $20 billion worth of military hardware in the coming years, and will sign 10-year military aid packages with Egypt and Israel, valued together at $43 billion. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Washington is "working with these states to give a chance to the forces of moderation and reform."Oddly, on Friday the New York Times published a story roundly criticizing the Saudis for their "counterproductive" attitude in Iraq. Senior U.S. officials were quoted as saying that the kingdom had tried to discredit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by handing...

In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the cold war being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain’s death—which, he famously said, had been “greatly exaggerated.” Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of Bush are now at it...

Women vote and run in Kuwaiti poll for first timeThu Jun 29, 2006 4:16 AM ET By Haitham Haddadin and Yara BayoumyKUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwaitis voted for a new parliament on Thursday with women running and casting ballots for the first time in a national poll in the Gulf Arab state."I don't know how to describe my feelings, I am so happy, it's a beautiful day as women practice their right," female candidate Hind al-Shaikh said. "I hope a woman makes it."Parliament passed a law in May 2005 giving women the right to vote and stand as candidates in elections...

Some people just don’t get it. Five years on, some people remain unaware that this is war; that we are facing an enemy that will do anything in its power to destroy us. The fact that on any given day we are free to fly around the world, drive our cars without restriction and buy as much food as we like in rich variety seems to have confused them. The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like...

KUWAITIS go to the polls next week to elect a new National Assembly, which will in turn approve a new prime minister and Cabinet. The Kuwaitis will be making history for a number of reasons. This is the first election in which women are allowed to vote. And - much to the chagrin of Islamists, who insist that women are unfit to play any role in politics - a number of women are standing, often on platforms of radial social and economic reforms. With a native population of 1 million, Kuwait is one of the smallest states in the Arab...

For Washington insiders, the US-Australia alliance is one of the great successes of the Bush presidency's troubled foreign policy, writes Greg Sheridan RICH Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state, lists four important accomplishments for US foreign policy under George W. Bush. The first is the US-Australia alliance. It has grown immeasurably closer under Bush and John Howard. The Australian Prime Minister, Armitage says, got everything he wanted from the alliance and the Americans are certainly happy with what they got from it. And Howard is one of relatively few democratic political leaders who has not suffered at all...

When President Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to run the CIA, the press focused on disapproving Democrats and even some Republicans who were dubious about confirmation. A month later, when the Senate confirmed Hayden by a 78-15 vote, the story was given much less emphasis in the media, which had moved on to other stories critical of the Bush administration. Similarly, when Bush nominated one of his aides, Brett Kavanaugh, to the federal judiciary, the press was filled with reports about Democrats threatening a filibuster because Kavanaugh once worked for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the case against President Clinton....

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as...

Bush is the Next Reagan Jun 4, 2006 Slater Bakhtavar - Persian Journal The same people who heavily criticized former President Reagan for his tough stance against Communism and for his aggressive push for democracy in Eastern Europe are now attacking President Bush for his tough stance against fundamentalism and his aggressive push for democracy in the Middle East. -They argued then that Communism would never fall - it did They argue now that Islamic Fundamentalism will never fall - it will -They argued then that the Soviet Union is too strong - it wasn't They argue now that the...

John Samples is director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once remarked that conservatism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty. For American conservatives, the past begins and often ends with the founding era and its greatest fruit, the Constitution. The Constitution established a constitutional republic dedicated to liberty and limited government under law. James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, never took constitutional government for granted. His famous Federalist No. 10 analyzed the dangers to...

"Iran Is Not Iraq" Much of the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush Doctrine.by William Kristol 05/08/2006, Volume 011, Issue 32 "We are committed to a diplomatic course [to stop Iran's nuclear program] that should, with enough unity and with enough strength and with enough common purpose, make it possible to convince the Iranian government [to change its course]. . . . "Let me go right to the crux of the question. The United States of America understands and believes that Iran is not Iraq. The Iraq circumstances had a...

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside. Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - 0622iraq-aidconf Iraq won wide and concrete support from the international community Wednesday, prompting bursts of optimism for the country as it struggles to rebuild its security forces in the midst of withering terror attacks. No new money was offered at a meeting that was never intended as a donors conference, but the gathering was applauded as proof that sharp differences over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could be put aside to help Iraqis now. "It's a good day for Iraq," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said joyfully. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, clearly moved, called it a...

President Bush's ambitious vision of global democratic reform has begun to dominate the administration's foreign affairs agenda, in some cases pushing aside urgent international issues. So far, the president's plan has been driven mainly by high-level rhetoric, symbolic gestures and a handful of modestly funded development programs. But collectively, this mix has started to shift the focus in relations with key nations. In the four months since Bush unveiled the approach in his second inaugural address, nearly every meeting with foreign officials and many of the changes taking place within the Bush administration, including several key appointments, has reflected the...

When President Bush began the war on terror he also began the process of planting the seeds of Democracy in the Middle East. No President has succeeded in sucessfully bringing Democracy to the region, but now we have had elections in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq. We have seen Syria pull out of Lebanon and we now have Lebanon's long-awaited legislative elections. They will begin Sunday in Beirut and in other regions over the following three Sundays in a four stage process. . .

“When the people realize they have the power to expose the deceit underlying a government prone to repression, it is the beginning of that regime's end,” Peter Ackerman – Fletcher School graduate and Tufts trustee – wrote in an op-ed published in The Boston Globe. A resilient, yet experimental venture by the Bush administration into uncharted waters has proven largely beneficial as democracy sweeps several countries once occupied by tyrants. The winds of change are blowing across the world as jubilant demonstrators are taking back their God-given right to freedom once usurped by fascist dictators. An unshaken vision of...

SHUNEH, Jordan (AFP) - The son of Libyan leader Moamar Kadhafi said his country will soon have an embassy in Washington and expected the US to reciprocate, adding the two had "excellent" intelligence cooperation. "By the end of this year we will have an embassy in Washinton and the United States will have an embassy in Libya," Seif al-Islam Kadhafi told a conference on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in this Dead Sea resort. Relations between the former foes have been improving since Tripoli agreed to a settlement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and renounced weapons of mass...

A new look for President Bush's global war on terrorism sits atop Condoleezza Rice's early to-do list at the State Department. Expect fairly soon some useful new handles on the problem and a more coherent overall strategy to guide the struggle that the bureaucracy abbreviates as GWOT.