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A group of prominent intellectuals, commentators and policymakers are calling on President Obama to act more assertively in Syria to help end the violence there and remove President Bashar al-Assad from power. SNIP The letter was organized by the neoconservative groups Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and signed by 56 mostly conservative foreign policy experts and commentators, including Liz Cheney, Karl Rove, Randy Scheunemann, former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and ex-New Republic editor Martin Peretz. Full letter text and signatories after the jump.

It’s just about a week since Russia and China, in a rare joint action, vetoed a European-sponsored resolution that “strongly condemns the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by Syrian authorities.” The only thing strong about this defense of civilians was the use of the word “strongly.” And, as Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post, the resolution demanded that Damascus “cease the use of force against civilians” and grant “fundamental freedoms” to prisoners.

Nancy Pelosi who always has her ear to the ground for a simple-minded explanation of an intricate matter has demanded to know whose money is behind the campaign against the Ground Zero mosque. Maybe she can't imagine anything other than a grand conspiracy: maybe Glenn Beck or David Koch, maybe Sarah Palin or some other ditzy lady with access to right-wing money. In my view, the really modest struggle against the mosque is probably the closest thing we've had to a genuinely grass roots effort against the casual and elitist First Amendment fundamentalists. "No" to admitting in schools that Christmas...

The Dove World Training Center in Gainesville, Florida and its pastor Perry (sic) Jones plan a Koran bonfire on the ninth anniversary of the World Trade Center-Pentagon enormity. SNIP But it is disgusting. And it is disgusting no matter how many people believe the act would be and should be protected by the First Amendment. In fact, it is uncivilized. I believe that the Obama administration should go to the Supreme Court or maybe tactically to the most sensible and civilized appellate court and seek an injunction against this atrocity that 1. will encourage Muslim madmen to respond in kind...

We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue "peace candidates," and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It's really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of "having arrived" up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him. Superficially, one may think of those who thought they were already middle class just...

We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue "peace candidates," and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It's really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of "having arrived" up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him. Superficially, one may think of those who thought they were already middle class just...

The New York Times and IsraelBy Roger Aronoff  |  September 9, 2005 We hope that Peretz and Sharon and Bush and the New York Times are right, that this move will lead to peace. But there are grave doubts. When dog bites man, that isn't news. But when Martin Peretz, liberal editor of The New Republic, devotes a column to blasting the New York Times, we take some notice. Peretz had just returned from Israel and Gaza during the so-called disengagement, the forced removal by Israeli troops of the residents of the Jewish settlements in the disputed territory. While...

...Then the Weekly Standard arrived in 1995, and Washington was suddenly a two-magazine town. William Kristol, Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz came up with the idea and Rupert Murdoch came up with the money.... Ever since, the Standard has proudly flown the banner of conservatism from Washington each week, sometimes conservatism of the "neo" sort.... "The Weekly Standard: A Reader" offers an impressive sampling from the magazine's first 10 years. Irving Kristol, William's father, defines neoconservatism, insofar as it can be defined -- he calls it a "persuasion," not a movement or ideology. Andrew Ferguson, tired of hearing Edward R....

In praising Mahmoud Abbas, Condoleezza Rice showed how little she understands the Palestinian Authority Condoleezza Rice rushed to Jerusalem and Ramallah on what she is likely to have imagined as a rescue mission for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. If that was truly her motive, she need not have bothered. Ariel Sharon has mainstream Israel solidly behind him, and a parliamentary majority has voted for withdrawal no less than four times. Sharon long ago determined that Gaza was a dead end for the country, what with the particularly daunting demographic ratio (1.3 million Arabs to 9,000 Jews, this number itself...

Martin Peretz, a principal owner, chairman, and editor in chief of The New Republic (TNR) magazine, that Liberal bastion, is an authentic, even quintessential Liberal himself. For a number of months now, he has been fingering the worn, tattered fringes of his Liberal cloak and discovering what a threadbare garment it is. In February, Mr. Peretz published in TNR a quite remarkable essay declaring that Liberalism, his only intellectual/political home for all his adult life "... is now bookless and dying. ... Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still...

GIVING GEORGE W. BUSH HIS DUE ON DEMOCRACY - The Politics of Churlishness by Martin Peretz 03.31.05 If George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others. He pursued his goal obstinately, they would say, without filtering his thoughts through the medical research establishment. And he didn't share his research with competing labs and thus caused resentment among other scientists who didn't have the resources or the bold--perhaps even somewhat reckless--instincts to pursue the task as he...

Just about every world leader one can count on to be sanctimonious has condemned Israel's killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and "spiritual" leader of Hamas. (Why were they never as outraged when Yassin's minions slaughtered Jewish civilians?) Kofi Annan, the pope, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana--they all sang more or less the same trope: Israel's missile strike was a criminal act. So did Syria's President Bashar Assad and every shade of theocrat competing for power in Tehran. Yasir Arafat, a man who knows something about the...

<p>Passive Saboteurs Ideological prejudice leads relief agencies to cut and run from Iraq.</p> <p>The world is now witnessing an exodus from Iraq. But it is not an exodus of refugees, whom critics of the war told us would flood in panic across the borders into neighboring states. These simply didn't materialize--and it tells us much that is good about the postwar realities of the country that they didn't.</p>