Free Republic

Republican Sen. Rand Paul blocking codification of Obama-era military deal with Israel. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is blocking U.S. military aid to Israel. Paul, who has previously called to cut defense assistance to Israel, recently put a hold on the U.S.-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018, which codifies into law the $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over 10 years that was negotiated in the final days of the Obama administration. A hold is a parliamentary procedure that allows senators to prevent a motion from reaching a floor vote. The Senate passed the act in early...

The Obama administration's policy in the Middle East appears to be designed to remove secular tyrants and replace them with more religiously oriented regimes. Thus, Gaddafi ("We came, we saw, he died." Ha ha ha.) and Mubarak were targeted. Bashar al Assad is the current target. This policy has been marked by monumental incompetence, mendacity, and confusion. Nothing about it should be accepted without a healthy dose of skepticism, including what follows. The Telegraph of the U.K. has a video of U.S. commandos fleeing a town under a barrage of insults ("Crusaders! Infidels! Dogs! Get out!") from the Free Syrian...

Adversaries welcome Obama’s conciliatory actions that turn Machiavelli on his head, and they are likely to be joined by others, emboldened by a perceived window of opportunity remaining open through the end of the Obama administration The most quoted political wisdom from Machiavelli is that “it is better to feared than it is to be loved.” President Obama’s Middle East policy may well go down as the turning point in U.S. policy in which Machiavelli was turned on his head, setting the stage for the whirlwind of chaos and war. What is one to think about the Obama administration’s extended...

In the history of physics, the “unified field theory” was an attempt to bring together an understanding of all forms of energy in a single explanation. Albert Einstein tried and failed to discover this. I don’t know much about physics but I know about Middle East policy. So here’s an effort to bring together all of Obama’s regional policy into a single analysis and explaining everything in 1100 words. The first point is that the Obama Administration’s behavior must be divided into two phases. They overlap and feature the same kind of thinking but they are also quite separate. Phase...

The Middle East Policy Twilight Zone: Four Examples You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone. —Rod Serling By Barry Rubin Ah, the gap between Middle East reality and official U.S. government-approved reality. Here are four examples: –“Here is the next challenge for the citizen movements that are advancing from Tunisia to Syria — and eventually, surely, to repressive non-Arab states such as Iran and China. Once they...

Reading Nicholas Burns speech is like entering the twilight zone. A handmaiden for Islamazis, he is delivering America into the claws of Islamic jihad. Worse still, he has a svengalian influence over Condhimmi. If you have trouble reading or understanding this, merely pretend it is 1942 and substitute Nazi Germany for Palestinian state. That should do it. Burns is just another State Dept Arab loving hack with, we now discover, a Palestinian-Arab in his family. Any wonder why and where his misguided sympathies are? The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) held its second annual gala Oct. 17 at the...

Republican 2008 White House front-runner Rudolph Giuliani warned Tuesday it was not in the interest of the United States to help create a Palestinian state that would "support terrorism." In an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, the former New York mayor also said too much emphasis had been placed on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks which he said just brought up the same issues "again and again." Giuliani renamed the US "war on terror" as "the Terrorists' War on US" in his hawkish article in the September/October issue of the magazine, and predicted a long battle against "radical Islamic fascism." In...

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The Bush administration has assured Arab states that Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank would not harm Palestinian demands for the return of refugees to their homes in what became the Jewish state. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his aides have been briefing Arab leaders on the U.S. endorsement of the Israeli withdrawal plan. U.S. officials said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposed withdrawal provides the Palestinians with a state as well as thousands of Israeli homes. "The Palestinians will take those settlements openly," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State...

How Little We Know By John Corry Published 4/4/2003 12:38:00 AM Say this about Richard Perle: He is not hobbled by inconsistencies, and he keeps his eye on the big picture. Perle, who stepped down recently as chairman of the Defense Policy Board after allegations he had a conflict of interest, although he will still remain on the board, is a longtime advocate of regime change in the Middle East: Iraq today, and Syria and Saudi Arabia tomorrow. The precise ways of doing this, however, have been unclear, and to Perle and his like-minded colleagues they seem to be irrelevant....

What part don't they understand? By Bennett M. Epstein June 30, 2002 Am I missing something here? What part of President Bush's speech on the preconditions for a Palestinian state don't the Europeans understand? Bush clearly said that a regime compromised by terror and corruption cannot be trusted to give birth to a state next to Israel, and therefore a new leadership, free of terrorism and corruption, is required before a Palestinian state can be recognized by the United States and before such a state should be recognized by the rest of the world. What part of that was ambiguous?...

Enough is Enough: An Open Letter to the President of the United States Rabbi Eliezer Waldman The responsibility for the well being of the State of Israel and the security of the Jews rests solely on the shoulders of the government of the State of Israel. Only they have the moral authority to decide how to defend the country and safeguard the destiny of the Jewish people. The Jewish people suffered enough when exiled 2000 years ago upon the destruction of the Second Temple. We were forced to wander from country to country where we were locked away into ghettos....

Reality bites. One could almost hear President Bush chewing the inside of his cheeks Thursday as he announced that he was dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Middle East, reversing his "hands off" policy--a policy that had clearly failed. Bush is proud, but he's a politician, too, and so he ended up yielding to one of the most powerful forces in politics: regression. Yes, regression, the statistical concept that explains why the policies of one president change so little from the policies of the previous president. Every White House starts out with a degree of contempt for its...