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It has become obligatory for both pro- and antiwar commentators to never mention the possibility of victory in Iraq. The most that antiwar people will admit is that the surge has gained a temporary military advantage in a war that cannot be won militarily. The most pro-war commentators will claim is that they see the possibility of "success" perhaps, maybe, someday, somehow. But as of Veterans Day 2007, I think one can claim a very real expectation that next year the world may see a genuine, old-fashioned victory in the Iraq War. In five years we will have overturned Saddam's...

<p>Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times for the past five years, yesterday accepted a position as executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington.</p> <p>He will also become a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation. He will continue to write his weekly editorial-page column for The Times.</p>

Sometimes we can better understand where we are politically from afar than from within. Consider this assessment from Europe's biggest and Germany's most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, this week: "The wind has shifted in Washington. America, not just its president, is at war. The Democrats are still critical of the failed Iraq campaign, but they are no longer opposed to the "War on Terror" in general. It has been accepted, and not just as a metaphor Ninety-two percent of Americans are opposed to an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a majority doesn't want to see the U.S.'s special detention camp...

The Senate is emitting an embarrassing level of emotional policy twitching on the topic of Iraq. Sen. Harry Reid can't take the war anymore. He "knows" it is lost. Sen. Olympia Snowe has just about had it with the Iraqi government. If they don't meet her benchmarks -- that's it. Sen. Mitch McConnell thinks "that the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall, and I expect the president to lead it." Who authored that wall graffiti, he doesn't say. After talking with grieving family members of one of our fallen warriors,...

Whenever I refer to the threat of radical Islam, I am inundated with e-mails chastising me for unjustified alarmism (that is the polite description of the missives)... ... To varying degrees, 27 percent of Moroccans, 21 percent of Egyptians, 13 percent of Pakistanis and 11 percent of Indonesians approve of terrorist attacks on civilians -- and not just American civilians. Extrapolating those percentages to the world Muslim population, roughly 250 million Muslims may approve, under some circumstances, of terrorist attacks on civilians generally. ... It should be remembered that a majority of Germans never voted for Hitler. His high-water mark...

The Imus affair was not about Don Imus; it was — and more importantly, is — about the motives of those who brought him down. And we should be familiar with those motives, because they recur throughout history. They were well articulated in a once-famous speech: "Since virtue (good citizenship) and equality are the soul of the republic... it follows that the first rule of your political conduct must be to relate all of your measures to the maintenance of equality and to the development of virtue... "What is our goal? The enforcement of the constitution for the benefit of...

Now that the Democrats have taken Congress, Rumsfeld has been fired and the Baker boys are in town, ‘cut and run’ is in the air, and the mortal danger we might have avoided is now staring us in the face.... This country, my country, the United States of America, can defeat any foe. We proved that in World War II and again during Desert Storm in 1991. In Korea and in Vietnam our military was placed under ‘politically correct’ constraints that prevented victory and got American soldiers killed; and now in Iraq the same thing seems to have been happening...

The decisions made on Iraq over the next few months will take the measure of America's maturity and sense of responsibility. Because, whether we like it or not, our decisions -- and our decisions alone -- will determine whether the barely containable murderous pathologies of the Middle East will just be dumped into the face of humanity -- or whether rational efforts will be persisted at to contain and mitigate its civilization-threatening forces. We have the most profound obligation to attempt to calculate the consequences of the impending American decision to wash our hands of the Iraq unpleasantness. In that...

Like the Berliners of 1945-46 who picked through the rubble to separate still usable bricks for re-building from that which was destroyed beyond repair, the Republicans now start the same lamentable process of finding something of value in the rubble that was their majority. And just as the Berlin of today is physically both similar to and different from the Berlin that stood before it was flattened during WWII, so, too, the new Republican majority that someday will be rebuilt will be similar but not identical to the one that was constructed in the Reagan-Gingrich era. For both edifices the...

John Stuart Mill once famously called the British Tories "The Stupid Party." From time to time since then, the Tory's American cousin, the Republican Party, has also earned that moniker. Now may be one of those moments. If current polls and anecdotes are to be believed, there may be a million or two conservative Republicans who are planning to not vote this November. Of course, Mill also said that : "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but also by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."...

Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that those who don't take the radical Islamist terrorist threat as seriously as the Bush administration does suffer from a "moral and intellectual confusion." He compared them to the British appeasers of Hitler before WWII. I did a left-wing radio call-in show after the speech in which the callers accused Rumsfeld of calling them pro-Nazi for opposing President Bush on the war. Of course Rumsfeld was suggesting no such thing. But it is worth reviewing the history and meaning of appeasement — both for those who hurl the charge and for those...

Quite surprisingly, what may turn out to be the world's most fitting epigram in our time was uttered by none other than the official spokesman of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, Ghazi Hamad. According to the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Mr. Hamad told his fellow Palestinians to dismiss Israel's responsibility for the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the Gaza Strip. He said it was time for the Palestinians to embark on a soul-searching process to see where they erred. "We're always afraid to talk about our mistakes. We're used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between...

In a remarkable week, nothing was more remarkable than the following announcement (reported, but not sufficiently, by the American media) from the government of Saudi Arabia: "Viewing with deep concern the bloody, painful events currently taking place in Palestine and Lebanon, the Kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] would like to clearly announce that a difference should be drawn between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures carried out by elements inside [Lebanon] and those behind them [i.e. Iran and Syria] without consultation with the legitimate authority in their state and without consultation or coordination with Arab countries, thus creating a gravely dangerous situation...

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, 121-180 A.D. It's an appealing thought, but there is something to say for being in the insane majority. After all, it is decidedly unpleasant to be opposed by an insane majority. You could ask Israel right at the moment -- or for that matter for the past 3,000 years. Whether technically insane, or merely wrong, ignorant, weak, stupid or malicious, the majority of people around the world...

Tuesday's front-page New York Times headline on Hezbollah/Israeli fighting -- "International Force Is Favored, But No Nation Commits Troops" -- was widely received with giggling "Well, duh's!" In a way, it was funny. While the Europeans agreed that international troops should be sent in to stop the fighting, the article ended with a quote that "The Germans recommended the French, the French recommended the Egyptians, and so on." But if one scratches just beneath the surface of the headlines, the great strategic failure of America since Sept. 11, 2001 can be detected in the fourth paragraph of the N.Y. Times...

When General Douglas MacArthur delivered his farewell address to Congress in April of 1951, after President Truman had fired the general during the Korean War, he gave advice that yet can be of value both to President Bush's Democratic Party war critics, and to President Bush and his generals: "[In war], there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory." At the time, MacArthur was criticizing Truman's decision not to seek victory in what was technically...

The Western response to the threat of Iran gaining nuclear weapons is tracking dangerously toward appeasement and failure. It is not yet inevitable -- President Bush has insisted in two State of the Union addresses and currently that he will not permit it to happen. But most government officials in Europe and here, and of course the dominant media, are already deeply into resignation, rationalization and denial. Indeed, in the last couple of years, the absolute exclusion of a military option has become the only "respectable" posture amongst both European and American officials and senior media personages. This rationalizing mentality...

Sunday Shows for 3/23/06This main post is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.Fox News Sunday (Chris Wallace) Meme: Hoekstra & Harman both don't like Negroponte, hurrah, hurrah!Panetta and Duberstein both don't like Bush's men, hurrah, hurrah!And Gilbert Arenas plays online poker at halftime....???? (that's the best I can figure as to why he's on) Topics: Reps. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harman on Iran's nuclear ambitionFormer Chiefs of Staff Leon Panetta and Ken Duberstein on White House shake-upWashington Wizards' star Gilbert...

Consider two hypothetical situations. In the first, a United States Army general officer in a theater of war decides by himself that he strongly disagrees with the orders of the secretary of defense. He resigns his commission, returns to private life and speaks out vigorously against both the policy and the secretary of defense. In example two, the top 100 generals in the Army military chain of command secretly agree amongst themselves to retire and speak out -- each one day after the other. In example one, above, unambiguously, the general has behaved lawfully. In example two, an arguable case...

Listen While You Freep! Five channels, five programs every day and each one playing for 24 hours and on weekends so tune in when it’s convenient for YOU! Call In Number - 866-884-TALK (8255) Heating the EDGE of a New Media! 1pm est- The Right Hour : Remember back to those thrilling days of yesteryear – the “hippy days.” Remember when everyone in Sociology 101 got an A, except you! You got a D because you were naïve. You didn’t realize that you were taking a course in Marxist studies. You weren’t 100 percent certain that the Vietnam War was...