November 2005

Today, Nancy Pelosi endorsed withdrawal from Iraq. Her statement is a political opportunity for the GOP.

"A U.S. withdrawal would likely lead to carnage on a scale that would dwarf what is now occurring in Iraq."

The House Minority Whip formed a group a few months back "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense," reported Roll Call in September. The rollout of the defense blueprint by Hoyer and his team comes just as some of the…

From Roll Call moments ago: Pelosi Backs Murtha Call for U.S. Withdrawal By Erin P. Billings Roll Call Staff Wednesday, Nov. 30 In a move likely to cause a stir among members of her divided Democratic Caucus, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) on Wednesday endorsed fellow Democratic Rep.…

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting piece on Chinese espionage methods inside the United States. China has spent more than two decades creating a large and varied intelligence infrastructure in the United States, according to US counterintelligence documents. High-profile prosecutions…

John Pike explains in today's Los Angeles Times.

The Defeatniks at Moveon.org may want to look at this before cutting a commercial on this.

EARTHQUAKE DIPLOMACY is in full swing in South Asia after a donor summit recently concluded in Islamabad with international relief aid commitments totaling $5.9 billion to rehabilitate and reconstruct the devastated villages of northern Pakistan and Kashmir. During the proceedings, Pakistan's…

THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency…

It's easy to forget that Senator Ted Kennedy & Company tried their best to defeat the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. It's easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear…

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero hosted a European-Mediterranean summit that ends "with a murmur." From the Los Angeles Times: The desperation of the summit hosts to achieve agreement, any agreement, was revealed during a break in deliberations. A microphone had been left on near…

Today's Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece, "Our Troops Must Stay," by Senator Lieberman who just returned from Iraq. Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism,…

FOOTBALL over the long, long Thanksgiving weekend was not, mercifully, dominated by stories about Terrell Owens. There were recaps, of course, and the TV people seemed reluctant to let go of what had been a very good thing for a very long time. T.O. (such is Owens' celebrity that he is known by his…

GENERAL MOTORS, which, like Ford, lost $1.3 billion in the third quarter, will lay off 30,000 workers and close or downsize 12 plants in a desperate effort to avoid bankruptcy. Kodak is frantically attempting to build its digital business as the use of film declines. Knight Ridder shops for a buyer…

MARY MAPES IS BACK. With her memoir, Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power, the former CBS News producer is trying to write a second act for her career. Sadly, if her book is any indication, her second act is just a repeat of the first.

The Director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, John Walters, delivered a "Progress Report on Anti-Drug Efforts in Colombia" here and here. According to Walters, heroin purity has declined 22 percent between 2003 and 2004, with an increase of 30 percent in price. Yet another…

Yet another Murray Waas bombshell piece -- if you believe the leftwing blogs and liberal pundits -- on Iraq has appeared in the National Journal as a "news feature." The fact that the anti-Bush crowd loves what Waas has to write should come as no surprise. Over the years, he has written for the…

Economist and Weekly Standard contributing editor Irwin Stelzer notes that the New York Times managed "to bury the good news about weekend sales (up 22 percent over last year) by reporting instead, on page 1 of the business section, that mall-based specialty stores are losing out to big stores like…

REP. JACK MURTHA has had a distinguished congressional career. But his outburst last Thursday was breathtakingly irresponsible. Nowhere in his angry and emotional call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq did the Pennsylvania Democrat bother to ask, much less answer, the most…

FOUR THEMES FLOW TOGETHER AT one of the most remarkable points in American history--the evening when Abraham Lincoln for the last time proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. It was April 11, 1865: two days after the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox; four days before…

The Surrender Solution

OVER SOME OBAN SCOTCH RECENTLY, a college friend lamented that Americans are averse to the notion of a wet lunch. I recalled the Sam Adams ad in which two guys at a business lunch order water until an enterprising fellow--clearly destined to be a leader--orders a Sam Adams. Then a gray-haired man,…

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic

THIS PAST SUMMER, AS part of Lincoln Center Festival, 86-year-old master choreographer and onetime virtuoso dancer Merce Cunningham glided into one of the Center's social rooms to be the subject of a festival symposium.

Gambling doesn't destroy people. People destroy people. The gentleman or gentlewoman who decides to gamble makes that decision of his own free will. It's a free market industry, and that appeals to conservatives. --Michael Scanlon AT ABOUT 8 p.m. on the night of September 26, a homicide detective…

Join the Club?

HAS SAN FRANCISCO SECEDED FROM the United States? The passage on Election Day of Measure I, dubbed "College, Not Combat," would seem almost to amount to that. By a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent, San Francisco's voters told military recruiters to stay out of the city's high schools. Although…

American Spartans

Jazz Anecdotes

BOOKS IN BRIEF

FINALLY. For much of the past week, the White House has been engaged in an aggressive effort to defend the case for war in Iraq. Thus far, it has mainly pointed out the obvious: In the months and years before the invasion, many of those who now accuse the White House of misleading the country to…

THE SENATE-APPROVED VERSIONS of next year's Defense authorization and appropriations bills each contain an amendment sponsored by Arizona's John McCain that would, as the commonplace newspaper shorthand has it, "make torture illegal" at Pentagon facilities throughout the world. The House-approved…

MANY HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW THE United States lost in Vietnam, but not former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. When the last American military unit was withdrawn in 1973, the Viet Cong had been defeated and the North Vietnamese army checkmated. For the next two years, "South Vietnam held its own…

LAST MONTH, Islamic radicals threatened to kill actor and Muslim convert Omar Sharif. Sharif had recently played St. Peter in an Italian TV film and spoke highly of the role, saying that he "seemed to hear voices" during filming and that "it will be difficult for me to play other roles from now…

Blackfive.net shares the bravery and courage of Javier's Marine squad in Iraq.

National Review's Victor Davis Hanson has an insightful piece on the "complicated" anger of the Democratic establishment. Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq…

THE WASHINGTON POST doubted that Americans would enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, announcing on the morning of turkey day that 61 percent of Americans are "anxious about money." So anxious, in fact, that the very next day between 130 million and 150 million headed to the malls to spend a sum that…

THIRTY YEARS AGO--before the arena rock of Born in the USA, before the look at a recession-torn America in The River--Bruce Springsteen released what would be his greatest work, Born to Run. The album' release was splashed simultaneously across the covers of both Time and Newsweek and it remains…

THOSE WHO VIEW George W. Bush as a perpetually tongue-tied bumbler might take note of his landmark speech last week in Kyoto, where he eloquently outlined a vision for economic liberalization and democratization throughout East Asia--and which, at its most provocative moment, embraced Taiwan as a…

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

On Sunday, November 20, Democratic Senator Joe Biden peddled the "imminent threat" myth. Here's the exchange he had with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace: WALLACE: I don't think that the vice president ever said anything about an imminent threat. And actually, some Democrats did. BIDEN: Oh, he…

The White House released this document on pre-war intelligence on November 15. Topics addressed include: Foreign Governments That Opposed The Removal Of Saddam Hussein Judged That Iraq Had Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMD). The Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) Was Judged Not To Have Different…

1) "Document Date: Feb-02, Title: ...Training Manual from Al Qaida Chemical Plant regarding Chem Warfare, Description: Contains papers concerning Iraqi officials, prices of equipment, training plans, and actions...all concerning chemical warfare" -- Here 2) "Did Saddam Hussein Account for the VX…

President Clinton told an audience two days ago that he had never "personally" seen any intel linking Iraq and Al-Qaeda and "no one I knew believed that was the case," reported the Westchester Journal-News. Well, the following quotes seem to indicate that the Clinton administration was "deeply…

THE EASY PART is almost over. The Senate Banking committee has declared itself satisfied with Ben Bernanke's responses to its members' not particularly penetrating questions, and overwhelmingly recommended that the full Senate confirm the president's choice to succeed Alan Greenspan for a 14-year…

Newsmax.com's Jason Barnes has set up a web site -- www.whosaiditiraq.blogspot.com -- to compile as many quotes from Democrats on Iraq as possible. If you have any, send them along to whosaiditiraq@gmail.com

On Saturday, the New York Times published an editorial, "A Cold War China Policy," criticizing the president's approach to Beijing. Dan Blumenthal, former senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and current AEI fellow,…

Sarajevo

Vice President Cheney delivered this speech today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Here are some highlights: "All of us understood, as well, that for more than a decade, the U.N. Security Council had demanded that Saddam Hussein make a full accounting of his weapons…

"SOME OF OUR ELECTED LEADERS have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respected their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and they are sending…

The New York Post's Ralph Peters on "How to Lose a War."

RIOTERS IN FRANCE HAVE TORCHED thousands of cars, injured scores of police, burned and shattered dozens of buildings, and killed at least one person. Not knowing what to make of it all, Americans may be forgiven if they file this away as an event that has nothing to do with normal life in France in…

THE NEW PRESIDENT OF THE Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may unintentionally have helped undermine clerical rule in the country with his recent outrageous speeches and remarks against Israel.

Into the Land of Bones

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I remember where I was during the exact hour on July 29, 1981, when Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married. I was in bed asleep, proudly uninterested. Only 11 at the time, I'd already fashioned my lifelong foreign policy toward the Royals. It comes in the form of a question,…

ON VETERANS' DAY, the president fought back. In a major speech Friday at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, President Bush defended the war in Iraq. Most notably, he defended the probity and honesty with which his administration made the case for the war to remove Saddam. At last, the president…

THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM, "the nation's highest civilian award," was established by Harry Truman in 1945 to recognize notable service in World War II. Eighteen years later, John F. Kennedy, prompted by White House aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, decided to revive the moribund honor by…

"THE INDICATION IS THAT we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of flu," warns America's top health official. "In 1918, half a million people died. The projections are that this virus will kill one million Americans . . . "

KATRINA STILL RAGES METAPHORICALLY, and this time she's battering Capitol Hill in the form of budget struggles over everything from entitlement programs to casinos. Members of Congress, aided by lobbyists, are duking it out over what to cut and how to spend, in the face of already bloated federal…

Joe Klein Strikes Back

The Master of Seventh Avenue

THERE ARE MANY REASONS CALIFORNIA governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lost all four of the ballot issues he imprudently placed before the voters in a $300-million special election last week. But among these reasons, education is paramount.

Lipstick Jungle

IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, I had a phone call from a man who identified himself as Maurice Rosenfield. He claimed he had been reading me in magazines for years, said that he had an option on F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and asked if I would mind reading a manuscript he…

Not Entirely Baroque

The Silent Treatment

IN 2004, THE NEW hotbed of Republican voters was the outer suburbs, the so-called exurbs on the distant outskirts of a central city, packed with tract housing, strip malls, chain stores, a megachurch or two, and thousands and thousands of middle class and lower middle class families. President Bush…

BOOKS IN BRIEF

The Last Coach

WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times.

IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, more than several former national security and intelligence officials fashioned new careers as critics of the Bush administration's war on terror. Among the more prominent of these former officials is Daniel Benjamin, who worked for the National Security Council…

From Time Magazine, November 20, 2005: In contrast to the Pentagon's stock answer that there are enough troops on the ground in Iraq, the commanders said that they not only needed more manpower but also had repeatedly asked for it. Indeed, military sources told TIME that as recently as August 2005,…

In the current Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes has a piece on the enormous volume of documents captured in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Hayes writes: There are many such documents in a U.S. intelligence database known as HARMONY. One example: Document number ICSQ-2003-00025586 was captured…

Iraq admitted in 1995 that it had produced nearly four tons of VX, but UN inspectors believed Saddam had imported 600 tons of VX precursors -- enough to produce 200 tons of the nerve agent. VX was clearly important to the regime. According to UNMOVIC's March 6, 2003 report, [i]n a top secret…

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman released the following statement today: Intelligence Chairs Calls for Declassification of Documents Seized in Global War on Terrorism FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Nov. 18, 2005 Intelligence Chairs Call for Declassification of Documents Seized…

AS MY FELLOW MINNESOTAN Garrison Keillor likes to say, I am a tax-and-spend liberal. I have always been one and I suppose I always will be. I'm also a first lieutenant in the United States Army, attending Harvard Law School in preparation for active duty as a Judge Advocate General's Corps officer.…

THE REPORTER called out, "Did you bring a check for $3.5 billion?"

Texas Sen. John Cornyn released the following press statement today: WHO'S PLAYING POLITICS ON IRAQ? While the Minority Leader Complains on the Senate Floor, Democrats Attack The Senate Minority Leader took to the Senate floor this afternoon to accuse the White House of playing politics. [T]he…

The media is all over the comments made by House Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania today. But will the same media cover Sen. McCain's remarks made here? We have told insurgents that their violence does grind us down, that their horrific acts might be successful. But these are precisely the wrong…

Weekly Standard contributor and German Marshall Fund fellow Daniel Twining on the incompatibility of restricting free speech in a globalized information age: Freedom of the press is under attack in much of Asia -- in countries that should know better, like Thailand and Singapore, and perhaps most…

THE MAN who positioned himself as the anti-Chamberlain has nonetheless allowed his presidency to be hijacked by appeasement. For two years, he appeased those who shouted ever louder that he lied about why we went to war in Iraq. At first, no doubt, the president saw those claims as too ridiculous…

[img caption="Hezbollah officials present a Syrian envoy with an Israeli rifle. Right to left: Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah political advisor Hussein Khalil, chief of Syrian troops in Lebanon Gen. Hajjar, and Gen. Rustom Ghazali." float="right" width="600"…

In typical Clinton fashion (and with Bush's poll numbers down), he now says going into Iraq was a "big mistake," but he's glad Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. His remarks remind me of his clever answer to a question on how Gov. Clinton would have voted on the first Gulf War resolution had he…

Some may be found here in the Washington Times and here in the New York Sun. And, here's what Bob Dole had to say yesterday on CNN: I think it's time that President Bush came out slugging. I mean, these guys [the Democrats] have been beating him up for the last six months. And he's hunkered down…

Let's not kid ourselves. The GOP walked right into a Democratic trap yesterday, and the newspaper headlines today are the early result. First, Republicans let months pass before countering the Democratic drumbeat that the President "lied us into war," despite the mountain of material available to…

PRESIDENT BUSH'S DECISION to finally push back against the "Bush lied!" fable paid off in strange ways this past week. Democrats seemed caught by surprise that the president would attack them so frontally on Veteran's Day; the shock caught them flatfooted all weekend long. Senators from the…

The White House released this document in response to this editorial in today's New York Times.

Pathetic.

William Kristol writes: One hopes that a year from now this vote is simply remembered as a minor hiccup on the way to success and victory in Iraq. But one doesn't win a war by showing weakness. And one doesn't win a political fight by half capitulating to one's opponents, and, in effect, accepting…

On April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate…

LAST WEEK'S BOMBINGS in Amman, apparently carried out by Iraqi suicide bombers loyal to Abu Musab Zarqawi, have led to a new round of discussions in both the Western and Arab press as to whether or not the Iraqi insurgency is branching out into other parts of the Middle East. While much of this…

IT IS FINALLY HAPPENING--the much-predicted bursting of the bubble. Surprise: It is the gasoline price bubble that has burst, not the house price bubble. Prices of regular unleaded last week averaged about $2.34 per gallon, below the levels prevailing immediately before Katrina struck, and well…

On April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate…

The invaluable Tom Maguire has an interesting post deconstructing Jay Rockefeller's October 9, 2002, speech explaining why he voted to authorize the Iraq War. Rockefeller is now - and was then - the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Here's another take on Rockefeller's speech.…

American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and frequent Weekly Standard contributor Gary Schmitt writes: Sunday's Washington Post ran a story, "Bush Carries to China a Delicate Diplomacy," by Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler in advance of President Bush's upcoming trip to Asia. The Post article…

ALMOST EXACTLY one year ago, President Bush was reelected with more votes than had ever been cast for a presidential candidate, breaking Ronald Reagan's 1984 record. Not only did Bush sweep to victory by a three million vote margin, the Republicans increased their majorities in both the House and…

WHEN SENATE MINORITY LEADER HARRY Reid abruptly took the Senate into closed session last Tuesday, he sought to portray the move as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to force intransigent Senate Republicans to complete the second phase of an investigation into the use of intelligence before the Iraq…

SINCE 9/11, President Bush and this most convulsive region of the Muslim world have become Siamese twins, inseparably connected in Iraq. If the Iraqi experiment takes--and we will certainly know whether a new democratic Iraq is alive and kicking by the end of the Bush presidency--then President…

YEARS AGO I WAS UTTERLY despondent over the state of American cuisine. A diet frenzy gripped the nation. Supermarket aisles were chock-full of low-fat variants of all that was good and pure--namely, foods made with butter. But then the pendulum began to swing, thanks in part to the late Dr. Robert…

Last week, I suggested that the Bush administration's second-term bear market had bottomed out. Since then, we've been pummeled by polls showing Bush in continued decline. Perhaps my bullish call on Bush was a bit early. Or perhaps it was wrong. Which is it?

An Imaginary White House Attack

Sewanee, Tennessee

Going Sane

Debating Iraq's Future

Beirut

THE FRENCH USE THE EUPHEMISM "quartiers sensibles"--sensitive neighborhoods--for the troubled, predominantly Arab and African working-class suburbs of Paris and other cities that increasingly resemble a ticking bomb at the heart of their society.

THE FINAL REPORT OF PRESIDENT Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform reveals a Republican party shell-shocked by the hostile reception to its Social Security reform plans and deeply ambivalent about the direction to take on tax policy. The underlying drama, rarely acknowledged, is whether the…

PRESIDENT BUSH DIDN'T TAKE THE HINT. Clean house, find fresh blood, replace senior White House staff--and this will assure success in the final three years of your presidency, Bush was told. When he didn't respond, those offering the president advice in public got specific. Get rid of Karl Rove,…

THE PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. Bush has three years yet to run, but this season of scandal and disillusionment is an opportune moment for conservatives to start thinking seriously about the post-Bush era--and particularly how to fashion a domestic policy from the wreckage of Bush-style, big-government…

WHO KNEW THAT THE NATIONAL Gallery of Art possessed one of only two complete, never-bound, original sets of John James Audubon's Birds of America? The other such set reportedly is in Moscow.

I HAVE A THEORY, perhaps a bit patronizing, that few readers will recognize the name of Wayne Booth, who died recently, because . . . it doesn't sound literary. T.S. Eliot or Cleanth Brooks? Yes. Wayne Booth? No. More like a banker or realtor.

The Question of Zion

Last week, I noted that Virginia Governor Mark Warner is now considered a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is traveling to New Hampshire this week on a wave of punditry that declared him one of the "biggest winners" of Tuesday's election. The Washington Post's E.J.…

"'If you have forgotten Halabja, we are ready to repeat the operation,' Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri to the Kurds, reminding them of chemical attacks they suffered," writes the BBC in its report on his death. In light of Saddam's wmd history, the Oil-for-Food scandal, and Iraqi attempts to conceal "its…

The Nation's current editorial throws down the gauntlet against Democrats who refuse to support the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The editors write: We will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her…

VIRGINIA is a Republican state with a habit of electing Democratic governors. And it's really not hard to see why. Democrats run on state issues like education and roads. Democrat Tim Kaine stressed these in handily defeating Republican Jerry Kilgore in Tuesday's election for governor. Kilgore ran…

HAVE YOU NOTICED how terrible the columns in the sports section of your local paper have gotten? It's not that the quality sports writing in general is falling. As Glenn Stout, the editor of the Best American Sports Writing series says, the great sports writing of today is at least as good, if not…

SOMETIMES when I hear music on the radio, I think of the fact that other people are also listening. People possibly not as perfect as me. With pasts and regrets different from my own.

WHEN WALTER WILLIAMS, America's last living Civil War veteran, died on December 19, 1959, the city of Houston gave him a funeral procession the likes of which the town had never before seen. A week of official mourning was declared, and more than 100,000 people lined the streets to salute the…

Sen. John Kerry has released a press statement in response to Sen. McCain's speech on Iraq delivered today at the American Enterprise Institute. Kerry voted for the war but now says he regrets his vote. But his latest position on Iraq seems firm. Military historian Fredrick Kagan explains why Kerry…

WHEN MICHAEL SCHEUER, the first head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, first emerged into public view almost a year ago, it was a curiosity how he could appear in the media--time after time--claiming that there was no evidence of a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda. It was curious…

Virginia's Governor Mark Warner would apparently like to replace the current president in the Oval Office. Next week he is traveling to New Hampshire on a wave of punditry that declared him one of the "biggest winners" of Tuesday's election. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and many others point…

"THE FRENCH," wrote journalist James Cameron, are "an erratic and brilliant people, who have all the gifts except of running their country." By the time French officials tease out just why gangs of disaffected "youths" have been torching cars and attacking policemen, large swathes of the Paris…

ON TUESDAY, November 8, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a previously-postponed hearing, titled "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?" The object of the hearing was to air expert comment on the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 (see here). Specifically, the hearing…

Senator John McCain delivered this speech, "Winning the War in Iraq," today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Some highlights: McCain on … The Courage of the Iraqi People …[A]s we look on events there, let us not forget that the Iraqi people are in the midst of something…

WHILE IRANIAN PRESIDENT Mahmood Ahmadinejad's recent call to wipe Israel off the map has elicited a great deal of much-needed international condemnation, relatively little focus has been paid since to Iran's long-standing support for international terrorism. Thankfully, a recent article published…

Most Americans haven't heard of the International Republican Institute but for over 20 years IRI has helped advance democracy in the world. IRI has monitored elections in over 160 nations with little or no history in democracy -- and supports democracy efforts in many others. IRI recently sent a…

Ellen Bork, a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, emails: Donald Tsang, Beijing's man in Hong Kong, recently completed a pleasant visit to Washington where he faced little criticism over his (read: Beijing's) plan to tweak the process by which Beijing controls the executive and the…

The Bush administration is going on the offense, finally. But to add real punch to their effort they could use an effective advocate who is articulate on television, a first-rate debater, capable of absorbing large amounts of factual data, and not in government. Over a year ago, I attended a speech…

TWENTY-FIVE MONTHS AGO, Arnold Schwarzenegger celebrated his recall win at Los Angeles' Century Park Hotel--dubbed the "Reagan Hotel" for its past Republican victory-night parties. So, naturally, Schwarzenegger returned to the same ballroom to celebrate the end of California's special election.…

JERRY KILGORE lacked the three things needed for a Republican to be elected governor in Virginia. In order of importance, they are: a dynamic campaign, an issue, and a president who's not a burden. So he lost to Democratic Tim Kaine yesterday in an election that Democrats will claim is more…

WHEN THE MEDIA began covering the spreading violence in France, it appeared to go out of its way to avoid the notion that Islam had anything to do with the riots or their organizers. After all, even the French viewed the first couple of nights of unrest with a jaundiced eye. A nation that…

ON SUNDAY, the New York Times and the Washington Post ran stories based on excerpts of a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document provided by Senator Carl Levin, the number two Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The stories concerned the interrogation of Ibn Shaykh al…

FROM NEW YORK CITY'S subways to Baltimore's highway tunnels, October brought repeated instances of local authorities stepping up security in response to terrorist threat warnings. After New York City police decided to scale back their heightened security measures on October 10--just four days after…

Since the 2003 invasion, the failure of the military to secure the airport road has been one of the most reported stories of the war -- and rightly so. As Reuel Gerecht wrote a year ago in the Weekly Standard: The Bush administration ought to admit to itself two obvious facts. First, we are losing…

DOES SENATOR CARL LEVIN believe that Saddam Hussein had nukes?

Let's see. First, the cry of many anti-Bush liberals was that Bush officials "pressured" intelligence analysts to reach the judgments made in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. When that line of attack was torpedoed by two bi-partisan reports-- Silberman/Robb Commission: The…

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President. He ran as a national security hawk and accused the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of conducting a reactive foreign policy in the face of Soviet adventurism. John F. Kennedy pledged to "assure the survival and the success of liberty" while…

IMAGINE A HUNT in which the Master of Fox Hounds is replaced just as the pack picks up the scent. Add a dense fog. That's a good description of the circumstances in which the Federal Reserve Board's monetary policy gurus find themselves as they hunt for the interest rate that will allow the U.S.…

WATERGATE spawned its own subgenre of suspense films featuring various arms of the United States government as the hidden masterminds of evil schemes. The first of these post-Watergate films was 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA researcher (Joe Turner, codename…

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas took to the Senate floor today to respond to critics of the Bush administration's use of Iraq pre-war intelligence. The speech may be found here. Some highlights: I wish to ask my colleagues, did President Clinton lie when he discussed the intelligence that…

A day doesn't seem to go by without Senator Levin spoon-feeding a story to the New York Times or the Washington Post that targets the Bush administration. The latest was Douglas Jehl's piece, "Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence," in Sunday's New York Times (Steve Hayes challenges the…

Yesterday's parliamentary election in Azerbaijan "deteriorated progressively during the counting and, in particular, the tabulation of the votes," reported the OSCE, which monitored the election. Ballot counting was "bad or very bad in 43 per cent of counts observed" and election violations…

ON THE BIG SCREEN, Arnold Schwarzenegger's closest brush with Shakespeare was playing a gun-toting, not-so-sweet prince in Last Action Hero ("something is rotten in Denmark--and Hamlet is taking out the trash"). But with Californians set to decide his reform agenda in Tuesday' special election,…

AFTER A 22-MONTH investigation into the compromising of CIA operative Valerie Plame, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald handed down a five-count indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff,

Editor's Note: Seven months ago, on March 23, the above-named news organizations, along with more than two dozen other companies and membership organizations collectively representing pretty much everyone in American journalism, filed a formal motion concerning the Valerie Plame leak investigation…

INNUMERABLE THEORIES (well, let's say six) have been put forth to explain the phenomenal success of the documentary March of the Penguins. The most obvious is that everyone loves penguins, as opposed to wolves, deer, or mandrills. A recent film by the revered German auteur Werner Herzog, about a…

VISITING THE SPANISH HIGH COURT in Madrid, it is hard to escape the feeling that one has accidentally wandered into a neighborhood police station, instead of a national judicial body that makes headlines all over the world. From the outside, the High Court is an office building like any other in…

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN it was almost fun to confront the Bush-haters and anti-Americans in Britain, where I live. And not only because of my natural love of forensic combat. No, the arguments were fun because my wife, Cita, and I invariably won. Not that we changed any minds, or induced any "I see…

THE STIRRINGS OF A NEW wave of democracy are underway in one of the least probable regions of the world: the Middle East and Central Asia. Elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian territory, and Lebanon, together with rumblings of liberalization in Egypt, are tangible signs of a growing…

LAST WEEK THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S second-term bear market bottomed out. On Monday, Bush nominated as the next Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who of all the leading candidates will be the central banker least hostile to tax cuts and least likely to direct monetary policy to any end other…

Great Moments in Self-Promotion

IF CHUTZPAH WERE A TRADABLE currency, chances are George Galloway could buy out Microsoft. Last week the renegade British member of parliament, always full of bluster, responded to allegations that he lied under oath before a U.S. Senate panel about his financial dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq…

Screaming Beagles

Polio

DON'T LOOK NOW, BUT the political winds may be shifting--back in California's favor. For years the Golden State was said to be the nation's political vanguard, but in the last decade or so it has been anything but cutting-edge. California hasn't been in play in a presidential contest since 1988.…

Classical Music in America

Here's Where I Stand

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Radical Islam's Rules

IN NOVEMBER 1986, THE Iran-contra scandal broke. The White House announced that proceeds from the secret sale of arms to Iran had gone to the pro-democracy contras in Nicaragua to aid their fight against the Sandinista government. The presidency of Ronald Reagan had more than two years to run, but…

LAST FRIDAY, a memo to White House staffers was issued (and released to reporters): Time to go back to class! All White House staffers with security clearances were instructed by the president to attend ethics briefings, including on "the rules governing the protection of classified information,"…

These and many other questions contained in the 9-11 Commission report remain unanswered. For example, page 66 of the report states: In March 1998, after Bin Ladin's public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an…

LAST TUESDAY, Senate Democrats fired the opening shot in the coming battle over prewar intelligence on Iraq when Minority Leader Harry Reid took the Senate into a closed session. The offensive began in earnest this weekend with a New York Times article:

In an upcoming Weekly Standard piece, Steve Hayes writes: For two years Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has led the Democratic assault on the credibility of Bush Administration's claim of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. It is worth moment to examine his credibility on these same issues. In the months…

"The FBI has determined that financial gain, not an effort to influence U.S. policy, was behind the forged documents," reports the Associated Press. Of course, the FBI's finding doesn't fit into the conspiracy theory that's been creating a frenzy on some blog sites. But wait, the FBI must be in on…

A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, "America the Vulnerable," stated that: officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of…

Venezuela's Chavez came to Argentina for the Summit of the Americas with big plans but no one seems to be listening except for the collection of leftists and anarchists chanting in the streets of Mar Del Plata. Chavez, who regularly claims Washington is trying to overthrow him, has said free trade…

SAM MENDES has the unenviable distinction of having directed one of the three most undeserving Best Picture winners in the last 30 years. In 1999, his directorial debut, American Beauty, won the Oscar and then, immediately, began sliding to oblivion. A paint-by-numbers critique of American…

IT'S A TESTAMENT to feminism's success that so many people, over so many years, have been so eager to write its obituary. From the 1970s onward, the public has been treated to regular bulletins announcing that feminism has failed, is finished, has expired of natural causes or been slain in a…

THAT WAS FAST. The ink on Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court was barely dry before the chattering classes fell into feverish debate over how it would influence Italian-American voting patterns. Their ensuing ruminations have confirmed at least three things: (1) Like Paris Hilton and…

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb writes: It used to be that I got to listen to BBC World Service as I rode into work every morning. No more. BBC has been displaced on WETA-FM by On Point, a show hosted by Tom Ashbrook with a pronounced tilt to the left even by NPR standards. The other…

The blog dealt with "sensitive subjects" like freedom and democracy. Beijing is also having a problem with too much democracy in its "village elections" nowadays.

IN 1993 the village of Valmeyer, Illinois, after suffering its fourth major flood in 50 years, voted to migrate to higher ground. They gave up their perilous location, but their attitude was not defeatist: On the contrary, calling their move "Operation Fresh Start," they picked up and ventured to…

WHAT'S CLEAR about Afghanistan's parliamentary elections, which were held on September 18th, is that they will bring to Afghanistan a popularly-elected legislative body working under a constitution for the first time in its history. The new parliament should open for its first session sometime in…

A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, "America the Vulnerable," stated that: officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of…

Here and here explain.

From today's Los Angeles Times: "Business is better than previous years," said Saleh Abed, 34, a Baghdad clothing wholesaler. "Although there is terrorism and the country is going through a very rough time, there is some kind of stability. We have an army. We have police. We have a…

The Bull Moose writes: the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security. It may provide immense partisan satisfaction to flummox the Republicans on a procedural maneuver, but beware of the long-term impact…

EVEN BEFORE THE INDICTMENT of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, many in the mainstream media had already settled on a simple storyline. Valerie Plame's identity was blown, the story goes, by administration officials seeking retribution against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Wilson is often portrayed as…

Within four or five years, [Iraq] could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing high-enriched uranium produced indigenously. Within that same period, it could threaten U.S. territory with nuclear weapons…

Well, Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, commented in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on what U.S. intelligence believed regarding Iraq's nuclear program: The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the…

From Worldwide Standard, October 30, 2005: Surprise, Surprise: The NYT's Frank Rich Ignores Facts that Undermine His Conspiracy Theory For example, Rich writes: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with ''crucial…

From the Worldwide Standard, October 28, 2005: Does the National Journal's "Exclusive" Piece on Pre-War Intelligence Distort the Public Record ? Yesterday, the National Journal publicized an "online exclusive" on the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims. Last night, Chris Matthews…

"How the CIA got the ball rolling on the Plame investigation."

Today's Washington Post has an article on a campaign to restrict military recruiting in Maryland public schools. The anti-military group Leave My Child Alone, based in San Francisco, is aiding the effort, particularly those in liberal Montgomery County, and the national PTA is getting into the act.…

INEVITABLY, liberal angst over the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito has focused on his vote to uphold the entire abortion statute at issue in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, including the spousal notification provision, which was the only part struck down by the rest of the Third Circuit, and later,…

"CONTINUITY." That's what Alan Greenspan's nominated successor is promising the president and the financial markets. But be careful before concluding that Ben Bernanke is simply Greenspan Mark 2. He isn't. My dictionary defines "continuity" as a "logical sequence," not quite the same thing as…