Joshua Muravchik

The illusory dream of democratic socialism lives again.

How might the United States end up in a boots-on-the-ground shooting war with Iran? 

Israel’s Operation Protective Edge was only a week old when Human Rights Watch charged that “Israeli air attacks in Gaza investigated by Human Rights Watch have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war.” The report quoted Sarah Leah Whitson,…

Intellectual error is not necessarily bad. It is sometimes the price of imagination and bold thinking. But it may also be the result of sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, or the venal desire to sell copy. So it is not necessarily good, either.

Since becoming speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has campaigned for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq with surprising fervor, making it sound as if "the war" and George W. Bush were America's only enemies. I had supposed that the Democrats would prefer to keep up a drumbeat of criticism of the…

Just three weeks after Hezbollah invaded Israel, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and causing the deaths of eight others, Human Rights Watch issued a 49-page report about the war that had been ignited by this attack. The title of the report was Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against…

SWITZERLAND'S NOMINATION OF ITS NATIONAL, Jean Ziegler, to membership on the U.N. Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights illustrates in a nutshell (and a nut) why there is so little hope for meaningful reform of the world body.

JOHN KERRY SAYS HE IS "PROUD" of his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War. Why, then, have he and his spokesmen consistently misrepresented them? Indeed the Kerry camp has been so effective in obscuring this history that both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to run…

NO SOONER was Saddam Hussein chased from power than CNN revealed that it had often held its tongue about his savagery for fear of losing access to Iraq and provoking violent retribution. Although the confession was stunning, it was only the most recent chapter in a long story. Tyrannies have often…

IN LAYING OUT HIS BATTLE PLAN for the war against terrorism in his National Security Strategy issued last September, President Bush emphasized two key elements, military force and waging "a war of ideas." The second is less tangible than the first, but no less important. Our victory in the Cold War…

THREE DAYS before abandoning diplomatic activity about Iraq in the U.N. Security Council and delivering an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, President Bush hastily invited reporters to the White House Rose Garden, where he announced a further initiative for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The…

THE TALIBAN MAY BE DEAD, but its propaganda lives on in the European and Middle Eastern press--thanks in part to the tireless machinations of one hard-left professor at the University of New Hampshire and to the willingness, nay, eagerness, of some of our foreign "friends" to believe the worst…

IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, the rulers or cabinet ministers of Iran, Malaysia, Jordan, Syria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia urged America to focus on the "root causes of terrorism." A good case can be made, however, that they themselves are the "root cause." The fact that the September 11…

It Didn't Happen Here

"Sure, it's not going as well or as fast as every"one would like, but it's . . . an alternative to K.Jconflict. The participants are still talking. . . . You take a step forward, a step backward. You go back and try again. What is the alternative? There is no alternative."

In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton crowed that "for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian missiles pointed at American children." As if the fiends in the Kremlin targeted their ICBMs at the under-18 set next, well hear that " they aimed their…

HANKS TO AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI, I found myself clawing through the muddy Indonesian jungle to catch a glimpse of feeding orangutans. This was a brief diversion, a two-hour detour from the city of Medan, in northern Sumatra. Our group was in the country to meet with Indonesian human-rights advocates.…

Tell me what you think of [the 1960s], and I'll tell you what your politics are," once said Joseph Epstein, the editor of the American Scholar. Of course, you might make much the same point about the 1980s or the 1950s, but the 1960s stand out as a decade of particularly intense cultural and…