There is a tragic monotony to the latest massive human migration, this one involving Syrians fleeing their war-torn country.
Whether the migrants are from Mexico, the Islamic world, or elsewhere, it is always the same: Migrants flock to the West.
Continue reading “Why Do Migrants Always Flock to the West?”
by Victor Davis Hanson // Ricochet
One hundred and fifty years ago this September 2, William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta after a brilliant campaign through the woods of northern Georgia. While Grant slogged it out against Lee in northern Virginia all through the late spring and summer of 1864—the names of those battles still send chills up our collective spine: Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor — Lincoln’s reelection chances were declared doomed. All summer, General George McClellan reminded Americans that he had once gotten closer to Richmond than had Grant and at far less cost — and promised that, under his presidency, the war would end with either the South free to create its own nation or to rejoin the Union with slavery intact … but that in either case the terrible internecine bloodletting would end. Then Sherman suddenly took Atlanta (“Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”); McClellan was doomed and the shrinking Confederacy was bisected once again.
What was to be next? Southerners grew confident that the besieger Sherman would become the besieged in Atlanta after the election, as his long supply lines back to Tennessee would be cut and a number of Confederate forces might converge to keep him locked up behind Confederate lines.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Syria is turning out to be a sort of Spanish Civil War of our age, with Hezbollah and Iran playing the role of fascist Italy and Germany, and the Islamic nations and jihadists that of Stalin’s Russia, as the moderates disappear and the messy conflict becomes a proxy war for greater powers, with worse to come. Continue reading “Intervention in Syria Is a Very Bad Idea”
by Bruce S. Thornton
Defining Ideas
Just in the last few months, events have hastened to a crisis in Iran’s long confrontation with the West. Continue reading “Iran on the Brink”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
A Teen-age President in Search of an Adult Identity
Barack Obama keeps looking for a presidential identity not his own [1]. In 2008, he wished to be JFK—whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. Continue reading “The President Who Never Was”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Defining Ideas
William Shawcross, the British journalist, historian, and human rights advocate — once a fierce critic of the Nixon-Kissinger years, now a defender of the West’s struggle against radical Islam — has written the best book yet on the dilemmas Western governments face in dealing with Islamic terrorists.1 Continue reading “The American Way of War”