On 9/11 — A Look Back, a Look Forward
The as now, the Arab world’s self-induced pathologies cannot be cured by American self-doubt. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online September 11, 2001, was not just a tragedy, but rather a willful act of war by radical Islamists who hate Western civilization and the American version of it in particular. They achieved, by their […]
Predictably Misleading
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner The one requisite in a presidential speech is honesty. Without it, nothing else matters. The president’s speech last night was incoherent in its call to be ready at some future day to use force that he just recently insisted must be used immediately.
Brotherhood Imposes Jizya Tribute on Egypt’s Christians
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com Now that the attacks on Egypt’s Christian churches have subsided, stage two of the jihad — profiting from the fear and terror caused by stage one — is setting in:reports are arriving that the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters are forcing the roughly 15,000 Christian Copts of Dalga village in south Minya […]
Syrian Knowns and Unknowns
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 1) Red lines: Does anyone believe we would be on the eve of a war with Syria had not Barack Obama on two occasions — echoed on two others by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — warned Bashar Assad of red lines surrounding the use of WMD?
A Bare-Chested Machiavelli
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner It is unfortunate that Vladimir Putin could not use his formidable diplomatic skills at home to address his own near failing state rather than showcasing them abroad at our expense. Oh, well . . .
Obama’s Farce
He sold his plan for bombing Syria on flawed political assumptions. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online To support the president’s enforcement of his red line in Syria requires suspensions of disbelief. Here are several. I wish it were not true, but there is scant evidence that the world, led by the U.S., […]
Now What?
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner Everyone can agree that Obama’s handling of the crisis has been puerile, and that there now are only the proverbial bad and worse options—the result being not whether the U.S. loses credibility, but only how much and for how long. So what comes next?
A Fundamental Absence of Seriousness
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner We are told hypocrisies are Obama’s problem: Republicans who are usually pro-war don’t support this war only because of Obama; Democrats who are usually anti-war can’t support this war for Obama without being shown up as sudden pro-war hypocrites.
If It Wasn’t Syria, It Would Have Been Something Else
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner It is very possible that the president will not obtain a join authorization to bomb Syria; if he chooses to go ahead and attack anyway, Obama will incite a constitutional crisis—the first time in history that a president has decided to go to war against the declared wishes of […]
On Poking Animals and Other Stupid Things
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner There are lots of reasons why many of us who would like to punish the Assad-family regime for its long history of anti-American and savage and genocidal conduct fear the present course is unwise, not in America’s interest, and dangerous — at least as it has so far […]
Syria In Historical Context
What lessons does the past have for President Obama’s policy? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama’s on-and-off-again planned American attack on Syria is nothing new. Besides its five declared wars, America has a habit of intervening all over the world.
Counterintuitively Risky
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner Ostensibly, even an intervention of the most restricted sort in Syria, given the loud proclamations of the limited nature of cruise-missile attacks, should not pose geostrategic risks anything like costlier major ground operations of the sort we conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Putin Puts Obama in Hot Seat: ‘What Will You Do If Rebels Are Ones Using Chemical Weapons?’
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strange way of speaking straightforwardly, without all the artificial and “morally superior” airs one expects from Western politicians. Earlier, for example, he wondered why Western leaders were supporting cannibals in Syria: You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not […]
Bad Reasons for Bombing Syria
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine President Obama Saturday laid out the case for a military strike on Syria. He evoked the same rationales Secretary of State Kerry and others, including some conservatives, have been articulating for the last week. We’ve heard of “international norms,” “common understandings of decency,” the “international community” that codified a “normal prohibition against chemical […]
Now What?
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online What are the president’s strategic objectives in the present mess? Does he know? There are four general strategic options — predicated on the political fact that either the Congress will approve the operation or that the Obama administration will ignore it if it doesn’t, and that Obama is not worried about either the […]
Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex
Was the MTV performance meant to be repellent rather than enticing? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online An older generation used to call the boredom of bad habits “reaching rock bottom”; the present variant perhaps is “jumping the shark” — that moment when the tiresome gimmicks no longer work, and the show is over.
Obama Indicts Obama
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy.
The Israeli Spring
Israel’s enemies are doing more damage to each other than Israel ever could. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders. The Arab Spring has thrown Israel’s once-predictable […]
Is The War to Save Face or Save Lives?
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Click here to see the symposium of PJ columnists analyzing the pros and cons of an intervention in Syria. Most of the arguments pro and con for an intervention in Syria have already been made.