Sunny California Caught by Gathering Storm
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services California’s weather is nearly ideal. The soil is the nation’s richest. There is a 1,000-mile coastline and endowments of fishing, timber, petroleum and water. In less than a century, our ancestors created Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as well as booming agribusiness, tourism and trade.
Unsung Victories
The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat’s Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as a kind of memorial. Suddenly, […]
The Folly of a Nuclear Iran
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Despite the bleak preventative options, no one wants to permit Iran to go nuclear. Yet if strategists despair over the methods of stopping Iran’s bomb, few have explicitly outlined why we should even try.
Fight Over Flight: Staying Power
by Victor Davis Hanson The New Republic With the increasing violence leading up to this week’s Iraqi elections for 275 seats in a new national assembly, a despair emerged in some U.S. circles that 150,000 American troops and their coalition allies could never really maintain security.
Why Democracy?
Ten reasons to support democracy in the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Neoconservatives hope that a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan can usher in a new age of Middle Eastern consensual government that will cool down a century-old cauldron of hatred.
Postmodern War
Weaker enemies have learned to use our strengths against us. This time, they’ll lose. by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal It is still suicidal to meet the United States in a conventional war—at least for any enemy that has not fully adopted Western arms, discipline, logistics, and military organization.
The Boxer Metaphor
by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers A shorter version of this was syndicated by Tribune Media Services. The symbolism of the recent heated exchange between Senator Boxer and Secretary-of-State Rice was telling.
The Distorted View of Israel
by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Joshua Muravchik, Covering the Intifada. How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising (The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy).
The Global Throng: Why the World’s Elites Gnash Their Teeth
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Do we even remember “all that” now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the “root causes” to explain why America may have “provoked” spoiled mama’s boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work?
Distortion’s Feedback Loop
by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A review of Covering the Intifada: How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising, by Joshua Muravchik (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy)
The Hard Road to Democracy
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Fostering elections in Iraq is a hard road, well apart from the daily violence of the Sunni Triangle. The autocratic Sunni elite of surrounding countries prefers democracy to fail, warning us that an Iranian-sponsored theocracy will surely follow in Iraq, legitimizing a new Arab Khomeinism.
Has Iraq Weakened Us?
by Victor Davis Hanson Commentary Magazine Whatever the results of the elections scheduled for late January in Iraq, a new pessimism about that country, as well as about the larger war on terror, has taken hold in many circles in the United States.
Strange Politics: The Rise of the Not-So-Conservative Conservatives
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There are several issues ahead, such as immigration, deficits of all sorts, and energy dependence, that have the potential to erode conservatives’ appeal to the general public.
Stories of Imperial Collapse Are Getting Old
by Victor Davis Hanson New Criterion The most recent doom-and-gloom forecast by Matthew Parris of the LondonTimes would be hilarious if it were not so hackneyed. After all, Americans long ago have learned to grin any time a British intellectual talks about the upstart’s foreordained imperial collapse.
Illegal Immigration Is a Moral Issue
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services As President Bush’s guest worker proposals slog through Congress, new reports suggest that there may be not 8 million, but almost 20 million illegal aliens in the United States, a population larger than most entire states.
Idealism and Its Discontents: Thinking on the Neoconservative Slur
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Neo- is a prefix that derives from the Greek adjective veos — “new” or “fresh” — and in theory it is used inexactly for those conservatives who once were not — or for those who have reinterpreted conservatism in terms of a more idealistic foreign policy that eschewed both Cold […]
Will Abbas Bring an End to Conflict?
Abbas must stop the murder of Israelis by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Just as in the days after the death of Arafat, the Palestinian elections have sparked an outburst of international optimism that perhaps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can begin to be resolved.
Islamicists hate us for who we are, not what we do
by Victor Davis Hanson Chicago Tribune Co. As the third recent Middle East election nears in Iraq, Americans are still puzzled over why well-off Islamic fundamentalists crashed planes into skyscrapers and now send mercenaries to the Sunni Triangle to slaughter us as we sponsor democracy.
Triangulating the War
Yesterday’s genius, today’s fool, tomorrow’s what? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Reading the pages of foreign-policy journals, between the long tracts on Bush’s “failures” and neoconservative “arrogance,” one encounters mostly predictions of defeat and calls for phased withdrawal — always with resounding criticism of the American “botched” occupation.
Heartbreak Aside, Iraq Progresses
by Victor Davis Hanson This column was syndicated by the Herald Tribune Co. and appeared in newspapers last weekend. This New Year, Americans should reflect on what we have accomplished in more than three years of hard war since being attacked on Sept. 11. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein are gone — but without the envisioned […]