Most aggressors take stupid risks only when they feel they won’t be stopped. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The world seems to be falling apart. Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to […]
Only Deterrence Can Prevent War Read More »
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine To read Part I, click here. In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: “So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are
Nothing to Do with Islam, Part 2 Read More »
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a
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An unusual calm for history’s constant cauldron. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online From the deck of a ship on the Mediterranean, the islands that pass by appear as calm as the weather. Huge yachts, not warships, are docked in island ports. I haven’t seen a naval officer in ten days. But it
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by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Everything that Barack Obama touches seems to turn to dross. Think of it for a minute. He inherited a quiet Iraq [1] (no American combat deaths at all in December 2009 [2]). Joe Biden bragged of the calm that it would be the administration’s“greatest achievement.” [3] But by pulling out all U.S. peacekeepers — mostly for a
The Un-Midas Touch Read More »
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
How to lose battles and gain sympathizers. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Once again neighboring enemies are warring in diametrically opposite ways. Hamas sees the death of its civilians as an advantage; Israel sees the death of its civilians as a disaster. Defensive missiles explode to save civilians in Israel; in Gaza, civilians are
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by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is
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by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to
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Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void thus created, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”
America’s Middle East Dilemma Read More »