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. Continue reading “A Fundamental Absence of Seriousness”
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. Continue reading “Syria In Historical Context”
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. Continue reading “Counterintuitively Risky”
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 only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Continue reading “Putin Puts Obama in Hot Seat: ‘What Will You Do If Rebels Are Ones Using Chemical Weapons?’”
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 weapons” in the Chemical Weapons Convention, the need to act to deter other rogue states like Iran, and the imperative to punish “crimes against humanity.” Continue reading “Bad Reasons for Bombing Syria”
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. Continue reading “Obama Indicts Obama”
by Raymond Ibrahim // Jihad Watch
By now it should be obvious that whenever the U.S. interferes in another nation’s politics in the name of “human rights,” that that is only 
a pretext. So it is in Syria, as Obama prepares to plunge America in a war with that nation, and, inevitably, its allies. The United States’ stated reason for intervention, as articulated by John Kerry, is that Syrian President Assad used Continue reading “Obama Crosses Red Line by Supporting Jihadi Terrorism”
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
Remember the “contrary” Sioux warrior from Little Big Man? He did everything backwards––said “hello” for “goodbye,” washed in sand instead of water. Our president is the foreign policy contrary. He has gotten backwards every maxim of proven wisdom for dealing with the rest of the world. Teddy Roosevelt counseled, “Speak softly and carry 
a big stick,” but Obama has spoken loudly and carried a little stick. Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.” Obama can be always counted on to do the wrong thing––before he’s tried anything else. The Roman general Sulla was “no better friend, and no worse enemy.” Continue reading “Our Contrary President”
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
We all want democracy to thrive and flourish, but can it?
The Obama administration was quite pleased that the anti-democratic Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had come to power through a single plebiscite. That confidence required a great deal of moral blindness, both of the present and past. Continue reading “Democracy’s Dog Days”
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Sometime in the mid-first century a.d., an otherwise little known consular official, Gaius Petronius, wrote a brilliant satirical novel about the gross and pretentious new Roman-
imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the Roman agrarian republic of old had degenerated into a wealth-obsessed, empty society of wannabe new elites, flush with money, and both obsessed with and bored with sex. Most of the Satyricon is lost. But in its longest surviving chapter — “Dinner with Trimalchio” — Petronius might as well have been describing our own 21st-century nomenklatura.
For the buffoonish libertine guests of the host Trimalchio, food and sex are in such surfeit that they have to be repackaged in bizarre and Continue reading “An American Satyricon”