In November, Barack Obama, who had avoided commenting on the Democratic presidential primary, came out forcefully in opposition to the extreme positions taken by some leading progressive contenders, positions that could cause the Democrats to be beaten by Trump in the 2020 election. Obama was a very popular president among Democrats, and what he has... Read More

The leadership of the District of Columbia—aka Washington, D.C.—and most Democratic political figures are fired up to make the District the 51st state. The dominant complaint is that residents of the District suffer from “taxation without representation,” a major slogan of the American Revolution. But this appealing claim for voting rights is really a tip-of-the-iceberg... Read More

About Joe Biden, President Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote: “He’s a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national... Read More

After Carthage had been significantly weakened by Rome in the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), Cato the Elder, a leading Roman senator, is said to have ended all his speeches with the words: "Carthago delenda est!" ("Carthage must be destroyed!"). This destruction ultimately took place in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC). A... Read More

On March 21, 2019, former governor of Pennsylvania and a past Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell stated: “I think all of a sudden, the 2020 election went from a slam dunk for Democrats to something where we're going to have trouble beating this guy [Trump] because he's going to make Democratic socialism swing to... Read More

“I have spent a good third of my professional life working to convince the readers—and often editors—of both Russian and American publications that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the world as we know it.” Thus spake Russian-born journalist and author Masha Gessen, a current heroine of the more intellectual part of the PC hive.... Read More

Israel has considered Iran to be Israel’s major enemy since the end of the Gulf War of 1991. But why, it might be asked, did the neocons promote war with Iraq, rather than Iran, in 2003? The neocons were in accord with Israeli thinking but planned to begin with Saddam’s Iraq, the elimination of which,... Read More

For many years, John McCain has been one of the major war hawks in the Senate, but he was not that way for more than a decade after he was first elected to Congress. When he entered the House of Representatives in 1983, he was a cautious realist, holding the position that U.S. military power... Read More

It was one hundred years ago this month that America entered World War I, which began July 28, 1914. [1] On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress and requested it to declare war on Germany. The Senate would vote in favor of war on April 4 and the House... Read More

The selection of Lt. General H. R. McMaster as Trump’s new National Security Advisor to replace Michael Flynn appears to be the coup de grâce to Trump’s efforts to achieve rapprochement with Russia. McMaster has received profuse praise from all types of mainstream figures: conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans. McMaster’s expressed hostile view of... Read More

The media has generally presented Trump as being ignorant and nonsensical in his discussion of American policies, and one example is his negative references to NATO as obsolete. The mainstream media is aghast that any political leader of the U.S. could possibly take a negative view of such an allegedly iconic alliance as NATO. A... Read More

During the latter decades of the Cold War with Soviet Russia, the charge of being “unpatriotic” or “anti-American” caused American liberals (excluding those who had to rely on the votes of regular Americans to hold political office) to burst into spasms of ridicule and howls of “Red-baiting,” “war-mongering,” “witch-hunting,” and “fascism.” Sophisticated folks, liberals implied,... Read More

The mainstream media’s narrative that the Russian government interfered with the United States election, and that this interference invalidated, or at least tainted, Trump’s election has culminated in President Obama taking a series of measures against Russia, which consist of: imposing sanctions on the GRU and the FSB (the two major Russian intelligence organizations), four... Read More

Alison Weir’s relatively short book covers the history of Zionism in the United States from the last decades of the 19th century until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. (She is working on a second volume that will carry this history to the present.) Its brevity does not mean, however, that it... Read More

Edward M. House, usually referred to as "Colonel" House, gained fame as President Woodrow Wilson's closest advisor, playing a significant role in Wilson's major domestic and foreign policies. House was essentially Wilson's alter ego. Wilson would say in 1912, less than one year after first meeting House, "Mr. House is my second personality. He is... Read More

The antiwar Left would prefer that old-style American imperialism and the quest for oil had caused the Iraq War. They are the preferred enemies of the Left. They are the traditional villains. And they are safe villains. Mentioning Israel as a culprit would cause problems: it would lose support for the Left among activist Jews,... Read More

The elephant in the room that no one is supposed to mention is the role of the supporters of Israel in shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East. Their role has become especially apparent with the American attack on Iraq and the subsequent American policy toward Iran and Syria, in all of which the... Read More

When the Bush I administration fought the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, with a bombing campaign and brief ground invasion, the American people were in ecstasy over a victory that was quick and (at least for Americans) largely bloodless. And unlike the case with Bush II's war, the United States was able to escape... Read More

The prevalent view of World War II is that of the “good war”—a Manichaean conflict between good and evil. And a fundamental part of the “good war” thesis has to do with the entrance of the United States into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. According to this view,... Read More

In an apparent effort to illustrate political simple-mindedness, Carroll Quigley derisively wrote in his noted (at least by the John Birch Society) Tragedy and Hope, that the “same groups who were howling about Soviet espionage in 1948-1955 were also claiming that President Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor.”[1] In a previous contribution to The Occidental... Read More

The failure to uncover Saddam's alleged arsenal of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) during the three months since the fall of his regime has fueled a great outcry from critics of the war and evoked various defenses from war apologists. Thus a review of the whole Iraq WMD issue is appropriate. Since efforts have been... Read More

In a lengthy article in The American Conservative criticizing the rationale for the projected U.S. attack on Iraq, the veteran diplomatic historian Paul W. Schroeder noted (only in passing) "what is possibly the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy — security for Israel." If Israel's security were indeed the real American motive for... Read More

I offer here what might be called a moderate revisionist account of the September 11 terror and the origin of the U.S. "war on terrorism." The official story permeating the major media runs something like this: the U.S. war on Afghanistan was simply an ad hoc response to the horrific events of September 11, which... Read More