Max Boot

GOP should stay the surge

July 2, 2007

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR's comments on Iraq came like a clap of thunder in the sultry summer skies of Washington. The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared in a widely covered speech last week that he doesn't think "the current 'surge' strategy will succeed" and that we should therefore "downsize the U.S. military's role in Iraq." Other Republicans also have expressed frustration and impatience with the war effort, warning that they may start to defect unless there are substantial signs of progress by September, which is unlikely.

An Iraq success story

April 24, 2007

'A FEW WEEKS ago you couldn't drive down this street without being attacked. When I went down this street in February, I was hit three times with small-arms fire and IEDs." Col. John Charlton was describing Ramadi as we drove down its heavily damaged main street, dubbed Route Michigan by U.S. forces. Even though this was an unlucky day — Friday the 13th (of April) — we did not experience a single attack on our convoy of Humvees.
Alarm over Iran helps Bush

March 7, 2007

IS THAT trigger-happy gunslinger in the White House about to take aim at Iran?
Going it alone because we have to

February 28, 2007

TONY BLAIR'S decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is understandable. The prime minister had to make a difficult decision about where to allocate Britain's scarce resources, and he decided, reasonably enough, that the top priority was to send reinforcements to Afghanistan, where 5,500 British troops are struggling to hold back a Taliban onslaught.
Is Iraq turning into Yugoslavia?

February 21, 2007

THE IRAQ DEBATE is starting to resemble the Yugoslavia debate of the early 1990s. Once again we are hearing that crazed foreigners are in the grip of ancient ethnic hatreds and that the U.S. has no cause to get involved in their internecine strife. Ironically, some of those now making this "realist" argument resisted its spurious logic 15 years ago. They were right to do so then, and they would be tragically mistaken were they to succumb to the siren song of nonintervention today.
Putin: the louse that roared

February 14, 2007

THE AMERICAN delegates to last weekend's Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual transatlantic gathering of policymakers and defense experts, were not predisposed to embrace Vladimir Putin after we learned that the Russian president's entourage had booked more than 100 rooms in the conference hotel, the stately Bayerischer Hof, relegating most of us to a ho-hum Hilton in the hinterlands. (It could have been worse. As one journalist joked, if President Bush had been in attendance, the White House would have taken so many rooms that we would have been commuting from Lichtenstein.)
Keys to a successful surge

February 7, 2007

WHILE politicians debate whether more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq, just as important is how those troops will be utilized. In the Boer War, a "surge" of soldiers helped. In the Vietnam War, it didn't. The difference is that the British had a sounder strategy.
No better idea

January 17, 2007

PRESIDENT BUSH'S plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq has not, to put it kindly, been well received. But does anyone have a better idea?
The media aren't the enemy in Iraq

January 10, 2007

IF WE WIND UP losing the war in Iraq, as now appears likely (though not inevitable), many conservatives know who to blame: the press, or, in blogger-speak, the MSM (mainstream news media). Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.
Hitler's Mideast helpers

December 20, 2006

MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust really occurred. The answer from such "scholars" as David Duke, the notorious former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, was a resounding no.
Throw the Iraq report in the trash

December 13, 2006

BLUE-RIBBON panels are easy to mock, but some actually do perform a valuable service. The base-closing commissions, for example, were able to close down military installations that weren't needed but that Congress couldn't pull the plug on. The 9/11 commission produced a definitive and enthralling account of the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
Max Boot: Who likes Ike?

November 1, 2006

THE 50TH anniversary of the Suez Canal crisis and the Hungarian Revolution, which both came to a head in October 1956, should spark another look at the president who presided over these two fine messes.
Max Boot: America's Wilsonian Instinct

October 11, 2006

THERE ARE few epithets more damning in American politics than "Wilsonian." It carries connotations of purblind self-righteousness, of senseless moralizing, of good intentions gone awry. Granted, most of those pejoratives apply to Woodrow Wilson, whose failures in peacemaking after World War I are notorious and helped set the stage for World War II. The fiasco in Iraq will undoubtedly strengthen the demonization of the Wilsonian impulse that was said to have animated the invasion.
Max Boot: The Stubbornly Hopeful President

September 20, 2006

THE BODY COUNT continues to mount in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military situation continues to deteriorate. On the home front, Democrats appear resurgent, and Republicans are bracing themselves for losses in November.
Staying the wrong course in Iraq

June 28, 2006

FOR THE LAST three years, the Bush administration has pursued a policy of wishful thinking in Iraq, operating under the hope that some deus ex machina — either elections or the capture of insurgent leaders — would salvage a deteriorating situation. Well, Iraq has now had three successful nationwide ballots. Saddam Hussein has been captured. Abu Musab Zarqawi has been killed. And still violence continues to intensify in Baghdad and the Sunni provinces to the west and north.
Max Boot: NATO's Afghanistan challenge

June 21, 2006

THE NORTH Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 to contain communist expansionism in Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the widespread expectation was that NATO would go the way of the Warsaw Pact. Instead, the alliance's role has grown since the end of the Cold War. In 1995, it fought its first war, to pacify Bosnia, followed by the 1999 conflict over Kosovo, where a NATO peacekeeping contingent remains. But it is in Afghanistan, a country about as remote as you can get from the Fulda Gap in Germany — where NATO once prepared to fight the Red Army — that the North Atlantic alliance faces its latest, greatest test.

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