Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stopped by the Reagan National Defense Forum to deliver an address titled, ‘A Time for American Leadership’. What leadership lessons did he have to offer? “I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS,” he told his audience. “Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles. So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.” He then went on to lecture that “we will continue to press Israel to protect civilians” and” that “protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative.” Gen. Austin headed Central Command from 2013 to 2016. Obama officials blamed Austin for telling Obama that ISIS

World War III is everywhere and nowhere. Politicians and pundits predict it and warn about it as they’ve been doing for 70 years. And for all of that time we’ve been fighting World War III. Is WWIII in Iran or Ukraine? Yes in its own way. Is it in the confrontations in the South China Sea, the Hamas attack on Israel or in the riots in the streets of our own cities? Also all yes. Not to mention cartels smuggling drugs and foreign influence operations being run in D.C. And it’s in a thousand other incidents and crises, some that make the news and some that don’t, but that are all around us and others which have long become part of our history. It’s all WWIII. “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” Einstein was quoted as saying. But Albert was as good at physics as he was bad at politics and he had it the wrong way around. It’s WWIII that‘s fought with stones. The atomic bomb, but not just it, had ended world

A third of the way into his article , “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way”, David Petraeus, former head of Central Command, who led forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then headed the CIA, admits the war was never going to end. “Some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to ‘flip’ the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning,” he writes. "When we recognized that we couldn’t 'win' the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just 'manage' it," Petraeus complains. Managing the war would mean a permanent military presence in Afghanistan. There was never any serious plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nation building, Petraeus argues, “was not just unavoidable; it was essential”. “How else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow

Over 70 days into the Ukraine war, no one knows how it’s going to end. But the one thing that we can be sure of is that it’s going to pick up again where it ends this time around. The war is the latest episode of a nationalist territorial conflict going back centuries. And those don’t go away until the people fighting them do. Progressive theories of history spent the last century predicting that wars were on the way out in a more enlightened age. Then two world wars shattered the civilized world and nearly led to a third even more devastating conflict. And yet westerners are still prone to believing that war, which has been around for as long as mankind, is one of those old-fashioned barbaric things, like mutton chops, disco, and Joe Biden, that is about to go out of style in the wonderfully enlightened world of tomorrow. It’s not. Very few of our conflicts are even new. Most are “endless wars” of tribe, race, religion or national identity that have been around for hundreds or even th

Bill Clinton was ambiguous about the definition of “sex” and “is”. Barack Obama is uncertain about what the definition of “war” might be. And wars are central to the duties of the man in the White House. Whether or not we’re in a war depends on who you ask and on which day of the week you ask him. Secretary of State John Kerry said that bombing ISIS in two countries wasn’t a war. After the White House spokesman said it is a war, Kerry agreed that maybe it might be a war after all. Forget about finding a strategy, this administration can’t even agree on whether the thing that it needs to find a strategy for is a war. Democrats don’t like the “W” word. They bomb more countries than Republicans do, but they find a prettier name for it. One of the first things that Obama did in Iraq was to change the name of the war. It was no longer Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was now Operation New Dawn. Even though there were 50,000 troops in Iraq, the combat mission was officially over. The 50

Most people who have gone to the movies think they know General Patton's famous speech to the Third Army. They think they know it but they don't, because the speech was too harsh and obscene for the eponymous film and was censored so that it could receive a PG rating. But war, real war, is not rated PG. It has no rating at all. "When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea... My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksucke