Most of what Americans have heard about the Tet Offensive is wrong. The brief battles in early 1968 during the Vietnam conflict marked the dividing line between gradual progress toward possible victory and slow descent to a humiliating defeat. That the enemy was handily defeated on the ground was considered immaterial; that it could mount attacks at all was deemed a military triumph for the Communists. This persistent view of Tet is a defeatist story line that continues to inspire America’s foreign enemies and its domestic critics of the use of force abroad.In This Time We Win, James S. Robbins at last provides an antidote to the flawed Tet mythology still shaping the perceptions of American military conflicts against unconventional enemies and haunting our troops in combat. In his re-examination of the Tet Offensive, Robbins analyzes the Tet battles and their impact through the themes of terrorism, war crimes, intelligence failure, troop surges, leadership breakdown, and media bias. The result is an explosion of the conventional wisdom about this infamous surge, one that offers real lessons for today’s unconventional wars. Without a clear understanding of these lessons, we will find ourselves refighting the Tet Offensive again and again.
We are living in an age of unprecedented upheaval. The future of Western culture is uncertain. America’s economic and political vitality are more fragile than ever. The preservation of tradition is far from guaranteed.Many have observed that we are living through a world historical moment of which Hegel spoke: a time when many of the traditional assumptions about the shape and future of culture are suddenly in play. As The New Criterion embarks on its fourth decade of publication, the magazine commemorates its commitment to the civilizing values of informed criticism with the publication of Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval.Compiling the writings of some of the greatest essayists of our time, Future Tense examines this pivotal period through a variety of lenses. Beginning with a meditation on memorials after the 9/11 attacks (Michael J. Lewis), the essays address patriotism in relation to Pericles (Victor Davis Hanson), twenty-first century American pride and leadership (Andrew Roberts), the future of religion in America (David Bentley Hart), and the unwinding of the welfare state (Kevin D. Williamson). Continuing this arc, pieces examine self-knowledge and modern technology (Anthony Daniels), the cultural capital of museums (James Panero), and the difficulties of making law in the modern world (Andrew C. McCarthy). In its penultimate essay, the book explores the possibility of a forthcoming political revolution (James Piereson), then closes with a reflection of culture’s role in the economy of life and the fragility of civilization (Roger Kimball).Taken together, these prominent writers demonstrate an acute understanding of the value of Western thought as well as the challenges it faces. Future Tense is an engaging discourse on the prospects of society and an important collection for anyone concerned with the longevity of traditional culture.
America finds itself in a moment of profound and complex governing challenges. A crushing recession followed by a feeble recovery have shaken the foundations of our financial and economic system. We are struggling with the exploding costs of health-care and entitlement spending, and fiscal disaster looms as our society ages. American families are anxious about wage stagnation, barriers to social mobility, and the nation’s competitiveness in an era of globalization. Meanwhile, our large governing institutions — most of them designed several decades ago — are showing signs of strain and decay, calling out for serious reform. National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays on domestic policy and political economy, was launched in 2009 to help Americans think more clearly about these problems and to develop promising solutions. This book is a collection of some of the most timely and concrete policy proposals published in the journal’s pages, offering ideas for reforming our welfare state, our tax system, financial regulation, monetary policy, education, state finances, and more. Each essay was written by a prominent expert in the field—the authors are all notable right-leaning academics, policy experts, former government officials, or think tank scholars with national reputations. The book thus comprises a ready-made domestic policy agenda for conservative policymakers (including a Republican president, should one be elected in 2012), based on the latest and best thinking from the world of conservative policy intellectuals. It will be the only resource of its kind in this election year—a one-stop-shop for conservative policy ideas.
With biting wit and amusing personal anecdotes, Harry Stein’s I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican chronicles the everyday travails and triumphs of the plucky conservatives marooned in the liberal bastions that loathe them, from Manhattan to Hollywood, to all the noxious places in between. Surrounded by the insufferably smug and self righteous – from the angry old lady with the anti-war sign affixed to her walker to the random jerk at a dinner party quoting George Soros – these intrepid souls live in a hostile world; knowing that anytime a neighbor chances to learn their views on affirmative action, big government, feminism, the environment, abortion, multi-culturalism, sex education, the reliability of The New York Times, the scariness of evangelicals or (fill in the blank), his/her face will register stunned surprise and deep confusion. Or worse.Stein gives special attention to those conservatives working in professions dominated by the liberal elite—journalism, publishing, entertainment, and academia—celebrating their guts and sharing in their disdain for the dogmatism of the self-appointed creative and intellectual class. The result is a conservative’s guide to love, work, friendship, dinner party mischief, and staying happy and un-smeared in liberal America.  
This is the first and only biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became an iconic figure in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan's UN ambassador and the most forceful presence in the administration, outside of the President himself, in shaping the Reagan Doctrine and fighting the Cold War to a victorious conclusion.Political Woman traces the complex interlock between Kirkpatrick's personal and professional lives using her as yet unarchived private papers and extensive interviews with her and her family and with dozens of friends and associates. The portrait that emerges, filled with character and anecdote, is of an ambitious woman from the epicenter of middle America determined to break through the multi dimensional glass ceilings of her time and place.A pioneering feminist who would be hated by the feminist movement because of her association with Reagan and neo conservatism, she began her career in the post war period as an academic focusing on the subject of totalitarianism. She fell in love with a married man, Evron Kirkpatrick, who had been a close aide to «Wild Bill» Donovan in the wartime OSS and who would help form the CIA after the war.A leading professor at Georgetown, she also became an important Democratic Party activist. Dismayed by what she saw as McGovern's trashing of the Roosevelt coalition and by Carter's capitulation to Soviet advances, she led a group of Democratic liberals who felt homeless in the radicalized and «Blame America First» (a phrase from her famous 1984 Republican convention speech) Party into the Reagan administration. As Reagan's UN representative, Jeanette sharpened the spearpoint of a rearmed America ready to join the final battle of the Cold War, in the process staging dramatic battles with figures like Alexander Haig and George Schultz over policy toward the Soviets, the Cubans, and the Contras.This book tells this parallel story–the flight of centrist liberals out of the Democratic Party and into neoconservatism and the complex chess match of the end game of the Cold War–through the intimate story of a woman who was at the center of these interconnected dramas and who kept resurfacing until her death in 2006, most notably for posthumously breaking ranks with her fellow neoconservatives on the war in Iraq. It also shows the price she paid for her achievements in a private life filled with sorrow and loss as profound as her epic personal achievements.
The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security, but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy—freedom and individual liberty. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy provides a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement’s jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious “Blind Sheikh” and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his national bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter 2008), he explored government’s conscious avoidance of the terrorist threat, which made the nation vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In The Grand Jihad, he exposes a more insidious peril: government’s active concealment of the Islamist ideology that unabashedly vows to “conquer America.” With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn’t merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our midst and gradually foists Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life. The revolutionary doctrine has made common cause with an ascendant Left that also seeks radical transformation of our constitutional order. The prognosis for liberty could not be more dire.
The Great Global Warming Blunder unveils new evidence from major scientific findings that explode the conventional wisdom on climate change and reshape the global warming debate as we know it. Roy W. Spencer, a former senior NASA climatologist, reveals how climate researchers have mistaken cause and effect when analyzing cloud behavior and have been duped by Mother Nature into believing the Earth’s climate system is far more sensitive to human activities and carbon dioxide than it really is.In fact, Spencer presents astonishing new evidence that recent warming is not the fault of humans, but the result of chaotic, internal natural cycles that have been causing periods of warming and cooling for millennia. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not necessarily to be feared; The Great Global Warming Blunder explains that burning of fossil fuels may actually be beneficial for life on Earth.As group-think behavior and misguided global warming policy proposals threaten the lives of millions of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable citizens, The Great Global Warming Blunder is a scintillating exposé and much-needed call for debate.
The 2012 election will be one of the hardest-fought in U.S. history. It is also likely to be one of the closest, a fact that brings concerns about voter fraud and bureaucratic incompetence in the conduct of elections front and center. If we don't take notice, we could see another debacle like the Bush-Gore Florida recount of 2000 in which courts and lawyers intervened in what should have involved only voters.Who's Counting? will focus attention on many problems of our election system, ranging from voter fraud to a slipshod system of vote counting that noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls “the most careless of the developed world.” In an effort to clean up our election laws, reduce fraud and increase public confidence in the integrity of the voting system, many states ranging from Georgia to Wisconsin have passed laws requiring a photo ID be shown at the polls and curbing the rampant use of absentee ballots, a tool of choice by fraudsters. The response from Obama allies has been to belittle the need for such laws and attack them as akin to the second coming of a racist tide in American life. In the summer of 2011, both Bill Clinton and DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz preposterously claimed that such laws suppressed minority voters and represented a return to the era of Jim Crow.But voter fraud is a well-documented reality in American elections. Just this year, a sheriff and county clerk in West Virginia pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent absentee ballots that changed the outcome of an election. In 2005, a state senate election in Tennessee was overturned because of voter fraud. The margin of victory? 13 votes. In 2008, the Minnesota senate race that provided the 60th vote needed to pass Obamacare was decided by a little over 300 votes. Almost 200 felons have already been convicted of voting illegally in that election and dozens of other prosecutions are still pending. Public confidence in the integrity of elections is at an all-time low. In the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2008, 62% of American voters thought that voter fraud was very common or somewhat common. Fear that elections are being stolen erodes the legitimacy of our government. That's why the vast majority of Americans support laws like Kansas's Secure and Fair Elections Act. A 2010 Rasmussen poll showed that 82% of Americans support photo ID laws.While Americans frequently demand observers and best practices in the elections of other countries, we are often blind to the need to scrutinize our own elections. We may pay the consequences in 2012 if a close election leads us into pitched partisan battles and court fights that will dwarf the Bush-Gore recount wars.
Tariq Ramadan is a global phenomenon. A Swiss-born Muslim activist, he is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group credited with inspiring modern Islamic radicalism. Ramadan is fluent in English, French and Arabic. In Europe, he is the most quoted and circulated writer on Islam. His writings are a regular feature of major English-speaking newspapers, but his real message is revealed in his speeches to Muslim groups in France, Africa, and the Middle East. Caroline Fourest has carefully transcribed and translated those speeches and shows that Ramdan's ingenious rhetoric is a Trojan horse, fostering the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian values of fundamentalist Islam on its latest battlefield: Western civilization.