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First, let me keep my promise from yesterday: when you use code WOODS at the link below, you can get in free to the Mises Institute's April 25 event in San Diego: "California's Decline: A Warning to America":
You have to register by April 1 to get free admission. That saves you either $80 or $95, depending on whether you're an Institute member. It pays to be a Friend of Woods!

Now a quick word about this newsletter.

For the most part, people who subscribe see the world the way I do, and even if not everyone agrees with my every judgment (and where would be the fun in that anyway?), they don't consider me to be a complete idiot, and they figure: he probably has good reason for his opinion even if it's opposed to mine. And I appreciate that!

However, I've had a handful of folks write indignantly to take issue with my view of this Iran misadventure. Most of them have simply repeated back to me the slogans associated with the war, which is like writing to tell me in 2020 that we need to flatten the curve -- you think I haven't already heard that a hundred thousand times?

As I've said before, I used to support whatever the U.S. government's military did, no matter the circumstances. It was cool entertainment to watch on TV, and it was a matter of righteous American forces unleashing violent justice on bad guys. What's not to like?

Then I discovered and read the noninterventionist right wing, and I couldn't believe I'd been snookered by this stuff.

The media class and the neoconservatives are two sides of the establishment coin. Simply repeating slogans to me, or being incredulous that I don't accept the slogans, will not change my mind. And certainly nobody who saw through the Covid propaganda should be falling for this.

We should not act as if Pat Buchanan never existed. Pat is a traditional Catholic, and undeceived about Islam. He warned us that Israel wanted war with Iran, and that such a war would not be in the interests of the United States (a vast understatement, that).

Here is where things are right now.

There is a reason that over the decades it's been the military that has pushed back the hardest against the neocons who wanted war with Iran -- a fact the self-appointed super-patriots writing to me so indignantly should have to answer for. No regime has ever been toppled by air power alone. A ground invasion is impossible and a suicide mission given the country's topography -- which, again, is why the military told the last several presidents that it made no sense to try, and why even today the Pentagon has obviously been signaling in a subtle way that they tried to warn against this and that success could not be guaranteed.

Given those two factors, all Iran has to do is just hang on, and the people who ignored military advice to launch this ridiculous adventure will continue to flail about.

We should have listened to a genuine right-winger like Buchanan and avoided all this rather than the neocons, who get everything wrong.

The University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer ain't no leftist (and indeed the most intelligent critics of the war are all right-wing), and he just said in an interview:

The truth is, even if you can force your way through the Strait of Hormuz, it doesn't solve the problem. Because once you're in the Persian Gulf, it's a rich target environment for Iranian cruise missiles, Iranian drones, and Iranian ballistic missiles that can target any ships that are in the Persian Gulf. And furthermore, the Iranians always have the option of just destroying the oil refineries, the oil installations of the Gulf states. So even if the straits are open, there's no oil to go through them.

The Iranians hold almost all the cards here, and it's hard to see how we can solve this problem. How President Trump, who's got himself into this war and got us into the war in the process, can figure out how to get out of it. 

Why aren't U.S. allies helping out? "In large part," says Mearsheimer, "because they understand this is a lost cause."

My friend of 20+ years, Scott Horton, went on the Lex Fridman show several months ago and discussed the entire theater of the disastrous "War on Terror" (how would you like to live in Syria or Libya today, or for that matter Afghanistan?) in great detail.

No regime slogan survived it. Scott talked for ten and a half hours, knowing every detail off the top of his head.

I don't know about you, but I want to learn from a guy like that, as opposed to from Sean Hannity, who knows the 30 seconds worth of slogans his assistants fed him five minutes ago.

Scott feels funny promoting his Scott Horton Academy during a war (or whatever we're calling it), but since it's not my company I feel no such compunction. Not to mention, the war profiteers don't lose sleep over their wartime profits (which come coercively out of your pocket, to boot), so Scott shouldn't lose any over his -- and if ever there were someone who deserved them, it's Scott.

While you're driving your car, learn from Scott so you don't get taken in by the War Party. (The Democrats' extremely weak response reveals what we all know: they have the same allegiances the neocons do, so they de facto support the war. Don't fall for the Democrat/Republican divide here.)

Until tomorrow, take 30% off with coupon code Buchanan, the conservative we should have listened to:
 
Tom Woods






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Tom Woods · PO Box 701447 · Saint Cloud, FL 34770 · USA