From the Tom Woods Letter:
I just finished recording an episode of the Tom Woods Show with Scott Horton on the situation in Iran.
If you are of the “this time it’ll be different, honest,” and “this time I promise I’m operating on reliable information,” and “this time the neocons really do have a good point” schools of thought, you and I will have to agree to disagree.
Journalist Aaron Mate just responded to a post by Vice President J.D. Vance, in which Vance said, “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use.”
Mate replied:
The argument is that Trump broke the original Iran nuclear deal, which capped Iran’s enrichment at the threshold for civilian use. By killing that deal, which Iran was adhering to, Trump sent the message that the US would not accept Iran enriching even for civilian use.
So Iran — as it was allowed to under the deal, given Trump’s violation of it — increased enrichment in the hopes of convincing the US to return to the deal and abandon its crippling sanctions that strangle Iran’s economy. What were they supposed to do, wait for Donald Trump, Joe Biden and then Donald Trump again to change their minds?
If one wants to argue that the original deal that Trump broke was flawed because it was set to expire, well Trump could have tried to renegotiate it. He didn’t. He simply killed it, re-imposed crippling sanctions, and then assassinated Iran’s top general as he was trying to de-escalate to Saudi Arabia.
One could also argue that Iran made a tactical error in enriching at a higher level. But it not only has the right to do that, it did so while actively negotiating with Trump and repeatedly renouncing nuclear weapons, as it long has. Just a few months ago, the US intelligence community affirmed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program suspended in 2003.”
I have yet to see a good argument for your administration choosing to side with Israel over US intelligence, and your promises to voters to stop engaging in endless war.
Back in late 2007, when the American intelligence community generated a report definitively showing there was no Iran nuclear program, even the hawkish dolt George W. Bush backed off. Oh, he wanted to invade, all right, as he said privately, but how could he when the official rationale had gone missing?
Now we’re going to reject the findings of our own director of national intelligence in favor of the assurances of a foreign leader who has done nothing but goad Americans into expensive and ridiculous wars on the basis of saccharine promises that — wouldn’t you know it — never come true.
It’s encouraging to see some people on the right who are resisting this, even though they stand to gain nothing (and indeed to lose a great deal) from doing so: Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec (mostly), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Matt Walsh, and plenty of others.
Ari Fleischer, press secretary for George W. Bush, spent his White House career telling one lie after another — but he sure is morally outraged at Tucker Carlson, whom he calls a “grifter” for not supporting another idiotic Middle East war when he evidently favored it in a clip from 2006.
Nineteen years is a long time, Ari, but for another thing: Tucker stands to gain precisely zero from his position on this. No leftist is going to congratulate him (not that leftists care about war), and now he has the president and the most cultish wing of MAGA, which will like or dislike someone on a dime according to orders, against him. The NeverTrump world, in turn, can’t stand Tucker for his antiestablishment views.
So Tucker is taking a bit of a gamble on his own future — which is kind of the opposite of what a “grifter” would do. Ari Fleischer, who supported what the powerful in the GOP wanted then, and who supports what the powerful in the GOP want now, has no idea what that kind of courage is like.
Four things evidently never change, no matter who gets elected: (1) the debt keeps growing, (2) the bombs keep dropping, (3) the lies keep getting told, and (4) the people the regime hates most are the ones who stand against (1), (2), and (3).
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