I am still skeptical of claims about the murder and eating of children. There is almost certainly a limit to the degeneracy of our rulers. Even so, there is no doubt that Israeli intelligence services have run influence and blackmail-style “honey trap” operations for decades across America, Britain, and Europe, and that the thuggish Netanyahu government has now leveraged kompromat and domestic lobbying muscle to push the United States into conflicts that place American lives—and global stability—at risk.
That ugly reality matters today because this war is not merely another Middle Eastern “crisis.” It is the culmination of a long pattern in which Washington’s ruling class—cowardly and perennially eager to be manipulated—subordinates American interests to a foreign agenda while dressing it up as “security.” And now we have crossed the line from threatened illegality to open violence. The news timeline is still emerging, but the early hours of February 28, 2026 saw joint U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iranian targets in Tehran and across the country—sold to the public as “preemption,” but unmistakably structured as something far larger: a sustained air-and-missile assault aimed at crippling Iran’s state capacity and inducing internal collapse. That fits precisely with what the earlier military buildup signaled: the largest concentration of U.S. air and naval power in the region since 2003, supplemented by an extraordinary tanker fleet—nearly 100 aerial refuelers—suggesting long-duration operations rather than a one-night spectacle.
This is not strategy. It is a ritual of institutional stupidity. Washington’s war planners love standoff firepower because it flatters them. It produces the illusion of control: “critical nodes,” “decapitation,” “shock,” “dominance.” It also promises what American politicians crave above all—war without American casualties, war without political cost, war as a televised abstraction. But the record of air-and-missile coercion is miserable. It rarely achieves decisive political results, and when it does “succeed,” it often succeeds through exhaustion or external pressure—anything other than the advertised miracle of bombs. The Kosovo air war was supposed to last a few days; it lasted 78. Serbia’s defenses were never crushed the way the PowerPoints promised. The confident assurances were wrong then, and they are wrong now—only this time the target is not a small Balkan state but a large, well-prepared country with a deep missile arsenal and every incentive to escalate.
If the reports are even half-true, Iran’s retaliation began quickly: waves of missiles and drones, not only at Israel but at U.S. bases scattered across the Gulf. That is exactly the point Washington’s cheerleaders have refused to level with the public about. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Libya. Iran is a country that can hit back—hard—across multiple theaters, against exposed installations, and against shipping and energy chokepoints that can convulse the world economy overnight. And that brings us to the first great indictment of this war: it is being waged by people who have no visible plan for how it ends.
War termination is the question Washington always evades, because honest answers ruin the sales pitch. Does the assault stop when Tehran “capitulates”? And what does capitulation even mean—unilateral disarmament, surrender of missile defenses, internal political suicide? Or does it stop when the United States runs low on expensive munitions and Israel is absorbing volleys it cannot indefinitely intercept? If Iran’s missile forces are dispersed and protected underground—as everyone serious admits—then “smothering” them may not be achievable from the air. If that is true, the war does not end on Washington’s timetable. It ends when somebody breaks, or when the region breaks.
The second indictment is moral and legal, and it barely needs elaboration. A “preemptive” strike doctrine is just aggression with better branding. It is the same imperial license America has claimed for decades: we decide what threats exist, we decide when “preemption” is justified, we decide who gets bombed. That doctrine has turned entire societies into rubble and still somehow leaves Washington shocked—shocked!—when hatred and resistance follow.
The third indictment is political: this is a war pushed by special interests, not for the American people. The American public does not benefit from blowing up Iran. American soldiers and sailors do not benefit from becoming targets at Gulf bases. American families do not benefit from oil price shocks and economic chaos. American security does not benefit from widening a regional war that could easily pull in additional actors and spark a chain reaction no one can control.
So why do it? Because Washington is a machine that converts lobbying and scandal-management into missiles. You can see the incentives in plain sight. The politicians profit from the oldest trick in the book: when the elite is drowning in domestic filth, manufacture an external crisis big enough to dominate headlines. And yes, the timing inevitably invites suspicion. When revelations about Epstein and his network continue to rot the legitimacy of powerful institutions, nothing is more convenient than a war—preferably one framed as a cosmic struggle against a demonized enemy. War turns questions of corruption into questions of loyalty. It makes dissent sound like treason. It launders reputations in a bath of flags and funerals.
If this war continues, the press will do what it always does: flood the zone with atrocity stories, many true, many false, all useful. Some claims will be too grotesque to credit; others will be quietly corrected weeks later, after they have served their purpose. Meanwhile the actual, predictable horrors—dead civilians, shattered infrastructure, retaliatory strikes, regional destabilization—will be treated as unfortunate “side effects,” as though they were weather. But the side effects are the product. This is what standoff war is: a policy of destruction in search of political miracles.
And in the background lurks the most dangerous possibility of all: that escalation becomes automatic. A spectacular strike, a misattributed explosion, a panicked response, a “retaliation” that demands “retaliation.” Every step justified as “necessary,” every step narrowing the exit. The very officials who spent years insisting they could manage escalation are the same ones who repeatedly failed to manage escalation in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.
So we should say it plainly while there is still time to say it: This war is reckless. It is strategically illiterate. It is contemptuous of American lives. It is indifferent to global economic stability. It is propelled by special interests and political desperation. It is being waged by leaders who fetishize bombing campaigns and habitually refuse to plan how conflicts end. And if the gamble goes wrong—and history says it will—Americans will once again be told that nobody could have predicted it.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Contemptuous of American lives”? You mean, the Iranian Jihadists who killed US soldiers and innocent civilians, or the US military now acting to remove the author of these attacks? Time is not on our side. If Iran is allowed to rebuild its nuke program, missile stockpile, and proxy network, for sure more Americans (soldiers and civilians) will die, along with Israeli, Arab, and European.
Some in the west have forgotten that appeasement in the name of “peace in our time” is not a viable strategy, it simply kicks the can down the alley. But we’ve nearly run out of alley. If we wait until Iran’s mullahs have nukes, they will use them. First to strike Israel (the “little Satan”) and complete the work of Hitler, then go after the “Big Satan” (the US and its allies”).
Your article is basically a word salad that reformulates anti-American slogans and is not based on the liberty principle of non-initiation of force.
Anti Interventionism and the Liberty Tradition
Liberty is grounded in the principle that initiating force is wrong, not in the idea that all interventions are wrong. An intervention is simply taking a side in a conflict. Whether it is just or unjust depends entirely on who initiated force. An intervention in defense of victims can be morally justified; an intervention on behalf of aggressors cannot. Both are interventions. The moral distinction lies in the direction of force, not in the fact that a political boundary is crossed.
The belief that “all intervention is aggression” is not part of the classical liberal or individualist anarchist tradition. It is a later development that entered the libertarian movement through a very specific intellectual lineage—one that diverged sharply from the universalist, natural justice framework of thinkers like Mises, Friedman, and Rand.
The Barnes–Martin Lineage
Harry Elmer Barnes, later praised by Murray Rothbard as “the great revisionist historian,” opposed U.S. action against Hitler not by analyzing German aggression, but by claiming that American involvement was engineered by “special interests,” including Jewish groups. His framework inverted the moral reality of the period: the victims of Nazi persecution became the supposed cause of the conflict, while the regime initiating mass violence was recast as a misunderstood actor. This was not principled anti war reasoning; it was a conspiratorial narrative that explained world events through hidden cabals rather than through ideology, institutions, or open aggression.
James J. Martin, Barnes’s protégé, extended this revisionist tradition. He wrote for the late period American Mercury after it had been taken over by extremist owners, and in his later writings he openly praised Axis figures such as Otto Skorzeny. Martin followed the same trajectory as Barnes: beginning with anti interventionist “revisionism” and ending in apologetics for regimes and actors who initiated force on a massive scale.
Rothbard revived this revisionist framework in the post WWII libertarian movement. His foreign policy stance did not come from classical liberalism or 19th century individualism; it came from Barnes and Martin, whose work consistently redirected suspicion toward those defending victims and away from those initiating aggression.
Divergence From the Classical Liberal Revival
The post WWII classical liberal revival led by Mises, Friedman, and Rand (all Jewish-Americans) rebuilt the liberty movement on universal principles: individual rights, economic reasoning, and institutional analysis. They did not treat foreign policy as a stage for hidden puppeteers, nor did they reduce war to the machinations of “special interests.” Their framework was consistent: aggression is wrong, and defending victims is not aggression.
The revisionist anti interventionist lineage diverged from this. It treated the act of intervention itself as the moral wrong, regardless of who initiated force. In doing so, it replaced the core libertarian principle with a reflexive suspicion of the defender and an indulgence toward the aggressor.
The Pattern in Application
Writers in the Barnes–Martin–Rothbard tradition consistently opposed interventions that responded to aggression, and they often opposed interventions that defended groups under attack. During the Cold War, the same pattern extended to communism: they opposed interventions resisting communist expansion even when those interventions were clearly responses to force initiated by communist regimes.
This pattern is not an expression of liberty. It is the product of a revisionist anti interventionism that treats all uses of force as morally equivalent, regardless of who initiated violence.
Modern attempts to view Epstein (a Jew) and Israel as puppeteers controlling US foreign policy repeat the same narrative structure Barnes used in the 1930s and 1940s. Epstein may have hade connections to multiple intelligence services, but the files disclose no evidence of a Epstein-Mossad link. They do show that Epstein cultivated relationships with Russian officials, and eagerly sought to help arrange finances for Putin. Iran is an important ally of Russia. Available files show Epstein opposed Trump and favored Bill Clinton.
Epstein’s activities do not map onto a simple “pro Israel” or “anti Iran” axis. Using him as a unifying explanation for U.S. or Israeli decisions ignores institutional, strategic, and ideological factors and replaces them with a single hidden operator—precisely the template that misdiagnosed events in the past.
Summary
The liberty tradition requires clarity about aggression, not categorical opposition to intervention. When analysis reduces complex state decisions to the actions of a single shadowy figure, it abandons the principles of individual rights and institutional reasoning that define classical liberalism.
When you write a comment this long, please consider submitting it for publication as a main article. This will go out on the main page tomorrow.
Thank you, Alan Bickley. If possible, please correct my mis-spelling of “had” (my typo had it as “hade”). Also there should be a space between all paragraphs.