Ed Crane Was Right About Free Speech And The Iraq War Years Before The Country Caught Up
Ed Crane had a gift for identifying moments when liberty required an unpopular defense — and history has a way of catching up to him.Ed Crane had a gift for identifying moments when liberty required an unpopular defense — and history has a way of catching up to him.The pernicious myth that America doesn’t win wars
False narratives have a way of being taken as fact in popular understanding. After years of repetition, these statements calcify into articles of faith, not only going unchallenged, but having any counterarguments met with incredulity, as though the person making the alternative case must be uninformed or unaware of the established consensus. Many people simply accept these narratives and form worldviews based on them, denying the reality that, if the underlying assumption is wrong, then so are the decisions that flow from it.
One narrative that has taken hold among many since the humiliating end to the war in Afghanistan is that the U.S. military doesn’t win wars, or that it hasn’t since the end of World War II. This critique of the armed forces, foreign policy, or use of force has become an ironclad truth among many who use it as a starting point to advocate their own preferred change.
The United States military has had plenty of successes since World War II and, in fact, has suffered only a small handful of definitive losses in that time.
Advocates of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision for the military have echoed it: “The military had grown weak and woke, so we need to change the culture, ignore or at least diminish adherence to legal restraints, and remake the composition of the military.” Restrainers, isolationists, and America Firsters have joined the chorus: “America has given up blood and treasure on stupid wars in which we were failures.”
There is only one problem with this understanding, and more importantly, its use as a baseline from which to derive policy prescriptions — it isn’t true at all.
Ignorance of war
It reflects a misunderstanding of how America has used force and what we have and haven’t achieved. And unlike many misunderstandings about American defense, this one isn’t solely by those with little familiarity with what the military does; the view has taken hold among many who should know better. There are several reasons for belief in the fallacy.
First, there is ignorance of what a war is, or at least not having a common definition of it.
For the pedants, one could point out that the United States has not been at war, by strict definition, since 1945. However, this isn’t relevant to the topic at hand because if the United States has not fought a war since 1945, then by this definition, we also haven’t lost one. In fact, the United States has declared war many times: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the World Wars, yet we have engaged in armed conflict significantly more often than that.
So for the purposes of this debate, we can reflect upon the United States using force to achieve foreign policy objectives. With this more expansive definition, then Grenada is just as much of a war as World War II (although the latter certainly is a source of more pride than the former).
Second, there is ignorance of the number of conflicts in which the United States has been involved. Americans tend to have short memories and often pay less attention to events beyond the water’s edge. Many are largely ignorant of ongoing, smaller operations being conducted in their name. (Remember the shocked response to the Niger incident when many people, including congressional leaders, announced their ignorance of U.S. presence there?)
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the passage of time. How many Americans are aware of our involvement in the Dominican Civil War in 1965? Or the various conflicts that made up the Banana Wars?
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Third, there is ignorance or misunderstanding of the outcome of those wars. Our perspective has been skewed, likely due to the recent history of the embarrassing and self-inflicted defeat in Afghanistan, the messy and confusing nature of the war in Iraq, and the historic examples of very clearly defined wars with obviously complete victories.
There was no ambiguity in the World Wars. The United States went to war with an adversary nation state (or coalition of them), fought their uniformed militaries, and ended these with a formal surrender ceremony abroad and victory parades at home. But this is not the norm, neither for American military intervention nor for conflict in general.
Most of American military history does not look like these examples — conflicts that are large in scale, discrete in time, and definitive in outcome. Some of our previous interventions have been short in duration and were clear victories but smaller in scale (e.g., Grenada and Panama). Some have been clear victories but incremental, fought sporadically with fits and starts and over the course of years, if not decades (e.g., the several smaller conflicts that are often lumped together under the umbrella of the Indian Wars).
Win, lose, draw
But then there is another category — one in which the conflict results in a seemingly less satisfying but mostly successful result, sometimes after a series of stupid and costly errors and sometimes after years of grinding conflict that ends gradually rather than with a dramatic ceremony.
The Korean War, often described as a “draw” because the border between North and South Korea remains today where it was before the beginning of the war, had moments of highs and lows, periods where it seemed nothing could prevent a U.S.-led total victory — only to see the multinational force squander its advantage (e.g., reaching the Yalu River) and moments where all seemed lost, only to escape from the jaws of defeat through audacity and courage (e.g., Chosin Reservoir, Pusan, Inchon).
When President Truman committed U.S. forces as part of the U.N. mission to respond to communist aggression, the stated intent was to assist the Republic of Korea in repelling the invasion and to maintain its independence. South Korea still exists to this day. The combined communist forces of the PRK and CCP were prevented from achieving their aims by American military power.
We have a much more recent (and undoubtedly more controversial) example of a misunderstood success. Many of those who ballyhoo about America not winning wars point not only to the failure in Afghanistan but also to the recent war in Iraq. The Iraq War was many things — initially fought with great tactical and operational brilliance, then sinking into lethargic and incompetent counterinsurgency, then adapting to local power structures, and of course, initiated under pretenses we now know to be incorrect. But it was not, despite the ironclad popular perception, a military failure.
The military set out, with the invasion of 2003, to defeat the combined forces of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard and remove the Ba’athist government from power. We achieved that goal. Once in control of Baghdad, the U.S. faced a new threat — one of a growing and complex insurgency that we had failed to anticipate. American forces under Ricardo Sanchez, and continuing under George Casey, seemed perplexed and frustrated by a conflict they had not come prepared to fight, nor that they adapted to. For years, despite the insistence of many military and political leaders, the war was not going our way as American casualties increased month after month.
But by 2008, the Sahwa — the movement of Sunni tribal militias aligning with the U.S.-led coalition and the government in Baghdad — and the American efforts to adapt to a more effective counterinsurgency strategy were turning the tide, to the point that by 2010, the violence in Iraq had largely subsided.
The government the United States helped bring about in Baghdad to replace Saddam Hussein endures to this day but not without difficulties. In his 2005 “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” George W. Bush defined victory in the long term as an Iraq that is “peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well-integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.” By continuing to maintain a relationship with Iraq, we are helping shape this long-term result, just as we did as we helped postwar Germany and Korea maintain security and political stability.
Due to the oppressive steps of a flawed prime minister, American desire to recede from presence and oversight in Iraq, and a compounding effect of spillover from the Syrian Civil War, there was the need for further American assistance in defeating the threat from ISIS, but defeat them we did — another success for the American military.
The Iraqi government also has close relationships with our Iranian regional rivals, as many of the local Arab countries do based on proximity. But just as the need for the 2nd and 3rd Punic Wars does not change the fact the 1st Punic War was a Roman victory, the war against ISIS does not change the fact that the United States accomplished the goal of deposing and replacing Saddam Hussein. Likewise the fact that the Soviet Union gained influence over Eastern Europe does not change the fact that World War II ended in a definitive defeat of the Nazis.
What does victory look like?
None of that changes a separate question, however — whether the war was worth it. But that was a political decision and one that does not negate the truth that the U.S. military first defeated the Iraqi military in a decisive win and then quelled a grinding insurgency in a less decisive way.
Just because a victory isn’t total doesn’t mean that the military fighting it lost. The War of 1812 was a victory, despite the fact the U.S. failed to achieve its maximalist goals of incorporating Canada but did achieve the goal for which the war was fought — rejecting British attempts to deny American sovereignty. World War II was a victory, despite the fact it set conditions for the Cold War and communist oppression. Korea was a victory, despite the fact we did not unify the Koreas under the democratic South. And Iraq was a victory — a poorly decided, stupidly managed, and possibly counterproductive long-term victory.
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When viewed in this way, the United States military has had plenty of successes since World War II and, in fact, has suffered only a small handful of definitive losses in that time — Vietnam, Iran (Operation Eagle Claw), Somalia (1993), and Afghanistan — with the temporal proximity of the latter and the fact that two of these were also America’s longest conflicts, helping to warp the public’s understanding of our military effectiveness.
None of this is to say that America should not take a harsh look at our recent military efforts and seek continuous improvement. Grenada, as I have mentioned, was a victory but an incredibly embarrassing one that was likely only successful because we fought a backwater Caribbean country with a population of less than 100,000. The hard lessons learned by examining the disasters, mistakes, and close calls from Operation Urgent Fury helped reform the military into the globally dominant force that defeated the world’s fourth largest army in 100 hours less than a decade later.
Americans should not look at our military through rose-colored glasses, chest thumping as we chant “USA” and insisting that no other force can land a glove on us. But neither should we allow the false narrative of failure to take hold. We should be clear-eyed about what our military has accomplished, can accomplish, and the costs, risks, and potential gains in using force. Armed conflict will remain a necessary tool for the United States. We need to adapt our military to meet and defeat the challenges of the future, and we need to balance and incorporate military power into our global strategies appropriately — but that will not happen if we do it based on an incorrect understanding of the past.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
The man who kept the CIA up at night
“Angelo.” With no surname necessary, the mere mention put Washington’s late-Cold War intelligence establishment on edge. Their tormentor was but a thirtysomething staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrarily, to the Cold Warriors sacrificing their all to defend the nation from communist subversion and nuclear missile threats, that single name, like a messenger from heaven, brought comfort and joy.
Angelo Codevilla, who died in 2021, knew and understood that the country that took him in as a boy would preserve itself and its founding principles by having the most capable intelligence and counterintelligence services the world had ever seen. “Most capable” didn’t mean the largest, or the most lavishly funded, or supplied with the most high-tech gear. It meant having the most creative, most principled, most virtuous, and wisest people doing the job.
Angelo was his own man. He stood true to his principles, never feared burning bridges, and often anticipated enjoying the flames.
Angelo watched the U.S. intelligence apparatus deteriorate. Visiting CIA headquarters over the years, he passed the stone inscription that the late and great CIA Director Allen Dulles placed as what he intended as a permanent greeting: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” — the Gospel according to John.
In the last year of his life, Angelo saw the videos of CIA corridors festooned with mind-numbing murals and telescreens promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. To Angelo, who spoke Latin, DEI meant “of God.” A new god, a false one, possesses the American intelligence community today.
The evolution to this point was entirely predictable, and Angelo foresaw it early. He had the most remarkable track record of any American. Close to a half-century ago, on the newly formed Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Angelo called out the CIA, not for its cult of secrecy, but for its cult of untruthfulness.
A relentless force
Angelo arrived at the Senate in 1977, just as George H.W. Bush left his 11-month stint as CIA director and as the liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) wrapped up sensational hearings and reports about the intelligence community.
Angelo’s committee work and intellectual rigor were so distinguished that President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential transition team chose him to be part of its intelligence and diplomatic section. He had built a rapport with Reagan’s campaign manager, the distinguished Office of Strategic Services veteran William J. Casey. Casey had done the unthinkable during World War II by proposing, then running, operations behind German lines after D-Day to open the invasion route for Allied American, French, and British Empire forces to march to Berlin.
Rapport and mutual respect grew to deep trust when Casey ran the CIA. Angelo became Bill Casey’s man in the Senate. But Angelo Codevilla was never the CIA’s man. To him, the CIA was just a bureaucracy that performed a necessary function. He believed that the bureaucracy was performing its function poorly and going in the wrong direction. No bureaucracy, he believed, was sacred. Certainly, none should ever be permanent.
Angelo wasn’t even Bill Casey’s man. He was his own man. He stood true to his principles, never feared burning bridges, and often anticipated enjoying the flames.
Angelo trusted and admired President Reagan for the good in him and for his ideals. He worked closely in a fraternal and trusting relationship with Reagan’s national security adviser, Judge William Clark. Casey brought the Senate staffer Angelo to private White House meetings with President Reagan.
Angelo found himself in the curious situation — or, knowing him, he created the situation — of serving on the Senate committee whose job was to oversee the CIA while also working with the CIA director himself to get ahold of the dysfunctional and demoralized bureaucracy. The CIA wasn’t being truthful with Congress, and it wasn’t being truthful with Casey either.
It wasn’t a matter of the CIA’s being secretive. Angelo had all the necessary clearances. It was a matter of being truthful. This bothered Angelo immensely. So did incompetence. And so did ideological blinders. Angelo was never in awe of the CIA or the FBI, though he did say once, 33 years ago, that the FBI merited some of his esteem. That was then.
That year, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he wrote a monumental work, “Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century,” on what a successful intelligence community should look like, how it should act, and why. The CIA was far, far behind the curve, looking backward instead of forward. “The major elements of U.S. intelligence will have to be rethought and rebuilt,” he said.
Of course, they were not rethought or rebuilt until after their hand was forced — after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Even then, the rethinking and rebuilding were done entirely wrong. Instead of the eternal standards of philosophical soundness and professional excellence that Angelo laid out in 1991, the U.S. intelligence system treated its bureaucratic instincts as sacrosanct, taking critical theory as its lodestar, and glowering establishmentarians cemented the new order.
The CIA leveraged its network of mid- to late-career bureaucrats — the “Old Boys” — to manage perceptions by leaking to the press, helping write or actually writing the popular histories, dominating the academic studies of intelligence, and credentialing those who would play well with others.
Angelo understood strategy the way others pretended to.
Angelo had his own exceptional network, however. He played five-dimensional chess in his sleep. He knew all about bureaucratic warfare and subversion both as a scholar and a practitioner. He knew exactly whom to call, when, and what to say.
Certain senators dreaded him. So did select high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.
He had a bipartisan spleen. On the Senate Intelligence Committee, Codevilla gleefully terrorized Republicans and Democrats alike with pointed, relentless inquiries that exposed intellectual inconsistencies and sheer sloppiness. He forced analysts and policymakers alike to address inconvenient facts as facts. They hated him for it, but many of them admitted he was right in private.
Angelo was known for his broad smile of iron teeth long before Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (or a KGB officer assigned to the pliant Washington Post reporter Dusko Doder, who related it to the American audience) came up with the term to describe Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Iron teeth” applied to Angelo far better than it did to the Soviet leader. Codevilla’s militant joviality while pummeling Washington’s morally corrupt and weak-minded power elite flummoxed both friends and enemies. Hit hardest were the victims of Codevilla’s intellectual inquisitions. They could never quite tell whether the iron smile was a signal of genuine joy in shepherding one lost in a sea of laziness and prejudice toward logical reasoning or whether the smile was a precursor to a deadly verbal salvo — until it was too late.
Challenging the Old Boys’ club
Angelo was a perceptive talent-spotter. He sized you up quickly. He would go out of his way to help those whom he deemed earnest. He reveled in discussions of facts, reason, and philosophy. One didn’t have to agree with him to be his friend. But if you were out, you were out permanently. He despised what he called “dishonest treachery.”
Treachery is part of the intelligence profession. It has to be. Angelo studied treachery and respected it. Dishonest treachery, to Angelo, was treachery executed in a morally wrong way and for morally wrong reasons. The world is treacherous. People are treacherous. To navigate treachery for a cause larger than oneself, one had to understand treachery, expect it, and deal with it on its own terms.
Born in Italy during the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist regime during World War II, Angelo always focused on the fundamentals. He always referred to the classics. He was the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, and perhaps the only person on earth, who read and studied the intelligence community’s entire super-secret annual budget, line by line — a pile of papers two feet high — year after year.
Angelo had a fear-inducing way of questioning intelligence leaders. He would say, “I asked Aristotle’s simple questions of officials throughout the Intelligence Community: What is the purpose of this activity? Why do you do this rather than something else? Do you do this for the sake of that, or vice versa? By what criteria do you judge your products good or bad?”
“I was astounded,” he remarked, “at how little thought had been given to decisions that affected thousands of careers, billions of dollars, and the nation’s very future. All too often, the answers to my questions were ‘We’ve always done it this way,’ and ‘How insulting for you to ask!’”
Angelo understood strategy the way others pretended to.
He was offending the agency or the bureau. Not the missions. The mission is never first in a permanent bureaucracy.
Angelo played five-dimensional chess in his sleep. He knew all about bureaucratic warfare and subversion both as a scholar and a practitioner.
Reasoned arguments were not part of the debate. The custom, then as now, was to attack the questioner and defend the bureaucracy. Decades before DEI and LGBTQ+, the FBI had its own informal acronym for its personnel: “DEB,” or “Don’t Embarrass the Bureau.”
“The attack is usually three-pronged,” Angelo explained when unpacking bureaucratic argumentative tactics. “First, this person must be revealing classified information. Second, this person does not know the whole story, and we who do know it are forbidden from commenting, except to say ‘You’re wrong.’ Third, this person’s demeaning tone precludes a rational explanation of some admittedly valid points.”
“So, in practice, three points boil down to one: Leave the field of intelligence for the Old Boys.”
The Old Boys would retire or die out, having mentored a new set of Old Boys, or New Genders, or whatever the flavor of the month may be, but the goal would be the same: Silence honest discussion about intelligence, counterintelligence, and whatever has become of “national security.”
Making truth-telling politically incorrect, and therefore wrong or immoral — and thus evil and professionally destructive — remains a defense tactic for intelligence agency bureaucrats. Angelo decried political correctness very early as it came into vogue. As it was killed off in favor of a more virulent strain, wokeness, he continued his crusade against it.
The Old Boys' networks that he called out from the 1970s became, or were already part of, what he would later define as “the ruling class.”
‘Why? What for?’ And other inconvenient questions
Before the pale riders of cultural Marxism penetrated the intelligence community, Angelo was hammering away at the sheer aimlessness of American intelligence collection and analysis, most of which he saw as existing for its own sake.
After World War II and the bipartisan consensus about containment of communism, defining American national interests was easy: Take the fight to the communists, who were strategically mobilized to tear apart our country and our culture by any means necessary, both ideologically and physically. By defining national interests, even broadly, America can define the scope of its foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and national security services.
Even the beginning faced deep flaws, plus tensions about growing globalism. That mission was poorly understood and became diluted over time, with priorities left up to “experts” from the Washington establishment and the Ivy League, further distorted by critical theorists of the Frankfurt School variety. Reagan temporarily disrupted that trend, but his monumental mission to bring down the USSR itself required immense intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.
The end of the Soviet Union allowed anyone with eyes to see that the intelligence establishment had become, as Codevilla had warned from his Senate staff perch, a huge intelligence-industrial complex that existed more for itself than for the national interest, whatever that national interest had become.
Codevilla became one of the first serious people after the Cold War to question why the United States was pouring so many resources into technologies to spy on everything possible around the world. Surveying America’s colossal human- and technological-intelligence might in 1992, he asked, “What for?”
Then, he crystallized the obvious but inconvenient facts. “To what does all of this amount? The activities to which we loosely refer as the U.S. technical collection system [were] never planned according to any single purpose, nor are they administered by a single organization,” he said. Some congressional oversight “sometimes prod[s] the system toward coherence. Yet coherence is elusive, because coordination is ex post facto to budgetary planning.”
Angelo’s unwelcome observation went unheeded, with Osama bin Laden proving the point with his ingeniously simple attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and all the Saudi and Qatari funding behind them. The al-Qaeda leader was but the most famous of a parade of “known wolves.” A bright and aggressive CIA man in Sudan tried to arrange bin Laden’s capture or elimination before he carried out the acts of terror he was openly planning, but he found little support up the intelligence chain and zero at the top of the CIA and in the Clinton White House. So bin Laden was allowed to remain free to attack.
Angelo had a bipartisan spleen. He gleefully terrorized Republicans and Democrats alike with pointed, relentless inquiries that exposed intellectual inconsistencies and sheer sloppiness.
It took a madman in a cave to force the United States to drop everything and try to add coherence to American intelligence. When that coherence came, it arrived in the hurried form of a huge centralized security apparat with near-limitless capabilities: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an überpowerful post that, in the wrong hands, would build coherence by abusing power and politicizing the apparat, resulting, by the time of Codevilla’s death, in a largely incoherent intelligence politburo, a rogue state deeply embedded within a state, whose modus operandi became guided by a revived Comintern’s critical theory and wokeness.
“Intelligence concerns human activities, and human beings, unlike God, go to great lengths to disguise their work. So perhaps the most serious charge that can be made against the fruits of U.S. intelligence concerns not the collectors but another set of people: the counterintelligence officers who should have guarded the integrity of the collectors’ work,” Angelo wrote in “Informing Statecraft.” American counterintelligence failed to do so, and Codevilla is one of the very few scholars to explain why.
Weaponized language
Angelo carefully studied language and the weaponization of words and grammar. He disdained wishy-washy intelligence products full of caveats, euphemisms, and that terrible passive voice.
He embraced the ancient treasure of virtue. Here I speak of virtue in the Aristotelian, Hebraic, and Christian senses. Niccolò Machiavelli changed the public understanding of virtue, influencing philosophers of liberalism in subsequent centuries. He taught how to change language to trick the reader to agree with the opposite of the original definition and intent and to reason, with easy logic, that evil was a virtue.
This was the most subversive aspect of Machiavelli’s writings. Subversion is an operational part of intelligence, though seldom adequately practiced by the CIA abroad or identified and combatted by the FBI to protect our constitutional republic at home (though competently waged against the American public).
Most readers of Machiavelli rely on translations. Angelo grew frustrated with some of those translations, even those by the finest scholars. Raised in an Italian-speaking home, he read Machiavelli in its original form and discovered that, especially in the case of the Florentine’s most important work, “The Prince,” the translators had “cleaned up” the Florentine evil genius’ imprecise uses of words, his often poor grammar, double meaning, or doublespeak, and indeed his bad use of pronouns. The cleanups improved the flow and readability of the translations and arguably corrected Machiavelli’s sloppy mistakes.
Angelo found that Machiavelli’s mistakes were purposeful, intended to convey or obscure meaning. So he set out to re-translate “The Prince,” in a literal but what he called an “inelegant” translation, and packed it with footnotes to explain the calculated plays on words and puns to distort language and understanding.
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Machiavelli was all about power for power’s sake — not for higher ideals, as Allen Dulles or Bill Casey later sought. It was power politics simply. Angelo explained how the mistranslators of Machiavelli, inadvertently or otherwise, taught people to dispense with goodness and all forms of higher purpose, to break down human relationships and society for the purposes of power.
Machiavelli twisted the meaning of virtue into a “tool for wretchedness,” suggesting that evil may be praiseworthy, twisting the concepts of evil and good. “The Prince,” Angelo said, marked the center of gravity from the standpoint of the sovereign: “Do I do virtuous things that don’t keep me #1, or do I do evil things and stay on top?” It refers to no higher purpose than that.
And so Angelo foresaw, whether translating Machiavelli or writing on — and acting for — intelligence, counterintelligence, and national security, that the machinery created to defend our constitutional republic has been perverted to seek and preserve power for power’s sake. The CIA as a bureaucracy, the FBI as a bureaucracy, Old Boys' networks against citizens, the ruling class, political correctness, wokeness, critical theory, and cultural Marxism are all effectively automatons stockpiling power for their own sake.
Subversion
Treachery had a love child called subversion. Few mainstream American studies of intelligence or counterintelligence over the past six decades or so devote much attention to subversion — how both to defend ourselves and our society against it and to utilize it against our enemies. Codevilla treated subversion as a natural human behavior. He devoted a whole chapter to it in “Informing Statecraft.”
He also made a study of one of the 20th century’s most notorious subversives, the Italian Comintern man Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci adopted the gradualist, cultural-Marxist approach to revolution, combining the evils of Marxism with the evils of Machiavelli and a dash of Mussolini to give us an early strain of critical theory.
Angelo embraced the ancient treasure of virtue in the Aristotelian, Hebraic, and Christian senses.
Few besides Gramsci knew and applied Machiavelli as well as Angelo. Gramsci did it to subvert and destroy Western civilization. Codevilla understood and explained Machiavelli in a bid to save civilization and its moral foundations and to save its chief protector, at least then: the United States of America.
Angelo also understood Gramsci’s kindred spirits at the Germany-based Frankfurt School, another Comintern enterprise, which was rooted at Columbia University and fanned out through the Ivy League and West Coast universities. The Frankfurt School populated the OSS Research and Analysis Branch during World War II and infiltrated the early CIA’s intelligence directorate and its analytical products with a cultural-Marxist worldview. It penetrated the FBI after Robert Mueller’s centralization and indiscriminate mass hires following 9/11, which is quite likely why President Barack Obama asked Congress to extend Mueller’s statutory 10-year term limit as director for another two years, making the then-cognitively-impaired Mueller the second-longest-reigning FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.
This wreaked damage that the rest of us are only beginning to understand as we watch the rot of critical theory permeate the Intelligence Community, just as it has our military and educational systems.
Angelo called it early. In a work on political warfare that he wrote in 2006 titled “Political Warfare: Means for Achieving Political Ends,” he noted that as dangerous as the enemy spies are who steal secrets, they merely steal secrets. Alger Hiss was a valuable Soviet spy, but his greatest value to the Soviet enemy was something else by far: a major controlled agent of influence and recruiter for Moscow within the Democrat and diplomatic establishments.
Worse than the spies who steal secrets and the controlled agents of influence, Angelo warned, were the subversive, uncontrolled fellow travelers, the so-called innocents and useful idiots who followed and mainstreamed the work of controlled agents — the men who designed the sellout to Stalin at Yalta, for example.
Since World War II, United States foreign policy succeeded despite, not because of, its giant intelligence-industrial apparat, Codevilla argued in his 1992 book. “Informing Statecraft” is so fundamental, and its principles and guidance so timeless, that it remains among the most important and informative volumes on both statecraft and intelligence more than three decades later. A future president should require all his intelligence, national security, and foreign-policy appointees to master the book.
American intelligence and counterintelligence understand little of this in terms of performing their missions that the public has entrusted to them. Nor does Congress, which makes the laws.
Nor do the courts, which interpret them. Nor do all but a very few of the nation’s schools. And so Angelo Codevilla’s approach to intelligence laid the foundations for his studies of America’s national character and of the ruling class.
Enduring character
To Angelo, America’s superpower status was an exception to its exceptionalism, an anomaly brought about by its defeat of fascism and its brief but squandered victory in the Cold War over the Soviet Union and communism. The post-Soviet world, he reasoned, was the time for America to return to its founding roots.
Nations have character. Their governments affect society, the moral order, and family. In a vicious circle, politics make or break all. America’s founders were all men of character. They spoke openly of virtue, not in the twisted Machiavellian sense, but in its real essence.
A coherent and strategic foreign policy was a core element of the American Revolution, the founding of the American constitutional republic, and the growth of the United States and the American dream to become a superpower. The greatest successes occurred when American intelligence, like the federal government itself, was very limited and very small and when U.S. strategic goals were simple and understandable to the average citizen who could support them.
Times are different, but the principle remains. The United States needs a strong foreign secret-intelligence service to collect and analyze information on issues vital to its national interests to inform a president and his administration. It needs a similar service to conduct activities covertly that diplomats and the military cannot or should not do. It needs a robust counterintelligence service to neutralize foreign spying and influence against us and a moderate security service to defend against violent or subversive internal threats to the Constitution.
Sheer size bears no relation to strength and robustness. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States built a Leviathan government that created a new ruling class through a form of bureaucracy and corporatism that linked political power and wealth. It attacked family, religious belief, and personal character. Surveying history, and stressing the profound America chronicled by Alexis de Tocqueville, Angelo in 1997 recognized the culture wars under way that ultimately begat today’s critical theory of wokeness.
How could America keep the peace in the world if it wasn’t even at peace with itself? Angelo naturally wrote a book about it: “To Make and Keep Peace,” subtitled “Among Ourselves and with All Nations.” Much earlier, with Paul Seabury, he wrote one of the most important modern textbooks of peace’s opposite, titled “War: Ends and Means.” And then, he provided a collection of essays during the Global War on Terrorism titled “No Victory, No Peace,” which observed, in what would mark the early part of a forever war, “The Bush Administration has not achieved peace because it has not sought victory.” That was back in 2005.
Angelo constantly asked the annoying question, “Why go to war if you don’t intend to win?”
A common thread bound all his works on conflict, defense, intelligence, peace, and treachery. That thread was about keeping America first, a solid and reasoned approach without the politicized jingoism, and tempered by a firm grounding in America’s founding principles and the Western moral tradition.
As time went by, after Reagan’s successful strategy brought down the Soviet Union and the military-industrial and intelligence-industrial complexes mushroomed to what they are today, Angelo focused extensively on the elites who run American politics and policy and the uniparty that became known as the Swamp and the permanent ruling class.
As an aside, perhaps Angelo’s most impactful legacy, more than 40 years ago, was to build up a leader in the U.S. Senate to push for a space-based weapons system to shoot down incoming ballistic nuclear missiles. This effort involved constant coordination with the Reagan White House. A Soviet active-measures campaign aimed at weak and treacherous politicians and other elites kept Congress from providing the funds to build and deploy that revolutionary, workable system.
The prospect of an American strategic missile-defense system wrecked the Soviets’ nuclear war calculus and, with Reagan’s own nuclear modernization, tricked the Kremlin into bankrupting the USSR with needless new weapons programs that Reagan planned to negotiate away. However, Congress never funded a functional space-based missile defense, and to this day, America remains completely vulnerable to a strategic nuclear missile attack.
The ruling class, as personified by President George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, never tried to understand the nature of the jihadist enemy. Angelo called them out for it at the time. Unlike in domestic politics, where they worked tirelessly to keep themselves in power, he observed, they never sought to win abroad.
Angelo Codevilla flew with the high and mighty, not because he craved being among them but because he knew he had to be.
The same was true for the permanent class within the military and intelligence communities. Indeed, by the 2000s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had completely removed the word “victory” from its annual 400-page “Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.”
On learning this during dinner with friends, Angelo grew incensed but was not at all surprised, switching the conversation to pose the question, “Why have a military if our leaders say nothing of victory?”
This need for an endlessly growing spy machine resulted more through the incrementalism of American interventionism and forever wars than through a grand design for a giant foreign and domestic spy apparat, or so we’d like to think, but the result was the same. A grandly designed spy apparat would have been more logical and effective than the one we have.
Angelo Codevilla flew with the high and mighty, not because he craved being among them but because he knew he had to be.
Even in Washington, he always took the time to mentor young people to become the next generation of diplomats, spies, and national security leaders.
He taught, among remarkable colleagues, at Boston University during the years when BU President John Silber was on the cusp of transforming the middling school into a top-flight institution with a world-class national security and international diplomacy program — a transformation that died with Silber and swirled down the loo of intellectual mediocrity, wokeness, and the scam of critical-race-theory corruption. Still, Boston University’s very woke Pardee School of Global Studies, of which Angelo was never on the faculty because the school didn’t exist at the time, proudly claims him as a professor emeritus.
Bureaucracies in need of replacement
Government bureaucracies are just bureaucracies. When they atrophy and abuse the public trust, they should be abolished. In an orderly way, their essential functions can be transferred to another bureaucracy that can do the job, or, better yet, they can be culled to create a new bureaucracy to last for as long as it faithfully executes its intended purpose.
Angelo agreed that we don’t need the FBI and CIA as they are. But that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t need strong foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and even internal security agencies to defend the country and its interests from foreign adversaries. Bureaucracies come and go. And just as the FBI and the CIA came from parts of the distant past, Angelo argued in his later years that it was time for them to go in favor of something better.
Replacements would have to be designed according to the priorities of America’s mission in the world, which he saw as driven by the American people’s priorities for the central government to serve them, with their consent as the governed, and not for the ruling class to serve itself. The people determine their needs, the elected officials determine strategies and policies to fulfill those needs, and then the officials design and authorize the intelligence apparatus necessary to execute those strategies and policies.
And this is where Angelo labored his last. For years, he had referred to the America seen by Tocqueville — its mission, its place in the world, its relations with foreign countries, and its securing its own defense. His last work, published posthumously in 2022, drew lessons in statecraft from an intellectual and political giant and near-forgotten contemporary of Tocqueville, President John Quincy Adams.
Although America had leading political families such as the Adamses even when Tocqueville made his observations, there was no ruling class. America’s founders fought relentlessly to avoid the emergence of a national class of elites, even though several states in the federation had their own dominant political or economic families and clans. But there was no massive, permanent central government with a constellation of companies with business models of milking the taxpayers’ udders. There was no interstate ruling class.
The superficiality of popular American history almost passes over John Quincy Adams, viewing him as the son of a founding father and a one-term president during a period of undistinguished one-termers.
In “America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams,” Codevilla described a true American foreign policy, one as consistent with the vision of the founding fathers as with present-day America First nationalism. Adams was the brilliant but practically forgotten 19th-century secretary of state and president who, as a 5-year-old, had been brought by his parents, John and Abigail Adams, to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.
John Quincy Adams effectively founded U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. He authored the Monroe Doctrine to preserve the independence of the new American republics from Mexico to South America and to keep European powers out of the region.
RELATED: The CIA’s greatest failure: Intelligence
In studying Adams’ extraordinary experiences as diplomat, secretary of state, president, and statesman, Codevilla showed America’s successes in determining its own national interests in geopolitics by limiting them, reducing the need for a global, expeditionary military and a centralized, European-style security state to prop up, among other things, a ruling class.
He celebrated John Quincy Adams’ principles and achievements — among them, ghostwriting the extraordinarily successful Monroe Doctrine as secretary of state — and tracked American foreign policy and geostrategy from Adams’ time to the present, uncovering a consistency of principles regardless of international circumstances.
Application of those principles is associated directly with America’s rise. Abandonment of them, over time, tracks with America’s relative decline. Revival of them, Codevilla would argue, would be cause for optimism.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind and was adapted from “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic: The Legacy of Angelo Codevilla” (Encounter Books).
Glenn Beck shares the DISTURBING secret President Bush told him years ago
Back during the 2008 election, Glenn Beck was summoned to the White House by then-President George W. Bush. In a profanity-laden rant, Bush, who was angry about Glenn’s negative coverage of the Iraq War, excoriated him for suggesting that there were grounds to impeach him.
“The first thing the president says to me is ... ‘You know, a lot of people think they know how they can be the effing president. Well, they have no effing idea how to be the effing president,’” Glenn mimics in his best Bush accent.
Earlier that day, Barack Obama, who was still campaigning for president, had said that if he were the current president, he would just “bomb Pakistan.”
“This is at the point where Pakistan is kind of helping us. They’re not our friends. They’re more frenemies,” Glenn says.
When he mentioned Obama’s comment to President Bush, he responded with something Glenn has never forgotten.
“He said, ‘Oh, I heard that. Don’t worry about that. ... Trust me, Glenn, whoever comes into this office, no matter what party they’re in, they’re going to sit behind this desk, and they’re going to realize — because they’re going to be advised by exactly the same people that have been advising me — that they really have no choice. This is what they have to do,’” Glenn recalls.
When he left the White House that day, he was “freaked out.”
“I was like, ‘This is not good. The president isn’t really the president. The president is just listening to all these advisers who were advising the last president and the president before that,’” he says.
It became clear to him that day that the deep state is just “executing a long plan,” regardless of who sits at the Resolute desk.
“What difference does it make who we have in the office if that’s true?” Glenn asks.
He brings up this old story today because it’s becoming increasingly clear that President Trump has ended this trend of deep-state shadow advisers running the country.
On August 18 during his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, “Donald Trump sat at the table and said, ‘I’m just going to get ol’ Vlad on the phone,’ and he stands up, walks out of the room with all the world leaders, and he just picks up the phone and calls Vladimir Putin and says, ‘Hey, I just want to keep you up to speed of what's going on,”’ Glenn recounts.
“He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t have anybody whispering in his ear. He’s leading the State Department. He’s leading the world. He’s keeping his own counsel. That hasn’t been done by a president in I don’t know how long,” he adds.
This is the reason “we’re once again the leaders of the world,” Glenn says.
“These advisers — all of these doctors and professors and people who have been in the State Department their whole life and know better than everybody — Donald Trump has said to them, ‘Shut up. I’ve seen your record. It doesn’t work.’”
To hear more of Glenn’s commentary, watch the clip above.
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Pro-life senator announces she will not seek re-election
With the 2026 midterms looming on the horizon, one Republican senator has announced she will not be seeking re-election.
On Tuesday, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) confirmed the rumors that have been swirling for months and officially announced that she will not seek a third term. She made the announcement in a video posted to X.
'Protecting life and the most vulnerable among us is the most important measure of any society.'
"It has been an honor to dedicate my life to the service of our great state and country. Having been raised in a family who has given me so much love and support, now as our family ages and grows, it's my time for me to give back to them," Ernst said in the video.
The Senate Leadership Fund quickly responded to the news. "We want to express our gratitude to Senator Joni Ernst for her dedicated service to our nation and the people of Iowa, both in the U.S. Senate and serving in the armed forces," executive director Alex Latcham said in a statement obtained by Blaze News. "Senator Ernst has been a steadfast conservative leader throughout her time in office, and we wish her the very best in her retirement. We are confident that Iowans will once again choose a strong fighter to represent them in the U.S. Senate next fall."
RELATED: Liberal media spins Sen. Ernst's town hall death reminder while Iowa Democrats make their play
— (@)
Ernst, 55, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014, making her the first woman ever elected to federal office from the state of Iowa.
Since then, she has been a reliable Republican vote. As an Iraq War veteran, Ernst has advocated for servicemen and women. She even ruffled feathers in her own party after President Donald Trump's re-election win last fall when she initially lobbied against the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense following allegations of sexual misconduct. However, she ultimately voted to confirm him.
She has also been a staunch supporter of the pro-life movement, voting for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and to defund Planned Parenthood. "Protecting life and the most vulnerable among us is the most important measure of any society," she says on her website.
While Iowa has some of the strongest restrictions on abortion in the country, a recent Des Moines Register poll indicated that a solid majority of Iowans, 64%, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
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How did a terrorist in a tailored suit get Trump’s stamp of approval?
While the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage has dominated headlines, another danger has quietly re-emerged — one far more dangerous to American lives than a frozen conflict in Eastern Europe. Donald Trump has legitimized a man who once led an al-Qaeda/ISIS faction, lifting U.S. terrorist designations and sanctions to recognize him as Syria’s leader.
For millions of Trump voters, ending America’s involvement in endless wars and repudiating the neocons who started them was a central promise. Trump’s campaign video “Preventing World War III” called out warmongers and globalist elites like no other candidate before him. He vowed to replace them with patriots and pursue an expressly America First foreign policy.
Trump’s instincts on war and peace can be right — if he listens to MAGA voices.
But instead of draining the neocon swamp, Trump has given it fresh water. His recognition of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — the protégé of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — has kept us on the endless war track.
This isn’t what MAGA voted for.
How we got here
In December, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria collapsed after 14 years of civil war. Into the vacuum stepped al-Jolani and his terrorist army, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — the latest iteration of al-Qaeda and ISIS. This is the same Islamist movement that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11, beheaded Americans, and committed atrocities across the globe.
Yet the United States — first under Joe Biden and now Trump — recognized HTS as a legitimate government. Trump went farther, praising al-Jolani as “a young, attractive guy” with “a strong past” and removing HTS from the U.S. government’s list of designated terrorist groups.
The ISIS record
Trump still celebrates the 2019 mission that killed ISIS founder al-Baghdadi. But Baghdadi's deputy, al-Jolani, was an equally ruthless figure — a homicidal psychopath once targeted by the State Department with a $10 million bounty and a spot on its most-wanted list.
ISIS, originally known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, became notorious for public beheadings, bombings, rape, sexual slavery, torture, and genocide — including the murder of Americans.
In 2011, al-Baghdadi sent al-Jolani to Syria to establish an ISIS foothold. Al-Jolani formed the Al-Nusra Front, Syria’s largest jihadist militia, which later evolved into HTS.
Interventionist fingerprints
ISIS didn’t appear from nowhere. U.S. foreign policy paved the way, under the influence of neoconservatives who believe that the purpose of American military might is to bend the world to their political will, regardless of who is in the White House. They’ve engineered endless wars in service of the military-industrial-congressional complex and globalist elites.
Just a month after 9/11, General Wesley Clark learned of a neocon plan within the Pentagon to topple seven Middle Eastern governments in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Six are down. Only Iran remains.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was predicated on nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction.” The result? 4,492 dead Americans, at least 655,000 dead Iraqis, trillions of tax dollars squandered, the ascent of ISIS, and a far more dangerous Iran.
Barack Obama’s decision in 2011 to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was another interventionist catastrophe. Spearheaded by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Democrat by party, neoconservative interventionist by worldview), Libya was left a barbaric, failed state.
RELATED: The terrorists run Syria now — and Christians, religious minorities are paying the price
After Gaddafi was sodomized to death by a mob of savages, Clinton perversely gloated: “We came, we saw — he died.” Now Libya is a human trafficking hub with open-air slave markets.
Then came Syria. Obama secretly authorized the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore to arm “moderate” rebels. Billions’ worth of weapons ended up on the black market or with al-Qaeda affiliates, including al-Jolani’s forces.
Syria has been shattered — 530,000 dead, 13 million displaced, with 6 million fleeing abroad.
Immigration jihad
Since 2001, U.S.-led wars have displaced 38 million people, destabilizing Europe and swelling its Muslim population to 44 million. Many have no interest in assimilating. Globalist elites and EU leaders have encouraged this migration to weaken national sovereignty and culture.
Clothes make the man?
When Assad fell, al-Jolani rebranded. Out went the mujahedeen garb; in came tailored European suits. Trump praised him and lifted sanctions, granting his regime international legitimacy.
Predictably, HTS continues slaughtering Christians, Druze, Alawites, and other Shia Muslims.
The choice ahead
When it comes to foreign affairs, Trump’s presidency is faltering. Badly. Caving to neocon interventionists has escalated war and betrayed his base. Embracing an al-Qaeda/ISIS warlord desecrates the memory of every victim of jihadist terror.
I still believe Trump’s instincts on war and peace can be right — if he listens to MAGA voices. Patriots inside and outside his administration must push him to break with the neocons, reject al-Jolani, and put America First again.
The soul of the republic still belongs to Washington
As we celebrate Independence Day, it’s worth reflecting on America’s founding character — especially the man who defined it: George Washington.
Washington didn’t build his legacy on grand speeches. He led with silence, sacrifice, and restraint. He may not have written poetry, but he lived it — with grit in war, grace in peace, and great wisdom in his letters, journals, and Farewell Address.
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance.
He didn’t just fight for a nation — he helped shape its soul. Washington understood that a country isn’t defined only by its victories, but by how it makes meaning out of its wounds.
In our time of division and disillusionment, we would do well to reclaim the legacy Washington embodied. Resilience isn’t the denial of pain but rather transformation through it. And the only vision worth holding on to is the one that unites us in building our future as a nation.
Trauma doesn’t end the story. Often, it begins the most meaningful chapters. That’s true in my life — and in America’s. Growth has never come from comfort. It comes from hardship, from wounds we don’t hide from but confront. Psychologists call it “post-traumatic growth.” It’s the idea that suffering, when faced and integrated, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded sense of self.
I guess most Americans would just call it “history.”
I led soldiers into Iraq in 2003 and returned to a nation largely untouched by the war I had lived. But my reckoning came later — when a brief Wall Street career collapsed, when a home invasion shattered my sense of safety, and when therapy forced me to face what I had tried for years to outrun: trauma, guilt, grief.
What followed wasn’t just recovery. It was transformation — a quiet strength rooted in humility and meaning. Post-traumatic growth teaches that suffering, when faced honestly, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded self.
That truth doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to us all.
From Valley Forge to Gettysburg, from the Great Depression to Ground Zero, America has been forged in fire. Our greatest progress has rarely come in peacetime. Lincoln didn’t rise when things were easy. The Greatest Generation wasn’t shaped in comfort. Renewal always follows rupture.
We’re in such a moment again. Pressure is building — on our national identity, our personal stories, our sense of unity. But pressure can forge something stronger, if we let it.
We must reject the lie that trauma equals weakness. PTSD is real — often invisible, often devastating. But it’s not the end of the story. Alongside post-traumatic stress, we can teach post-traumatic strength. The kind Washington lived. The kind America has always needed.
That’s part of why I wrote “Downriver: Memoir of a Warrior Poet.” Yes, it tells a story of trauma — from childhood instability to the battlefields of Iraq, from Wall Street collapse to personal unraveling. But more importantly, it traces the long road of healing — not as a tidy comeback story, but as a messy, hard-earned path toward growth and integration.
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The journey is not reserved for veterans alone. It belongs to survivors of addiction, loss, illness, injustice, and personal collapse. It belongs to first responders, caregivers, and ordinary Americans living through extraordinary hardship.
But growth isn’t guaranteed. It requires honesty. It requires community. It demands a culture willing to honor both the warrior and the poet — the one who endures and the one who reflects, the one who fights and the one who heals.
Too often, we swing between denial and despair. But what if we told a different story? What if we treated our national wounds not as signs of weakness but as calls to deepen our roots?
We’ve done it before. The post-9/11 generation gave us new models of service and empathy. The scars of the COVID-19 pandemic will never fully heal, but they can teach us lessons about connection, community, and what really matters.
The question isn’t whether we’ve been wounded. We have. The real question is what kind of country we’ll become in response. Will we let trauma divide us further — or use it to rediscover what binds us together?
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance. Let’s honor not only what we’ve won but how we’ve grown.
That’s the path of the warrior poet. That’s Washington’s legacy. And it can be ours, too.
Why the right turned anti-war — and should stay that way
After the COVID lockdowns, the Western global leadership class had little credibility left. So it seemed insane when they immediately pivoted to a new crisis — but that’s exactly what they did.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered demands from elites in Europe and America for NATO-aligned nations to involve themselves in the conflict. Many Republicans were initially on board, with Fox News and CNN marching in lockstep behind intervention. But the Republican base quickly soured on the war once it became clear that U.S. involvement didn’t serve American interests.
If the situation really is dire, let the Trump administration make its case to the people. Present the evidence. Debate it in Congress. Vote.
In a strange inversion, the right became anti-war while the left championed military escalation.
That reversal matters now, as some in the GOP look to drag the country into another long conflict. We should remember what Ukraine taught us.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded, many conservatives instinctively aligned with Ukraine. The Soviet Union had been an evil empire and a clear enemy of the United States. It was easy to paint Russia as an extension of that threat. President Biden assured Americans that there would be no boots on the ground and that economic sanctions would cripple Russia quickly.
But the war dragged on. Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed to Ukraine while America entered a painful economic downturn. Conservatives began asking whether this was worth it.
Putin was no friend of the U.S., and conservatives had valid reasons to distrust him. But suddenly, anyone questioning the war effort was smeared as a Russian asset. Opposition to the war became an extension of the left’s deranged Russiagate conspiracy, which painted Donald Trump as a blackmailed Kremlin agent.
Some Republican politicians kept pushing the war. Fox News stayed hawkish. But much of the conservative commentariat broke ranks. They knew that the boys from Appalachia and Texas — exactly the kind of red-state Americans progressives despise — would again be asked to die for a war that served no clear national purpose.
From that disillusionment, conservatives drew hard-earned lessons.
They saw that U.S. leaders lie to sustain foreign conflicts. That politicians in both parties keep wars going because donors profit. That Fox News can become a mouthpiece for military escalation. That you can oppose a war without betraying your country. And that American troops and taxpayer dollars are not playthings for globalist fantasies.
“America First” began to mean something real: Peace through strength didn’t require constant intervention.
Unfortunately, many of those lessons evaporated after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
That attack was horrific. No serious person denies the brutality of Hamas or questions Israel’s right to defend itself. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has treated the attack as a green light to target longtime adversaries, including Iran. As a sovereign nation, Israel can pursue its own foreign policy. But it cannot dictate foreign policy for the United States.
In 2002, Netanyahu testified before Congress that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. He said toppling both the Iraqi and Iranian regimes would bring peace and stability. He was wrong.
He wasn’t alone, of course. Many were wrong about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq War. But Netanyahu’s track record is highly relevant now. While conservatives once fervently supported the Iraq invasion after 9/11, many — including Tucker Carlson and Dinesh D’Souza — have since apologized. They admit they got it wrong.
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Afghanistan, while flawed, had clearer justification. The Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. But the lies about weapons of mass destruction and failed nation-building in Iraq turned that war into a conservative regret.
In March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that Iran had not resumed efforts to build a nuclear weapon. Gabbard, like Trump allies Robert Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, was chosen precisely for her skepticism of the intelligence bureaucracy. Trump remembers how his first term was sabotaged by insiders loyal to the status quo. This time, he selected appointees loyal to the voters.
Gabbard’s assessment contradicts Netanyahu, who claims Iran is months away from having a bomb. That’s a massive discrepancy. Either Iran hasn’t restarted its program, or it’s on the brink of building a nuke.
So which is it?
Did U.S. intelligence fail again? Did Gabbard lie to Congress and the public? Or did she simply say something the ruling class didn’t want to hear?
Trump, Gabbard, and Vice President JD Vance understand how Iraq went wrong. They know Americans deserve evidence before another war — especially one that risks dragging us into a region we’ve already failed to remake at great cost.
Yet the war hawks keep repeating the same lie: This time, it’ll be quick. The United States is too powerful, too advanced, too economically dominant. The enemy will fold by Christmas.
Biden said the same about Ukraine. And hundreds of billions later, we remain in a grinding proxy war with Russia.
Now, while still financing that war, Americans are told they must back a new war — this one initiated unilaterally by Israel. The U.S. faces domestic strife, crippling debt, and an ongoing open-border crisis. Involvement in yet another conflict makes no sense.
Israel may be right about Iran. Tehran may indeed have developed a nuclear program behind the world’s back. But if Israel wants to wage a war, it must do so on its own.
The Trump administration has made clear that it wasn’t involved in Israel’s pre-emptive strikes and didn’t approve them. If Israel starts a war, it should fight and win that war on its own. America should not be expected to absorb retaliation or commit troops to another Middle Eastern project.
These wars are never short, and they are always expensive.
Even if Iran’s regime collapses quickly, the aftermath would require a long, brutal occupation to prevent it from descending into chaos. Israel doesn’t have the capacity — let alone the political will — for that task. That burden would fall, again, to America.
So before conservatives fall for another round of WMD hysteria, they should recall what the last two wars taught them.
If the situation really is dire, let the Trump administration make its case to the people. Present the evidence. Debate it in Congress. Vote.
But don’t sleepwalk into another forever war.
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