 A couple of things I want to do today. I want to go through the blame game today. I want to articulate exactly who I think is the blame for what is going on in Afghanistan right now. And I was triggered today to do this as I usually am by people on Facebook. I don't know why I ever go to Facebook. Facebook is just a hornet's nest of irrationality. I don't know if that works. Hornet's nest of irrationality. Anyway, it's whatever irrationality. And the thing that really triggered me is I posted some stuff about blame and about all the different people responsible for it. And it was just astounding. The number of people who came in and said, this is all Biden's fault. Trump is the Messiah. Nothing he did is wrong. He, you know, so yes, those of you who are, you know, might be offended today because I, but best friend, Hank, might enjoy my little rant here. Trump can never do any wrong. Everything Trump did is great. This is all Democrats communist fault. Republicans are fantastic. Republicans would never have to make this happen. They forget that Richard Nixon was president and Republican when this happened in Vietnam. But forget that. You know, it's all Democrats fault. It's only Democrats. Nobody else's talk on Pompeo is a CIA guy and a West Point graduate. And he's just a genius. And it couldn't have been any Pompeo. It would never be Pompeo's fault. Of course, Pompeo went after Biden. Now, I agree about Biden's culpability here without any question. But to view this through the prism of tribalism, a political tribalism, which is what's going on. Unfortunately, everything today is viewed through the prism of political tribalism is disgusting, dishonest, ridiculous, unthinking. So I want to lay out the blame. There was a good article that we're going to go over by a guy named Thomas Jusselin. I have no idea if he's a Republican or Democrat. I don't know. I don't really care. But Thomas Jusselin has a good article about the blame. And he actually thought of an angle. It's not a blame that I didn't even think of. So I mean, I did when I dealt with Pompeo 15 years ago, but I didn't in the last two shows. So that'll be good. We can cover that. But I also wanted to read you before I get to that. I wanted to read you a quote from Inran, because Inran, I mean, she was a genius. And she says things about in the 1960s that are just unbelievably relevant to the world in which we live today and to what's going on in our world. And here is a quote about Vietnam that is so perfect with regard to what is going on in Afghanistan right now. Because look, we all agree that it was time to leave Afghanistan, not because it was time to leave Afghanistan, but because we weren't going to win it. But how we leave matters. How we leave matters. And this is the quote from Inran from a 1969 lecture. She writes, and remember she was anti the Vietnam War. She writes quote, the problem is how to end the war without destroying the prestige of America and delivering thousands of people who trusted us, the South Vietnamese to slaughter. If we hadn't gone into Vietnam, it wouldn't be our responsibility to protect either side. It's their country. Let them fight it out. But since we did go in and asked for and received the cooperation of the local people to then withdraw and abandon those people, when we have the power to fight would be monstrous. We shouldn't remain at the expense of American lives, but merely stamping our feet and demanding our boys come home is acting like a petulant child. Now that's perfect. And she's absolutely right. It's what I said yesterday. You can't go there and ask for people to help. Promise the people who help you that you will not let them fall into the hands of the Taliban. And then cut deals with the Taliban and get out of there and act like a petulant child. I mean, this petulant child stamping our feet reminds me both of Trump and Biden. Oh, we need to get out of Afghanistan. I promised the American people I would get them out of Afghanistan. I don't know if you saw Biden's pathetic speech today where he basically blamed the Afghans for everything. Hey, it is their fault. We stabbed them in the back. Trump negotiated a peace deal without inviting the Afghan participation, the Afghan government participation. We promised them certain things and then we reneged on those promises. But it's still at the end of the day, they're responsible to protect themselves and they defaulted on that. So Biden shifted all the blame to them. He's not going to get that off that easy with me. Neither is Trump, neither is Pompeo, neither are any of these people who are either as McMaster or any of the generals, or any of the commanders, or any of the people who had decision-making capabilities over the last 20 years and even before 20 years over the last, I'm going to go 40 years back. None of them is going to get away from responsibility for what we're seeing right now. The immediate responsibility for this particular fiasco lies squarely on the Biden administration, on Biden, on his generals, who are Trump's generals as well, on military intelligence, on the CIA. The fact, the fact that the United States of America didn't know that the Afghan army would collapse, the fact that the United States military or intelligence didn't know that the Afghan president would run even before a shock was fired, the fact that we didn't see this coming, that we didn't model it, didn't anticipate it, didn't prepare for it, is a shocking failure of intelligence, a shocking failure of preparation, a shocking failure of leadership at every level within the military all the way up. Somebody says McMaster presented his options, it wasn't his decision. McMaster's options were pathetic because McMaster is a completely bought-in to just war theory, completely bought-in to nation-building, completely buying-in to the idea of buying the hearts and minds of the enemy. If you saw the movie The Outpost, and if you haven't, you should watch at least my review of the movie The Outpost, you would see the outrage that we should all have towards the generals like McMaster, Petraeus, Mad Dog, I wish he was the Mad Dog, Mathis, all of these guys who don't reach the ankle of a Patton or MacArthur or Sherman or any real American general of the past who knew that the defeat the enemy meant to crush them, to bring them to their knees. One of the few men says John Bolton would have done better, yes, with all my criticism over the years of John Bolton and all the things that I actually disagree with John Bolton on, yes, John Bolton would have done better, but John Bolton, one of the reasons I think he left and one of the reasons he was kicked out was because he objected to the kind of negotiations that was going on with the Taliban and that was when he was, what is it, far past the advisor to Trump? National security advisor, sorry, to Trump. So Iron Man saw it, you can't go into country even if you're not supposed to be there. Now here, we were supposed to be here, they attacked us with every legitimate way to be there and that's where you have to start placing the blame. How did we get into this situation where we had to go there? Well, let's start with the pragmatism of the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan who funded the Mujahidin during the 1980s. Now you could really go back to Jimmy Carter and his failure to deal with Iran which inspired much of the slumist uprising around the Middle East during the 1980s. The Jihad in Afghanistan that generated the creation of al-Qaeda that really brought to the forefront the Muslim Brotherhood that generally inspired Islamic totalitarians all over the world. So you could blame Jimmy Carter for now responding to the embassy in 79 and you should. That's the beginning, if you will, at least of this round of our dealing in the Middle East. And then you have to blame Ronald Reagan for funding the Mujahidin and not thinking forward. Funding the barbarians. Without thinking the barbarians might turn on you. Why? To get back at the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was collapsing anyway. Afghanistan was not ultimately the determining factor in its collapse. But we funded bin Laden, we funded Mullah Omar, we funded the Taliban. We created these guys in the 1980s. That was Ronald Reagan. And then you jump ahead a little bit. Skip over Bruce Sr. because he just didn't do anything. To Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton in the late 1990s had plenty of opportunities to take out bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Plenty of reasons to do so. You might not remember but I do. The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania in Kenya. Which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people. Many of them Americans. I remember the attack on the Navy ship off the coast of Yemen. All handiwork of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. What did Bill Clinton and his military generals do? Drop bombs in the middle of the desert. In Afghanistan by the way. That had no impact and did nothing. On a number of occasions. During the 1990s. Yes that was the USS Cole. Thank you wonderful. During the late 1990s on a number of occasions. Bill Clinton had the opportunity to order an attack that would have killed bin Laden and destroyed al-Qaeda's capabilities of attacking the United States. George Bush when he became president was briefed on al-Qaeda. Was briefed on bin Laden. And did nothing until September 11th 2001. Then maybe it's better if he'd done nothing. Because after September 2001. We engaged in wars in Iraq. And particularly in Afghanistan. That did not lead to victory. This is I'm reading now. This could have been out of my book. I wonder if Jocelyn has read. This Thomas Jocelyn has read any of my essays. This is by the way on Barry Weiser's substack. Barry Weiser's substack which is excellent. I mean here's him. Here's Thomas Jocelyn writing. Blame President Bill Clinton. His administration didn't take al-Qaeda seriously. Clinton as advisors passed up multiple opportunities to target Islam bin Laden. The al-Qaeda threat manifested on Clinton's watch. Leading to 9-11 and ultimately the one of Afghanistan. Good for him. Blame George W. Bush. And Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001. They had the opportunity to deliver a death blow. To al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We could have crushed them in 2001. But instead of committing the forces necessary. To hunt down bin Laden. Aiman el-Zwahari. And the leaders of the Taliban. Zwahari is the current head of al-Qaeda. They hesitated. The U.S. relied on local warlords. And other actors. Some of whom were duplicitous. Bin Laden and Zwahari finagled their way out of the remote Torah Bora mountains. If you remember. And found sanctuary in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda regrouped in the years that followed. So we had them. We had the world behind us. The military was ready to act. The American people supported it. We could have crushed, decimated, destroyed the Taliban and al-Qaeda once and for all. And George Bush, Donald Ronfield hesitated. You know what the mission to Afghanistan was originally called? It was called Operation Infinite Justice. Operation Infinite Justice. When the planes took off. Heading towards Afghanistan. Operation Infinite Justice. The next day was changed. The name was changed. Why? Because the Saudis. The Saudis. And the Muslim world complained. That only God can inflict infinite justice. And it was offensive to Allah and to Muslims to call this Operation Infinite Justice. So what did the Americans do? We said, oh, we don't want to offend you guys. You just flew airplanes into our buildings and killed 3,000 of our citizens. But we suddenly don't want to offend you. Okay, we'll change the name. Don't worry about it. And we did. That was Bush. That was Ransfeld. That was Cheney. Those were the tough guys. The you guys. All Republicans, by the way. All Republicans. So we missed our opportunity. Then we stayed in Afghanistan. And we started to build them roads and build them schools and encourage girls to go to school. And elected Karzai to president and sent them doodles of money. Lots of dollars. Billions and billions and billions of dollars under Bush. But, you know, one of all here. So why stop it blaming Bush? You know, Bush at the end of the day has most of the blame because he's the one who initiated this action. This war. And instead of winning it, he set us up for defeat. It is George W. Bush who set us up for today's events in Afghanistan. I don't know if you're seeing the video. Pretty horrific. But we can also blame Obama. Obama decided it was our quote vital national interest. And again, I'm reading from Thomas Jocelyn to help the Afghans build the capacity to defend their country on their own. In December 2009, he committed forces at their peak more than 100,000 American troops to accomplish the task. Not to defeat the Taliban. This is me now. Not to defeat the Taliban, but to train Afghans who would then probably fight on the side of the Taliban. Continue to quote from Thomas. More Americans were killed in Afghanistan during Obama's war than in any other period of this decade. But Obama wasn't fighting to win. His surge in forces came with an expiration date of just 18 months. And then he chased a fanciful deal with the Taliban. A peace deal with the Taliban. To his credit, Obama ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. But al-Qaeda lived despite Obama's attempts to declare the group dead. So Obama continued the Bush tradition, spent gazillions of dollars in Afghanistan. Pretended to go after the Taliban while negotiating with them at the same time. But we're not going to stop with Obama. He writes, blame Donald Trump. His instinct was to bring the soldiers home. Instead, he agreed to a small increase in America's footprint, claiming that the U.S. was fighting for victory. He didn't mean it, and they never tried. Blame Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who portrayed the Taliban as America's counter-terrorism partner. Yeah, Pompeo thought that the Taliban would be our partner in going after al-Qaeda. Saying that the group, this is quoting him again, had agreed to, quote, work alongside us to destroy al-Qaeda. Who was he kidding? What kind of evasion would get you something like that? Quoting again, Trump repeated Pompeo's claim, saying the Taliban, quote, will be killing terrorists for us. In what fantasy land would that happen? And Thomas continues, this is nonsense. The Taliban's men are terrorists, and there's no evidence they've broken with al-Qaeda. Absolutely good for you, Thomas. Blame the generals. It is true they were asked to fight a war that was undermined by America's erratic political leadership. But no general ever stood up to say, no, we cannot prosecute an unwinnable war. Remember when Bush called it an unwinnable war? Remember the title of Ilan Jona's book, Winning the Unwinnable War? Since 2018, this is still Trump, and this is from Thomas. The US military has been invested in the State Department's delusional peace process with the Taliban. Repeatedly claiming that there was no, quote, military solution to the conflict. But this was always a lie. Of course, there's a military solution. The Taliban knows that. As the Taliban takes control of Kabul, Americans can see for themselves that the jihadists have a, quote, military solution in mind all along. The Taliban and al-Qaeda were never ambivalent about their jihad. They were always, always, always fighting to win. We were not. In the end, to quote Thomas, President Biden wasn't ambivalent about the war either. He was willing to watch the jihadists resurrect the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And so they have. Excellent piece, excellent piece. I mean, I encourage you all to sign up for Barry Weisz's, Barry Weisz's sub-stack. He's absolutely right, absolutely right. And, you know, Scott is still defending Trump. It just sickens me, sickens me. Even on stuff that is, he's obviously so frigging wrong. There'll be some people who will defend him no matter what. It's just stunning. This is what happens when you try to fight wars without winning, without their attempt to win. This is what happens when you try to build nations without first destroying their belief in their previous system. This is what happens when you are not willing to fight a war the way wars need to be fought. This is what happens when you don't value your troops as much as you value the virtue signaling and the altruism that's involved in pretending that you care about the citizens of another country. This is what happens when you job just war theory, the altruistic theory of war advocated by Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, many middle, you know, many philosophers over the years, but certainly within the Christian tradition. And West Point today. West Point today is dominated. I mean, there is an alternative to just war theory. I actually debated years ago, years and years ago, probably 2007, 2006 or 2007. I debated the head of the philosophy department at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Springs, Colorado. I debated the chairman of the philosophy department on just war theory. He defended it. I attacked it. Leonard Peacuff was in the audience. I remember that. And they will defend it to the death, to the death of as many troops as necessary. Just war theory says puts all these rules of engagement, all these conditions of fighting, all these rules on what you can and cannot do when you can and cannot engage in war in violent activity. And again, if you want to see just war theory applied, watch the outpost, watch the movie, the outpost, unbelievably powerful in depicting the evil of our policy in Afghanistan. God, do I blame Clinton and Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden and every general that served under them. I don't blame the troops. I don't blame the colonels. I blame the decision makers, the people who could have stood up, who could have presented an alternative. And it ain't never happened. And for those who say, who cares about the Afghans? Well, we, the philosophy of egoism, the philosophy of selfishness, I at least as a selfish human being care. I care about people who are going to be subjugated. I care about people who are going to be raped and murdered and tortured. And particularly I care about people who are representatives, representatives who are speaking from me and you because they are political leaders. Promise that they would be safe. Promise that they would save them. Promise that they would get them out of the country. And they clearly reneged on their promise. They clearly abandoned their own people. And you can see Biden's pathetic attempt today to even that to blame on the Afghans and not to take responsibility for it. Again, where was the intelligence? Where was the preparation? Where were the troops? Where was the intelligence? Look, none of this, I don't enjoy saying any of this. It sickens me that this is the world in which we live. And this is much worse than Vietnam. Because Vietnam, we had no reason to be there. Here, we actually acted in self-defense to go there. Jekyll, unfortunately the just word debate was not recorded. It was actually done at the University of Colorado Boulder at Boulder. It was a packed house. But it was not recorded in those days, you know, it was expensive and it just wasn't. People just didn't record everything. Everyone in which student group organized it. But my just war theory essay is available online for free. It's available in winning non-winnerable war book. My talk on the morality of war and just war theory is available online. The talk that I gave at the U.S. Air Force Intelligence headquarters in a... I forget, it's the big Air Force base in Ohio is recorded and available. I think we blanked out the Q&A because you just not identify the officers who were there asking questions. All of that is available. My position on this going back to 2002 is available. You can find my talks on 9-11 one year later all the way. And my talks on why I hate neoconservatives, why they're anti-Americans, why the forward strategy for freedom was wrong. That's another talk. And then my just war theory talks available as well. So all of that is available. You can find it online plus talks that I did with Daniel Pipes and Fleming Rose. Those are also all available. But the debate unfortunately is not. Okay, thank you. Best Fed Hank, I appreciate that. Thank you, Stefan, for the support. All right. Let's do some super chat questions related to the Afghan stuff. And then I'm going to shift over to education. Let's see. Quickly, Tony Sniper Gaming says, I think all this was planned and people is crazy for thinking that we have any say on who will be next president. No, we do have a say. Biden, like it or not, was actually elected by a majority of Americans. All right. That's on a different topic. That's on a different topic. History, Michael says history doesn't repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme. Mark Twain said that. Yes. In Vietnam, Afghanistan, you can see it. Unless you change the philosophy, people will repeat the same mistakes over and over and over and over again. Let's see. Shazba says, why does the US have such a faulty policy in the Middle East? But it has such a gung-ho attitude in the movies. For example, true lies. Because in the movies, you can play out your fantasies of being tough and being American and blowing stuff up and killing the bad guys. But in reality, altruism kicks in. In reality, questions kick in. Well, you know what about the innocence? And is this a just war? And have we tried everything? And shouldn't we negotiate and on and on? True lies, by the way. I love that movie. That's a terrific movie. But on and on and on, you go with the altruistic view. But shouldn't I turn the cheek? And shouldn't I love the enemy? And who are we to judge them? I mean, even George Bush, after 9-11, remember, celebrated the Ramadan in the White House that November, brought in Islamic religious leaders to celebrate with him called Islam a religion of peace. I mean, it's just appeasement upon appeasement upon appeasement that our politicians engage in. In the movies, we can fantasize. In the movies, we can put our moral beliefs aside and just go for it. It's just like in our day-to-day lives, we don't act altruistically. It's only when we sit and think about things or in politics or when we have to write a check to the charity or we have to vote on raising our own taxes, then we become altruists. But in day-to-day stuff, to a long extent, we try to act in our self-interest. Not always, not all the time, not consistently, that's the problem. But True Lies is a good movie. It's the only comedy done by James Cameron. And it's during the period when James Cameron actually made good movies. I mean, that was the last good movie he made. That was with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was the last good movie he made after that was Titanic. Awful movie. All right. I was derazio. Sorry to distort your name. I apologize. He writes, anti-war libertarians are saying this war can't be won. America's imperialism in the Middle East is the origin cause of this problem. Any truth in that? No, no, no. Anti-war libertarians is why I don't consider myself a libertarian, why I won't have anything to do with certain libertarians. This is, it's a complete lie. Of course, this could have been won. I laid out a strategy for how it could be won. I've done it over and over and over again. I laid out a strategy in winning the unwinnable war with Elan Giorno. I highly recommend you read that book. And it's absolutely not. And I, again, I have written about this extensively in my essays on foreign policy. Look them up. Get winning the unwinnable war. Why? This crisis has, and by the way, I did courses on the history of the Middle East, on the history of totalitarian Islam or the Islamist movement. You can find them on YouTube for free. If you think that American imperialism in the Middle East is the origin, is the original cause of this problem, go check out my courses. I prove there unequivocally that that is complete and utter nonsense, that that is just not true, that it has nothing to do with that. Oh, your name is the voice of reason in Spanish. That is, that is quite cool. So, so now I'm really sorry that I was pronounced it. So, look up my work on this topic. Look up my lectures, my talks, my Q&As. I've covered all this ground. But no, the Middle East, they hate us because of our virtues. The Middle East hates us because Islam and Jihad are deeply ingrained in their beliefs. And again, the anti-war libertarians are the worst libertarians. So he asked, is it altruism to think that the hasty pullout was morally wrong? No, it's not altruism. It's egoism. It's not in our long-term self-interest to do a hasty pullout. It's not in our long-term interest to abandon allies. It's not in our long interest to renege on commitments that we make. Any more than it's not in our long-term self-interest, it's not selfish of us to lie, cheat, steal. We made commitments to certain Afghans, which we have reneged on. We have now shown our allies our true colors. We will pay a heavy cost for this in the future. And it's just, it's morally offensive. So, no, altruism. Altruism is the ideology that prevented us from winning. Altruism preventing us from crushing the Taliban before we left. Altruism is what prevented us from, you know, destroying every single Taliban base, every single Taliban vehicle, every single Taliban, before we left. By the way, the Taliban now possess one of the largest fleets of black-hot enicopters outside of the United States because they've just taken over the Afghan military. Everything we gave the Afghan military now belongs to the Taliban. Why didn't we blow out of the air? Why don't we blow up now, all those helicopters? Why don't we go in and send our stealth fighter pilots, Obama's, to go in there and bomb every single piece of equipment we gave the Afghan military so that the Taliban cannot use American weapons to subjugate their own people? That would be self-interest. Scott asks, can you expand on the idea of how we could have taken control in Afghanistan? Altered their education system, wouldn't they have been pushed back? Look, I don't think that's what we should have done. I don't think that's what we should have done. What we should have done is gone in, destroyed the bad guys, sent a clear message to the world about what happens when you mess with America, destroyed their capabilities to ever resurrect their bases to attack us, crushed the Taliban, crushed al-Qaeda, told them, if you attack us again, we will come back and crush you again and done it in devastating, unequivocal fashion, and then left. That would be my preference. If, my point yesterday was, if you're going to, if your goal is to convert Afghanistan to a secular, freedom-loving, liberal country, that's never my goal, never my intention, never my want. I believe that would be sacrificial of Americans to do. If you were going to do that, then you would have to take over their institutions. You would have to change their curriculum. There would be pushback, significant pushback. You would have to overcome that pushback. You would have to slowly, systematically change their institutions. You would have to find ways to break the tribal alliances. You would have to pushback against everything barbaric associated with Afghan culture, which is a lot. You would have to stay there for 50 years, and then you'd have a shot. But I don't advocate for that. Never. Oh, by the way, you would have to rewrite the Constitution, force them to engage in separation, church, and state. I mean, you would have to thoroughly demolish the existing foundation of their culture. And yet there would be massive pushback on that, and that's why, I mean, it's not why I don't advocate for it, but it's clearly not realistic to do it. That's the only way in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or in Syria, or in any of these countries, you can actually change the culture. I mean, this is what Israel has to do with the Palestinians. But Israel has no choice. We had a choice. We didn't have to do that. We could have killed the bad guys, gone home. But really killed the bad guys. And we didn't do that. That's on Bush. On Bush and his entire senior leadership, Colin Powell, all of them, it's their fault. Yeah, we did that in Japan after World War II, but to some extent, there was reason for us to do it in Japan. Japan was an industrial powerhouse, and we didn't want Japan ever to become what it did. To go back to have to fight another war with Japan would have been impossible. But Afghanistan is not a threat to us. We can go in, demolish it, go home, warn them, and wait it out. Stefan asks, are you familiar with Thomas Jefferson's fight against the Tripoli Muslim Pirates? I wonder what an anti-war libertarian would have to say about that. Yeah, I mean, I cited that often. One of the things I cited was, you know, Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to fight the Tripoli Pirates in the Mediterranean when he was president. And in the early 20 teens, there were pirates off the coast of Somalia, and nobody seemed to know anything about what you do. And I'm not sure what you're asking, Saad. Even after winning, I would go home. In Afghanistan, I would go home. I would crush them and go home. Let them stew. I would not pour billions of dollars. I would not try to re-educate them. I would not invest anything in it. I would put the troops on the ground, put the troops in the air, crush them, and then get out of there. And if the Europeans want to sacrifice themselves to the cause of improving the lives of Afghans, let them do it. Yes, so one of the great ironies is that Thomas Jefferson could get rid of pirates back in the 19th century, and we couldn't do it in the 21st century with pirates off the coast of Somalia. Ryan says, altruism rewards evil. The Taliban punishes virtual American soldiers and innocent Afghanis and women. They so said, absolutely. And that's what altruism, that is placing the interest of other people above your own, always does. Always does. And that's what makes altruism so evil. It rewards the bad and penalizes the good. It sacrifices, purposefully, sacrifices the good, the productive, the able to those who are not. All right. The Taliban was not part of the tribal culture there. The Taliban is a particular group arising out of a particular group of teachings. It came out of the Pashtuns, but it wasn't all Pashtuns. It was people who studied the madrasas in Pakistan, which I after 9-11, if I were president, I would have wiped out the madrasas in Pakistan. I would have ordered the American Air Force to bomb every single one of those madrasas. I would have raised them off the face of the earth, right? That's how you crush an enemy. Those are the schools that teach them, the terrorism. That's what you need to do. It's those kind of things. Taliban is students, student of what? Student of Mullah Omar, student of Islamism. And you've got to crush Islamism. And that's not that hard to do. Not that hard to do if you know who you're targeting. But again, I've spoken about this hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And I encourage you to find all my talks that I gave in the 2000s about this so that I don't have to constantly repeat the same things that I've talked about over and over and over again. Plus, I did a whole course on the history of the Middle East where some of this comes up. I did a whole course on Islamic totalitarianism when this comes up. All of it is available for free on my channel on YouTube. It's on my playlists on YouTube. It wouldn't start a wider war. Nobody would attack America. Nobody would touch America. The excuse is always, oh, in a World War II, against whom? Who's going to fight World War III against the United States? The Russians, the Chinese, are going to fight from the side of the Muslims. And who among the Muslim nations is going to fight against America? No, crushing the, systematically crushing. Islamist organizations would be something that many Muslim countries would have thanked us for. So no, it wouldn't have started a wider war at all. It would have ended a war much earlier, much sooner. And again, I go into all of this in winning than winnable war. All right, I'm going to take this question by Joe because it's a $50 question. All right, let me just do Andy Blank because it's on topic and then I'll do Joe's. Is there a principal self-interested case for protecting individual rights abroad? What are the limits of protecting U.S. rights internationally? It's complicated, right? It's a complicated thing, but it's absolutely the job of the United States government is to protect the individual rights of Americans wherever they happen to be. Within realistic limits, that is, one of the jobs of the United States government should be to define the places that Americans can go where America will defend their rights and places where Americans go at their own risk, at the risk of their own personhood. That is, you know, the certain places where I would say you're not, you shouldn't go. I don't think America should have embassies in many of these countries. I mean, one of the great tragedies of Benghazi is why did we have an ambassador in Benghazi? Why do we have an ambassador in Afghanistan? Why do we have an ambassador in Pakistan? Why do we have an embassy in Saudi Arabia? Why do we have an embassy in China? We shouldn't have embassies in these places and we should tell Americans to go there. It's on you. It's your responsibility. But if the Chinese government or if Islamists are systematically killing Americans in Europe or in places like Lebanon where Americans, let's say we say it's okay for them to go, then it's the job of the U.S. government to say, stop it. And if you don't stop it, we will destroy you. We will go to war with you. You cannot, and the same with confiscation of property. Now again, it depends on scale. It depends on the kind of property. But for example, confiscation of oil, confiscation of the Suez Canal should not have been allowed. The U.S. government should have stopped it. And imagine what would have happened if we'd insisted that the oil doesn't belong to the Saudi king, but the oil belongs to the oil companies that actually discovered it. Yes, I've argued for ending diplomatic relations with China for years now. Daniel says, how does the Afghan pull-out affect China? Who to help? Oh, it helps China. It's a massive help to China. It weakens the United States. It suddenly weakens the United States influence in the region. The Pakistanis won't have anything to do with the U.S. India is now looking sideways at the U.S. like we can never trust you. These stands, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, all those countries north of Afghanistan that are close to China and the China is running the Silk Road through now have no reason to trust the United States have anything to do with the United States. This raises the prestige of the Chinese. It raises their influence in the region. From what I've read, they've already started to negotiate with the Taliban with regard to moving some of the Silk Road through Afghanistan. The Chinese want a number of different routes for the highways and the trains and so on. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there. Help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share. And you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and and show your support for all for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. And and of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber, even if you even if you just come here to troll, or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on when they're on. You'll get notified. Right. So, yes, like, share, subscribe support, like share, subscribe support. There you go. Easy. Do one know all of those, please.