 I want to announce our panel to take a little bit more of a look at this. And first, I have someone I know very well, and I have someone that I know his work, but we have not met in person yet. And Phil Geraldi, I've known for quite some time. Phil is a regular contributor to our institute's website. He's one of my favorite writers. He writes from experience. He spent a couple of decades in the CIA and operations. He knows the Middle East like the back of his hand. And he's a terrific writer. He's always uncovering something. And Phil, I think, is such an asset to our movement, what we're trying to do. Someone who's been there and knows it. Professor T. Hunt Tuley is the chairman of the history department at Austin College. And his expertise really is the Great War, which is so appropriate today. He's the author of The Great War, Western Front and Home Front. And I think it's excellent that the Mises Institute invited him because this sort of pulls the strings together. So welcome, panelists. Let's sit down and have a conversation. What we're going to do is each panelist will present five to seven minutes synopsis of what they are thinking about. And then we will open it up to a discussion, and we would like to involve all of you in the discussion. There are little microphones I'm told that you can throw at each other and ask questions. When the questions do come, please make sure they are phrased in the form of a succinct question so we can get as many people in it so we can answer specific questions. So let's get started. No? OK. Dan and David Stockman between them stole virtually everything I was going to say. So what I'll try to do is throw out a few comments, which I hope will be supplementary to what they've suggested. And these won't be in any specific order or not necessarily connected, but hopefully they'll be useful. The first thing I would ask people to consider is that the premise for this conference is actually incorrect. I would suggest that the United States actually doesn't have a foreign policy. A foreign policy, virtually by definition, is a coherent plan that essentially pulls together different elements in terms of how the United States interacts with the rest of the world. What we've been seeing ever since 9-11 is essentially something quite different. We've been seeing a reaction to what is going on in the rest of the world. And the original intention of a foreign policy to protect American interests and to protect Americans traveling or in business has basically been abandoned. So I think that's something that people should consider. We have really walked away from what the principle was for having a foreign policy as seen by Jefferson and others. Another thing that occurred to me when I was listening to the previous speeches was that in my own history, I voted for George W. Bush in 2000, I voted for Obama twice, and I voted for Trump. In every case, the reasoning was exactly the same. These people represented, to me, the peace candidates, in some cases, only by virtue of who they were running against. But the fact was, they were people that were promising a change of direction in terms of the United States and how we conduct our policies. In terms of what I did and what they have done, I would deduce that we've been betrayed that basically the people in this country, which I think, both from the right and left, constitute a considerable part of the electorate that really do want peace, have been betrayed by both parties. And I think this is something to consider, that the peace movement that David Stockin was talking about, I think, is actually much bigger than we see it, because we generally come out of our own bubbles, politically speaking. And from our own bubble, we may not see that there are people that are politically on the other side that share a lot of our concerns. The trick will be to bring all of this together. Another thing that David brought up was essentially that the investigations of what happened in Syria, just like a Russia gate, will probably produce no result. And I think that's an accurate assumption on this part. But coming out of the intelligence community, I would say the sad thing about this is that the intelligence community and the US government know exactly what happened in both cases. But whether this will ever come out or not is doubtful. I think what we really need is a whistleblower. And I think in people in their conversations with people who work for the government and national security should subtly hint to people that this might be a good idea. Finally, I think it's important to assess just how serious what is going on today in Syria really is. I consider this just as bad as the invasion of Iraq. And there are two reasons for that. For one thing, ISIS was on the verge of destruction. It's gone the other way. The other thing was the Russian relationship was improving. That's gone the other way. These are extremely serious issues. And I think that they're going to be very destructive for the United States if Trump is not reined in. Thank you. Professor. Am I on? Is that on? OK. Well, I think this is a very good time to talk about peace and war from a historical's perspective. It's a good idea. Since 100 years ago this week, we began the week at peace and we ended the week at war. So we're talking today in part about prospects for peace today. Are there prospects? And as a historian, I'm a little bit conflicted there because historians are pretty good with the past and we're pretty bad with the future. So I remember the day I told my students at the Berlin Wall, which I'd just been seeing after a research trip to East Germany would not fall in my lifetime or theirs. And two weeks later it fell. So they were pretty pleased, you can imagine. So I have three short points and two are kind of historical and one is not quite as historical. First of all, this vilification of Russia that we see in the press, the systematic cranking up of the steam and above all of Putin as yet one more face of evil. I've been working a lot lately thinking about American intervention into the war in a course of a series of essays. And I'm just put in mind the whole run-up to World War I and American intervention in particular. The press was a pretty much British subvention but there were many, many forces of the government that really made it appear that the Kaiser was the face of evil and that the Germans were the root of all evil. This was a technique that had been invented a while before by the British but it was used in this big way to say, OK, focus people's ideas on this one face of evil. A phrase, by the way, which Time Magazine adopted beginning with many tyrants in our times, Gaddafi and many others, but since then it has become much more sophisticated and we've got a virtual machinery of creating faces of evil in that same imperial city that David Stockman mentioned. And they can really crank them out on demand and make everybody that same sort of Time Magazine face of evil. So this has become the indispensable part of the sort of propaganda for war, I think. And that's where we find ourselves today looking at Assad and we had to have at this point some kind of terrible event with children involved. The second point is that there were in the period of World War I, as I say, I've been working on American intervention. And it's a tragic but exciting material to study. One aspect the heroic rearguard action by about 50 members of the House and six or eight senators who just fought like mad to keep that war from happening in spite of having the deck stacked against them and so forth, they filibustered an armed ship's bill which fighting Bob LaFollette said would mean war if it passed. And they filibustered that out of existence. But a few days later, the administration was able to conquer anyway and just persuade everybody. Their vote was 50 congressmen opposed and six senators, LaFollette and Norris and others opposed. But I want to point out this. And thinking about this, they did all this without a coherent anti-war, anti-interventionist movement with a deep background of economic and political philosophy behind it. They did it without Ron Paul. They did it without the Ron Paul Institute. They did it without the Mises Institute. So I say all honor to their names. But I do believe that puts us in a better situation today. Finally, just a very short point. If peace is to have a chance, let me give my opinion. It won't come because of some individual politician who comes to power and makes peace. It has to come from changing minds and perceptions. Something that I suppose all of us in this room are engaged in and a part of. Education at all levels is certainly the key. And in this regard, there is, I think, since 2003 and above all, since 2008 and the election, there is a huge growth in the understanding of the deep state. And therefore, I'm optimistic about the prospects for peace. Thank you very much, Professor. And thank you, Phil, for your comments. I'm going to take the right of the chair, I guess, and ask a couple of questions, one each of you. Professor Julia, I'm fascinated by the media. I always have been. I think it's such an important part of how it shapes our opinions and our views of the world. And I think you made a very interesting comment. At the time of World War I, what a strong role the media played in the indecision. And one thing I noticed when the Syrian missiles flew and the stories came out of why, it seemed like the media, in the large sense, was completely bifurcated. And I mean, on the one hand, the mainstream media was lockstep, as David Stockard mentioned, lockstep behind. But, and Jeff Deis has mentioned this, we now can create our own media for better or for worse through social media. And I went on to my Twitter and my Facebook, and I looked at the people and the institutions that I follow, and it was night and day. They were questioning. They were speculating. In some cases, they were conspiracizing, if that's a word. So what do you make of this idea that the media monopoly has been broken? Oh, I think that's really important. I think it's vital to everything we're doing. I mean, think of the multitude of sort of network connections that end up with all of us being here together in this room. Yeah, it's a very crucial thing to our movement. And your shows, Ron Paul Institute and I watch YouTube videos and get great information from all kinds of people. Yeah, I think this is crucial. And as you say, it just goes, it's this kind of viral quality. So that's wonderful. And Phil, I'll ask you a quick question. You spent decades in the intelligence community. You still know people there and have good contacts. You mentioned that they know what happened was very different than what we've been told is happening. If you could take a guess, what do you think is going on in the intelligence community right now as we sit here? Well, I can't speak for the whole intelligence community, but I certainly can speak for the circle of people that I know that are retirees and some of whom are still in fact, working on contract for the US government. There's a great deal of dissent going on in terms of what is happening. This has been generated by the fact that as I hinted at before, there are people inside the system who witnessed what happened two days ago and filmed it, saw it happening live from a drone and they talked to their friends. And they say, look, what we saw, what we perceived was precisely or was a lot closer to what the Russians are saying happened than what the White House is saying happened. I was personally astonished when President Trump immediately jumped on Syria. There was no way in hell that he could have known what he seemed to think he knew at that point. And dad made the comment to me that basically he was getting his feed from what was going on in the mainstream media. In other words, he wasn't talking to his intelligence community, which could have given him possibly some reason to pause. Instead, he was listening to what Fox News was saying. So this is a very scary thing if we have a president who's driven more or less by what is perceived or is perceivable as factual information and is more driven by sentimental information that's being put out by the media, which is basically a commercial product trying to sell what it has and saying what it thinks will be most popular. Do we have some questions out there from the audience? First hand went up in the back. You gotta catch this though, that's the key. If you don't, it's a miss. You're gonna get it. Oh, right? That's neat. All right, so can anybody hear me? Okay. I have a question about the concept of extreme vetting in light of what is happening in Europe. Is that a good thing to do extreme vetting or is this just a case of being xenophobic and paranoid? Extreme vetting again is kind of a catchphrase. If you're opposed to it, you see it as an extremist act and if you're in favor of it, you see it as something justifiable. I think the reality is that our immigration system, our refugee system, our asylum system, they're all connected is broken. How do you tell that someone who comes from a war zone who has no documents, who he is, what he's about, what he's doing? So when Donald Trump was raising these issues initially, they made a lot of sense. The problem is it then becomes dogma, it becomes doctrine and the doctrine punishes the innocent together with the guilty without fixing the system. I would be much in favor of them looking for ways to fix the system rather than to punish people who might get caught up in it. Norman? Conventional wisdom in DC on Thursday was that the Trump administration with the allegations of the manufactured scandals of his connections to Putin and the failure to pass Obamacare repeal and replace was causing his administration to flounder. Conventional wisdom on Friday morning was he was on the path to becoming the next Lincoln because he was killing a lot of children. To what extent do you think that those political considerations may have contributed to a wag the dog type scenario at least in the Oval Office? And also what does this mean between the reported conflict between Steve Brand and the more nationalist populist America first or restrained foreign policy and rents previous and Trump's son-in-law who represent more of a traditional establishment tarry and rule the world and invade the world and invite the world point of view? I agree. Well, and I basically do agree with the premise of your questions, which all were aimed at, yeah, the things we've been talking about. I may kick this back to Phil if he wants to take that, or you did. Well, I was just gonna say, you know, there is a precedent when President Clinton got into trouble in a different sort of way and the Aspen family factories in Sudan were taken out. So there certainly is a precedent for this sort of thing. Is there any sense that this, in other words, if he was just reading the news and not getting, not resorting to intelligence? Is there any way that that was formulated, rounded, created that situation by the intelligence community? I don't think it was created by the intelligence community. It was created by the White House is pretty clear. I think it is a plausible hypothesis that Trump would allow this to happen or encourage this to happen as a way of getting back at the Russiagate attacks against him by saying, look, I'm doing something against the Russians. I'm attacking their ally. And it makes a lot of sense that he did that. And there are other elements of it that make sense to support that argument. For example, the Russians knew way in advance that this attack was coming. The US had a hotline connected with Russian intelligence and told them an hour before the attack was coming. The Russians and the Syrians were able, more or less, clear out the air base. So it seems to have been an attack that was intended to minimize actual damage as a way to mitigate the reaction of the Russians. Now that hasn't worked, as Dan pointed out. The Russians didn't buy into this. They're very offended by what occurred and what the implications of it are. So I think that this may have been a clever, or as the English would put it, too clever by a half move on the part of the administration to deal with the Russiagate issue and to look tough at the same time. Unfortunately, the result has been both to strengthen the ISIS and the other terrorist groups in Syria at the same time, weaken the relationship with Russia, maybe in a fatal way. So almost sounds like a hundred million dollar temper tantrum, green box. You might have partially answered my question already, but my question is given all of the positive rhetoric between Trump and pre-election and given the strategic importance of the negotiations with China and how the timing of the missiles coincided perfectly with China, do you think there was actually any kind of more backdoor, like you previously mentioned with Russia, where Trump is like, hey, if you kind of let me get away with little missile strike to show demonstration of strength against China, maybe I'll scratch your back in the future. Obviously you have to trash talk it in the media and you have to do your things in your PR and then we have to do our PR, but ultimately let's not try to start World War III out of this. Let me get a little demonstration of strength against China and maybe I'll just help you with Crimea or easing of sanctions down the road after this all kind of plays out. We get our cake with China. What's your thoughts on, I guess, all of that? Well, I think that's a very possible scenario and of course, I can't know, we don't have any information on this right now, but of course, the basic problem is that it's president who is came out as being in a sense kind of anti-interventionist, but never accepted the premise that I suppose most of us in this room accept that you just shouldn't go looking for monsters. So I think that's what makes us have to ask all these, do all this specific speculation. It's like the old Sovietologist, you know, stringers who sat outside of Red Square to see which lights were on in the Kremlin and things like that. You know, it's just, it's speculation, but I think it sounds highly possible to me. And my only problem with that is that the Kremlinologists were usually wrong. So I worry about speculation on plausibilities and I think oftentimes there's too much complexity put into the possibilities of these kinds of relationships. And I would add that it's a very subtle scenario and Trump doesn't do subtle very well. Blue box. Yeah, I have two short questions. One, Phil mentioned that we needed more whistleblowers and I agree. And I'm wondering, there hasn't been much talked about in the media about this, but I'm wondering is our contractors treated differently with results to the whistleblower statute. And then also I was real shortly, I was just wondering why we can't seem to get any or why nobody in Congress in these intelligence communities seems to know anything about or can't get any documentation about what happened in various surveillance activities. It's like they're being stonewalled. Yeah, two questions there. Whistleblower, there's federal legislation for whistleblowers who are government employees. Whistleblower legislation is my understanding for people who are just employees of companies varies from state to state. I think that's the reality. So we'd have to depend on what the law was in the state where the whistleblowers company was located. So it's not as easy for contractors, that's for sure. And what was the second question? Oh, yeah, got it, yeah, got it. Okay, as this was being debated on Thursday, they're debating in the Senate a resolution condemning Syria and calling for action. The, it was my understanding that the senators were not receiving any background information from the intelligence community. And the only reason I couldn't possibly understand why that was the case was because the White House must have been blocking it. So yeah, this is an awful situation where our elected representatives are not allowed to see the information that the government has when they're being called upon basically to agree with a document that's calling for possible acts of war. It's incredible. But I mean, I wonder if they not getting any information because there isn't any information. Everyone says that Putin hacked the election, Russian hacked the election, but what did they do? And then when they're put into a corner, they say something vague like somehow RT mesmerized a middle America factory worker into voting for Trump. When you pin them down, they can't point to what did the Russians do? Did they hack the ballot boxes? No, they didn't do that. We know they didn't do that. What did they do? Did they hack the, did they hack Podesta's emails? Well, his password was password. So, you know, there wasn't a lot of geniuses. And then there's the crowd strike issue. You know, the only organization that took the forensic evidence of the hacking turns out to be founded by a guy who has very shady circumstances, very closely tied to the Atlantic Council, which is a pro let's go to war Russia outfit and also is on the payroll of the FBI. Yeah, and the other thing I would point out when you talk about change of evidence, you know, if a sophisticated intelligence service, which certainly the Russians had was setting out to do this hack, to demoralize our democracy, to get Donald Trump elected as all has been alleged and basically bought completely by the mainstream media. They would be able to hide their tracks and they would, believe me, there are a number of things that they could do to get this information and to make sure that nobody would be able to pick up the trail as to where it finally went. So I'm not saying the Russians did it, but I'm saying if they did it, well, it's a waste of time to do an investigation. And that's why these investigations are such a frustrating thing. They're gonna go on for months and months and months. All they're basically gonna do is enfeeble the Trump administration which after Thursday might be a good thing. But they're not gonna accomplish anything. Okay, let's go to green. Yeah, a simple question. Why do we believe the North Koreans have nukes? All the tests so far have been well, well under critical mass. If you don't have 15 kilotons, you don't have critical mass, you didn't have a nuke. So why is it that we're believing these one kiloton tests, which could just as easily be fertilizer bombs? The fact is many people in the intelligence community don't believe that North Korea has a nuclear weapon. They believe just as you are speculating that the tests that the nuclear, that the North Koreans have pointed to as evidence that they have these weapons were caused by conventional explosives or similar. And there are people that have been saying that and believe that. It's obviously in North Korea's interest to allege that it has nuclear weapons as a deterrent. So I think you have to pay your money and take your choice, but the US government obviously has by and large bought into the theory that they do have nuclear weapons. I think we have time for one more. I've got the blue in the corner. Thanks for the panel guys. I'm a PhD student. So my question's more about the role of academics and other pieces of the intelligentsia. How do you view both normatively and positively? So how you think it ought to be and how it just is right now, the role of academics and so-called the intellectual class with regard to the anti-war movement. Thank you. Overwhelmingly still in academe and especially in the disciplines with history and political science foreign relations, sociology, these kinds of disciplines, people are financed by money that directs them in a certain way for generations. The professors and the professoriate has been completely indoctrinated by stages as they go through graduate school. And so if you took the whole picture, it would look pretty grim. But on the other hand, most of these academics are pretty quiescent and they're basically investigating the dress links of dolls in 18th century New York or something, that's not really that striking. So I think that there are a few academics who are really effective and some of them work in different kinds of institutions. Some of them are at high profile research institutions and some are not. But I think that for example, if you go to one of the Mises economics conferences, you'll find that there are fellow travelers everywhere throughout the disciplines. So that too, I mean, I think it's a big uphill battle to think that you would ever convert that kind of mass in those kinds of years and generations of sort of indoctrination, sort of the acceptance of social democracy, sort of the acceptance of Marxism light and all of these kinds of things. But again, I mean, I see that in this case, the glass is not at all half full, but there's something there in the glass anyway. And I think that that's still very useful to have. I would just add to that the put in a plug for the Ron Paul Institute's academic board. We have people like Professor Klaus Renn, who's dedicated his career to promoting a better foreign policy and a brilliant man and also professors Flint and Hillary Leverett, Flint is at University of Pennsylvania and Hillary is teaching at American. They wrote a seminal work going to Tehran, which argued that we need a Nixon to China moment to have an opening with Iran, which to his credit is something that President Obama did to the consternation of almost everyone in Washington. So they get credit for that. And I think we're gonna have to close out the panel, but thank you very much to the panelists, Phil Geraldi, Professor Huntouli. Thank you so much for joining us.