The list of countries currently at war is staggering. Murray Rothbard, who would have been 100 on March 2, was always against war. He was dismayed by the cold war. He would be more than alarmed by the aforementioned list and the US’s and Israel’s invasion of Iran. “I am getting more and more convinced,” he wrote a libertarian associate in 1959, “that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, and that we will never get anywhere in this great intellectual counter-revolution (or revolution) unless we can end this Verdamte cold war—a war for which I believe our ‘tough’ policy is largely responsible.”
Iranian-American scholar Vali Nasr told Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain why Iran isn’t breaking under the US-Israel bombing campaign, and the reasons behind Tehran’s belief that time is on its side. He says Iran believes this is the final battle and its people are rallying around the Iranian flag.
He says Iran is playing the long game while the US President keeps telling Americans the war is already won. If Trump believed the Iranian people would rise up against the regime, now they are fighting for their lives against the US and Israel, not the Iranian regime.
Nasr told Husain, “I don’t think Iran is ready to quit. They’ve put their teeth into the United States and they’re not ready to let go. They’ve already suffered a lot. I think they’re prepared to suffer more. They want to come out of this war changing the US calculation. They don’t want to go back to the status quo.”
He continued. “Their thinking is that this has to be the last war. Either they go down or the United States and Israel will abandon the idea that they could go into Iran and have a war every six months or at will — this idea of “mowing the lawn.” The United States has to pay a high enough cost to lose its appetite for war with Iran.”
Rothbard told a friend, “I realize that this is heresy for a professional economist to say, but I think the issue of peace vs. nuclear annihilation of the world is considerable more important than whether we have a 2% or 4% per annum rise in prices, or whether taxes on the upper income brackets are raised or lowered by 2%.”
President Trump claimed that an Iranian attack was imminent. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the President “concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action.” While no intelligence indicated an imminent threat, “As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.”
Rothbard foresaw this decades ago. “… war and a phony ‘external threat’ have long been the chief means by which the State wins back the loyalty of its subjects.”
[Nasr] was in India recently and “it’s very clear that outside the United States and the West, [the Iranian regime is] enjoying huge amounts of support for standing up to Donald Trump [and] for standing tall.”
In For a New Liberty, Rothbard makes matters clear. “War, then, is mass murder, and this massive invasion of the right to life, of self-ownership, of numbers of people is not only a crime but, for the libertarian, the ultimate crime. … Since all governments obtain their revenue from the thievery of coercive taxation, any mobilization and launching of troops inevitably involve an increase in tax-coercion … because inter-State wars inevitably involve both mass murder and an increase in tax-coercion, the libertarian opposes war. Period.”
