Where do you start? With the planning that left out the whole thing about Iran shooting back? With the use of an insecure curtained-off ballroom in Mar a Lago as the Iran war room? With the White House turning a real shooting war that is killing hundreds of Iranians each day into a macho meme campaign that features clips from video games mixed with real-world strikes on targets in Iran? With Russia providing targeting information to the Iranian military, and that causing our Treasury Secretary to relax sanctions on Russian oil because…well, we haven’t been told why, but gas prices headed ever skyward might have something to do with it.

You can’t keep up with the madness, because there is so much of it. The House and the Senate rejected a war powers resolution that would have ended military action in Iran and required Trump to get congressional approval before proceeding with his war. Republicans said Trump was justified in unilaterally attacking Iran because of the “imminent threat” posed by Iran. When Democrats pointed out that the word “imminent” does not appear even once in the notification and justification the White House provided Congress for the war, Republicans turned to something new…or is it old?...a charge that “Iran has waged a 47-year war against the United States,” so Trump was justified in attacking Iran because it has been our enemy for so long.

Who knew we have been at war with Iran for so long? This is the first we’ve heard of this 47-year war. Should it matter that Republicans can’t agree on why Trump must have the power to take this country to war on a whim, immediately after he walked out of a party in Mar a Lago? The White House itself can’t come up with a coherent reason for the war. Is it about regime change? “Imminent” nuclear weapons? Eliminating Iran’s ability to fund proxies that can strike U.S. “interests” in the Middle East? Eliminating or damaging Iran’s ballistic missile program?

See what I mean? When they’re caught out for contradicting themselves, for lying, for exaggerating, for denying that the war Trump and Hegseth talk about every day as, in fact, a “war,” they just keep babbling more nonsense, secure in the idea that if Donald Trump wants a war on Iran that it must be right.

Meanwhile, Trump has so far refused to interrupt his weekly flights on Air Force One to Palm Beach, where he spends time at Mar a Lago and goes golfing with his pals. The fact that there is an all-out war being fought against Iran – not because the Congress ordered the nation to war, or because anyone else thought bombing Iran was a good idea – but solely at his behest seems not to matter to him, or to anyone else in the Republican Party for that matter.

But now comes the piper insisting on being paid. Trade in oil has been severely interrupted, sending gas prices up everywhere, including the U.S., where the price of regular gas has increased fifty cents a gallon in a week. The price of diesel fuel has gone up even more, making the cost of shipping goods more expensive, and this on top of Trump’s insane tariffs that had already pushed the price of imported goods higher and then higher again, the ones everyone buys at Walmart and the corner store, forced small businesses to go out of business, including restaurants and family-owned firms distributing imported goods. And now we are told that this war that Donald Trump started just over a week ago has cost the United States one billion of our tax dollars each day.

Coming as I do from a military family, I must insist that we treat all this as background noise, because the United States is at war, and that has already caused soldiers to be killed and means that soldiers will likely continue to be killed, with Trump beginning to make noises about committing troops to combat on the ground in Iran.

I realized over the last couple of days that too much of what I have written about this war has been like what I have written above about Trump and the Congress and the justifications for the war and its effect on prices and all the rest. It is automatic to treat this war as if it is a gigantic and complex series of decisions and effects: if we attack this, how will Iran respond? If we use these munitions, what will that mean? Will we run out of those bombs before we can accomplish this goal? And what are the goals of this war, anyway?

The reality of this war and every war for that matter is death. We are told that more than 1,300 Iranians have been killed. The total killed on “our” side is much less. The CENTCOM “Live Tracker” of casualties as of this morning shows that missile and drone strikes by Iran have killed one person in Bahrain, three in the United Arab Emirates, one in Oman, six in Kuwait, 11 in Israel, with injuries around the region in the hundreds. CENTCOM also lists the six American soldiers who have been killed so far.

This is what those cold statistics mean: Most of those people were living and breathing and sitting down to eat dinner with their families one week ago. They tucked their children in bed, or they wrote emails home, or they chatted with their friends on the phone and at work.

And then they didn’t, because this war started by Donald Trump killed them. This is what happens when someone is killed: A death in this war takes a son or a daughter from a mother and father; a husband from a wife, or a wife from a husband; a father or a mother from their children; a brother or a sister from their siblings; a friend from his or her friends.

When a life ends, possibilities end with it. This war has taken from the world the contributions the dead may have made to their families, to their communities, to their countries. The contributions of the people who have been killed need not have been the invention of a new technology or the cure for a disease or a solution to a shortage of food or water. All they might have done was to make others happy, their friends or their families or their children or the people they work with.

But now that has been taken from them, and from us. It is the most profound loss there can be, because their deaths did not occur naturally as part of the wrinkling of time. Their deaths did not have to happen. They died because of the decisions of one man.

The man who sent the nation’s military to war has no idea what the consequences are. Last week, speaking of the soldiers who were killed in a drone strike in Kuwait, Trump told NBC News, “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

A great deal for the world.

Trump attended the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base when the bodies of the six American service members were returned to U.S. soil. He wore one of his baseball-style caps, a white one with the letters USA on the front, at the ceremony. The same cap is for sale as a souvenir on his website where he sells other gimcrackery with his name and image and MAGA emblazoned on them. After the Dover ceremony, Trump and his Secretary of War and his other guests got on Air Force One and flew to his hotel/residence/club, Mar a Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

I have written before about my grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., and the remarks he made on Memorial Day in 1945 at the dedication of the American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy. I grew up as the son of an army officer and the grandson of two army officers. I can remember attending Memorial Day ceremonies at army posts in Georgia and Kansas and Pennsylvania and Kentucky and at West Point. I can remember my father stepping out on the balcony of our apartment in Oberammergau, Germany, on Memorial Day in 1956 and 1957 and 1958 to blow the trumpet he was given in the Boy Scouts at Fort Myer, Virginia, the mournful tones of Taps sounding across the army post grandpa had seized from the German army when he was military governor of Bavaria in 1945.

And I remember what my father told me about the night before he left on his assignment to the war in Korea when he asked grandpa what it was like to command troops in combat. Dad said they were standing along a wooden fence behind the farmhouse grandpa and grandma bought in Virginia after the war. He said grandpa listened to his question, and then he just broke down crying, sobbing so hard he had to lean against the fence to remain standing. Dad said all grandpa managed to say was, “The bodies, son, all those bodies, those bodies, all those bodies.” He said it was the only time he ever saw his father cry in his life, and he said they never again talked about war.

There is no official record of grandpa’s remarks at Nettuno in 1945, but Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, who was part of grandpa’s army in Italy during the war, wrote this in his memoir, “The Brass Ring,” in 1971:

“There were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn’t started digging up the bodies and bringing them home.”

“Before the stand were spectator benches, with a number of camp chairs down front for VIPs, including several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. When Truscott spoke he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded here. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics.”

“The general’s remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true.

“He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. He would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.”

That “hard-boiled old man” Mauldin describes was 50 years old. Bill Mauldin was 23. Neither of them could have foreseen the day that the President of the United States would attempt to popularize his war with video game meme images.

I will be 79 years old next month, and I do not consider myself either old or hardboiled, but I come from an army family, and I can assure you that after this war, as it has been true after every war, the dead will speak louder than any of the noise we hear from the man who ordered them into a war nobody wanted and that neither they, nor the world deserved.

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A whirlwind of a week in Donald Trump’s world has swirled expectations in global relationships, in economics, in politics and in any sense of personal security. Every conversation now is filled with public dread over uncertainty and private desire to shut the noise.

Apart from watching a war develop seemingly uncontrollably, we’re seeing prices rise yet more, jobs and immigrants disappearing before us, health care and social services being declared optional at best, and Americans fleeing late from the Middle East.

We are getting a constant barrage of messaging that if we complain, we’re being told we are  unpatriotic, even if those messages change by the day or hour. As an example, Trump’s call for “unconditional surrender” by Iran faded after a day to “when Iran can fight no longer,” just as quickly as “war” was being described as a “limited combat opportunity.”

Iran’s president said Iran would halt unprovoked attacks on neighbors except Israel, only to have reports in the hours that followed of more Iranian missiles landing.

At his recent State of the Union, Trump demanded that people stand if they agree that “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”  It prompted Republican legislators to rise while Democrats, who see that statement riddled with illegal tactics and randomly unwarranted deportations remaining seated and expressionless.

Even in the moment, it smacked of political grandstanding for partisan gain. But a week or more later, it feels an empty gimmick worth re-applying.

In the name of “protecting American citizens,” Trump has launched a preemptive strike against Iran, acting apart from all allies but Israel, and leaving many believing that Trump remains under the sway of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu towards an expensive, open-ended conflict towards ends that even the administration has trouble encapsulating.

When War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the military objectives are clear, he’s probably right. The U.S. and Israeli military commands have long-established lists of specific targets to wipe out nuclear and missile capacity, weapons manufacture, Islamic Revolutionary Guard command and control and the like. More than a week after the launch of daily sorties against hundreds of targets a day – and on the brink of committing some “limited” ground forces — the ultimate political, economic, security goals remain uncharted, and unaddressed.

All week, there was continuing talk of one Trump move trying to distract from the previous one, whether the war was a “wag the dog” move about slumping polls and election setbacks, the ever-present Epstein mess or immigration roundups seen as gone out of control. It feels as if there always is something from which we need distraction.

War-Torn Week That Was

In this single week, the Congress has sought, and failed, to pass resolutions to assert its Constitutional right to declare war amid arguments from Republicans who avoid the use of the word “war” to elude the requirement. By the day, Iran shows no sign of concession and is bombing – and drawing response from Israel and a growing number of Gulf nations – in ever-widening circles to make this conflict much wider.

Rather than American dominance, what we are witnessing is a flailing America working out of sync with allies to demand obedience from a world that is growing increasingly uneasy with the U.S. and its promises, and with Trump’s government. Using brute force is usually not the best way to win hearts and minds, whether in Iran or in the many historical cases that have proceeded it.

None of this has to do with the “rightness” of acting against Iran’s bad behavior over five decades, but everything to do with the ham-handedness and egocentricity with which Trump seems to have blown a unique chance to build and lead a coalition of nations towards a common goal.

As a result, even within a first week of war by whatever name, we are already seeing ill economic effects building, further undercutting the Trump arguments that he is presiding over an American “golden age.” The week was concluding with unexpected downturns in job numbers, oil and energy prices rocketing around the world as shipping through the Gulf is halted, and even questions about available weaponry for a sustained conflict.

It was a week that opened the U.S. election season, amid solid gains and enthusiasm for Trump opponents even in deep-red Texas, scandals that further threaten the thin Republican Congressional majorities, and the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over her botched public relations handling of a $220 million ad campaign at a time when Homeland Security is threatened by possible Iranian cells.

Court rulings continue to declare Trump policies illegal over tariffs and the proposed prosecution of political foes, while federal agencies are focusing on control over what comedians can say on television and what merit badges earned by Scouts may violate Trump’s sense of horror at diversity and inclusion concerns.

Trump and Hegseth were taking heat for dismissive comments about the first troop deaths as something to expect, and saying Americans should expect there will be more to come. Those fleeing the Middle East only after the start of these preemptive strikes are hearing from the White House that they should have known the area was dangerous from its previous travel warnings.

Trump and Hegseth insist that U.S. weapons supplies are ample enough for multiple global military deployments but had defense contractors meet in the White House to agree to speed production of replacement missiles, drones and explosives.

Trump is making a point of greeting the coffins of six U.S. soldiers killed, but has dismissed casualties as something that happens in war.

Who is ‘Crazy’?

Together, it makes one question whether Trump is rising this week to say that his primary mission is to “protect American citizens.”

He’s not protecting against increasing prices or war-fueled inflation. He is not protecting against a diminishing respect abroad from international institutions and our expected allies. He is not protecting in any systematic manner against the sexual abuse exposed by the Epstein Files, and there are serious questions about whether his anti-drug campaign is effective by any practical measure.

He is protecting Americans against his “feelings based on fact” belief, as the White House tells it, that Iran wants to reconstitute its nuclear weapons development and continue to harass Israel and the Gulf with missiles. But we have yet to see that there was anything “imminent” about those plans. The Omani go-between official who was shuttling between Iranian and U.S. negotiators said Iran was ready to accept most terms that Trump had wanted about nukes, but that other missiles were not discussed.

On the other hand, we have seen much reporting this week saying that the Israelis wanted to strike Iran while it was down after the previous U.S.-Israeli bombing run on nuclear labs and setbacks for Hezbollah and Hamas, Iranian proxies. The “imminent” danger seemed concern for U.S. personnel in the region being endangered by expected Iranian response to an Israeli strike.

Now that the political season is open, we can expect to see Republican ads about who was standing and who was not at the State of the Union, as if that showed who is loyal to Trump and who is “crazy,” in Trump’s label.

Trump now argues that Democrats back both unending illegal immigration and a nuclear-armed Iran.

Who is “protected” in all this. It feels as if it is Team Trump that is protected, not Americans, citizen or not.

Just who is crazy here? If backing the Constitution for its process guarantees for individual rights for citizens and migrants alike and a belief that we ought to know what the goal is before sending thousands of U.S. airmen, sailors and troops at Iran, count me as one of the loons.

This week was not about disagreement. It was about trying to stuff “crazy” into political packaging.

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The post Trump’s War Week Raises Questions About Who Is Really Being “Protected” appeared first on DCReport.org.

It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.

The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.

Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each.

That’s a lot of money. But if the main work of parental care is replaced by paid workers unrelated to the child the cost is stupendous – in Australia $100 000 a year for foster care and as much as $1 million a year for high-needs children. And in the case of an unwanted child raised by their parents, the same work must be carried out without pay.

On top of that, there is public expenditure on schooling and childcare, around $20 000 per school-age child per year or another $ 300 000 by the time high school is completed. On average, this a good investment for society considered purely in financial terms. The extra earnings of more educated workers are shared with society as a whole through the tax system and are sufficient to cover the costs of schooling with a surplus left over. But that surplus is tiny compared to the public and private costs of raising a child.

The policy implication here is that there is no point in trying to induce women, and their partners, to have more children than they currently want. However the economic costs of raising unwanted children are divided between parents and the states they far exceed the benefits accruing to society as a whole [1]

The only way to increase birth rates is to remove obstacles to childbearing for those who want more children than they already have. Those obstacles include infertility, the lack of a suitable partner and economic insecurity. We could probably do more on infertility (including options like surrogacy) but addressing the other big obstacles would require huge social changes. Many of these, such as a reduction in the time demands of paid work, would not be welcome to some of the advocates of higher birth rates.

fn1. Of course, once a child is born their interests count just as much as anyone else’s. But we do no harm to any of the uncountable trillions of possible children by not bringing them into existence in the first place.

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Here we are, beginning Week Two of what will either be a short war as Trump gets bored and sees how much attacking Iran threatens to topple his regime. Or we’re in for a years-long quagmire as Trump’s bloodlust intensifies and he commits tens of thousands of American troops to a suicidal course of action.

Either way, this will be yet another Republican military disaster that we’ll have to clean up. Except this time, I refuse to take the fucking blame for it, no matter how hard the legacy press tries to absolve Republicans of their culpability.

They broke it, they fucking own it.

Now let’s see what other news you missed this week, yes?

Monday: It’s all going to shit in record time. Bravo!

Tuesday: Christian Nationalist death cultists have infested out government and military.

Wednesday: Recording and editing!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: I did an interview!

Also Friday: They could have stopped this a decade ago but they didn’t. Too fucking late now.

5 Interesting Things I Read This Week

1. MAGA Stole Obama’s Playbook - How the right learned Obama’s game—and what Mamdani and Indivisible show about taking it back from the mucky mucks LIKE RAHM EMMANUEL who tossed it aside. by LOLGOP at The Cause

2. Anti-Trans Democrats Blown Out In North Carolina Primary Election - Anti-trans Democrat Nasif Majeed lost to Veleria Levy, who ran on a pro-LGBTQ+ platform. Other conservative Democrats lost as well on primary day. by Erin Reed at Erin in the Morning

3. Trump CANNOT regulate elections by executive order by Mike Brock at Notes from the Circus

4. Trump Has No Plan for Iran’s Future - Just bombing Iran will not create a stable regime by Anne Applebaum at Open Letters

5. The Future is War Crimes: AI and the Authoritarian Threat - The war in Iran and all its atrocities is a baptism into a dangerous new world by Jared Yates Sexton at Dispatches From A Collapsing State

The most important thing General David Petraeus did during his multiple tours in Iraq and his command of allied forces in Afghanistan was not “the surge” he conceived in Iraq in 2007. On the first or second day after the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003, Petraeus, then commander of the 101^st Airborne Division, turned to Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson and said, “Tell me how this ends.”

It’s the question being asked today in every capital in Europe, every Emirate on the Gulf that is being bombarded daily by missiles and drones from Iran, every oil company trying to move tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to the Suez Canal, every trucking and shipping company moving goods to market with fuel prices exploding daily, every dinner table of every family with sons or daughters on U.S. ships and stationed in military facilities in the Middle East, around every table of every editorial board of every newspaper in the U.S. and around the world, hell, it’s the same with everyone who watches or reads or listens to the news anywhere. Nobody knows when or how this war will end, and that makes everybody nervous.

Petraeus was smart enough to see early on in Iraq the futility of moving great numbers of U.S. troops into a country that clearly did not want them there. The 101^st was getting hit by fire from Iraqi army units that had dispersed as the Americans crossed the border from Kuwait. The American soldiers were moving down roads in Humvees and trucks with canvas sides and tops, not a scrap of armor to protect them from small arms fire and RPG-7’s Iraqis were shooting at them. Later would come roadside bombs – they came up with a word for them, Improvised Explosive Devices or IED’s – placed under piles of trash and buried under dirt roads, even hidden in the body cavities of dead animals that lay along roadsides.

Petraeus had no way of knowing in March of 2003 that insurgents fighting against U.S. forces would go on for the next eight years, but he suspected that the attacks his division was experiencing during the initial invasion of Iraq were not signs of anything good. He knew it would get worse. He just didn’t know how much worse and how fast. He was also knew that American politicians back in Washington D.C. had gambled their political careers on the invasion of Iraq, and they would be unlikely to want to order a pull-out of U.S. forces anytime soon.

Petraeus’ prescient question should probably go on his tombstone when he is buried at West Point and be taught in the classrooms to cadets not only after he is gone, but right now. The U.S. has had a very bad habit of getting involved in wars it has not been able to win. This trend began with the ceasefire and division of Korea into North and South that ended the war but did not win it; the misbegotten war in Vietnam that ended with our ignominious departure in 1975; through the First Gulf War in 1991 that achieved its goal of running the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but did not result in either the destruction of Iraq’s army or the end of the reign of Saddam Hussein.

Then came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which no sane military historian would claim the U.S. “won.”

Now we are in the age of Donald Trump, who ran for president promising “no more forever wars,” a clear reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he supported until he opposed them.

Donald Trump was bothered by Iran when he took office the first time in 2017. He hated the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by John Kerry and signed by Barack Obama, mainly because it was a “Democrat deal” and was not his, so he cancelled it. Then he bided his time until he won back the presidency and appointed enough lackeys to his cabinet and intelligence services and to the Pentagon that he could do anything we wanted with the U.S. military, so he decided to do something about Iran. First, he bombed its nuclear facilities last year, declaring they were “decimated” and not to be worried about any further.

But that wasn’t enough for Donald Trump. Josh Marshall in his column in Talking Points Memo pointed out that as Trump has become more bedeviled by frustrations at home – the Epstein files come up with a new horror about his friend, and even himself, practically every day; the Supreme Court took away his emergency tariff powers; his campaign to rid the country of undocumented immigrants is going so poorly he had to fire Kristi Noem; inflation is proving to be stubborn; employment figures are tanking; Republicans are resigning wholesale from Congress; his poll numbers have hit all-time lows – Trump has turned “more and more to the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has.” Marshall sees Trump “leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.”

But it’s the kind of self-care of a man suffering from an ulcer that he decides to cure by operating on himself with hand tools from his garage and dull knives from his kitchen. We are seeing that there was little planning for this war beyond assembling a whole bunch of ships and bombers and jets and missiles and bombs and giving the order a week ago to attack, from a ballroom in Mar a Lago, no less.

Donald Trump is clearly among those in positions of power in this country who failed to learn from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan that the enemy gets a vote. If you hit someone in the face, you are going to get hit back, and it’s going to hurt.

Here is the key to those wars and this one: they live there, and we don’t. All you had to do to realize the folly of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan was to look at what we built there. We built temporary little Americas and called them “base camps.” Our military forces ventured outside of those base camps at their peril. When we left Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, we left our base camps behind, because our soldiers were never going to live there and establish a presence that could only be achieved by absolute victories over our enemies such as we had at the end of World War II over Germany and Japan, when they accepted terms of unconditional surrender and we became what amounted to permanent occupiers.

Trump is not well schooled, or even schooled at all, in military history, but he is smart enough to know that he will not be able to get what he wants from Iran unless that country agrees to “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” as he demanded on Truth Social today, because of course, that’s how you get an enemy to give up. You do it on social media.

After his demand on Truth Social, Trump called Axios and explained what he meant on the phone: “Unconditional surrender could be that they announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

This, of course, is blind and dumb flat-out madness. Iran is an enormous country with a huge population, more than 92 million people. If you took Iran and placed it over the United States, it would cover everything from Maine to Florida. That means its territory would cover every major population center on the Eastern seaboard, from Bangor to Boston to New York and New Jersey to Washington D.C. to Richmond to Charlotte and Raleigh to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Miami. The combined populations of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida is about 95 million people, more or less equivalent to Iran’s population.

Now let me ask you something: If another country decided it didn’t like us, and that country decided to do something about its dislike and started bombing the Eastern Seaboard of the United States with its 95 million people, how do you think we would react? Would all those states, and all those Americans, just lie down and say, in effect, please stop, we give up?

The first thing to know is, it would take hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds of bombs to force into submission a territory as big as our eastern states. Nobody has that many bombs. We don’t have that many bombs. We don’t have enough missiles and conventional bombs to bomb Iran into unconditional surrender. There are too many towns and cities, too many structures, too many roads, too many factories, too many single family and multiple family homes, too many schools, too many mosques…

Too many of everything that makes up a modern society and nation including people.

Israel over the last two-plus years has been able to basically flatten Gaza. But Gaza is 25 miles long, seven miles wide at its widest point, with a population of two million. Have the Palestinians of Gaza given up? Has Hamas unconditionally surrendered?

The answer is no, and that answer is a lesson that neither Donald Trump nor Bibi Netanyahu has learned. We should have learned that lesson by now. In ten years of war in Vietnam, the U.S. dropped about seven to eight million tons of bombs on North and South Vietnam.

That war ended 51 years ago. We have had plenty of time to learn that Vietnam won. Our soldiers went home. Our ships left Vietnam’s waters. Our jets took off and flew to American bases on Guam and Hawaii and other islands.

Dominating another nation using military means is impossible in our modern age. It doesn’t matter how tough Pete Hegseth thinks he is, or how bothered Donald Trump is by Iran and its mullahs. Iran and its people will not give in or give up to Trump and Netanyahu, no matter how many bombs they drop, or how many airborne divisions we move from the U.S. to the Middle East.

We’ve have moved airborne divisions to the Middle East before. David Petraeus can tell you that it didn’t work. The war in Iran, which is being fought by the U.S. and Israel with bombs and missiles and defended by Iran with drones armed with bombs and missiles, will not end because Donald Trump wants it to end. Russia’s war on Ukraine will not end because Vladimir Putin wants it to end. Iran won’t stop fighting, even if they fire their last missile and their last drone, because they live there, and we don’t. Donald Trump will not get to pick their next leader.

There are no forever wars. There are only countries that don’t want to be bombed and attacked with missiles and invaded by foreign armies. Iran is one of them. Our military should pack up and go home before more of its members die in Trump’s fruitless attempt to flex his muscles and distract from everything that is driving him crazy here at home. It’s not our war, it’s Trump’s war, and after just one week, he is already losing it.

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The Medicines for the People Act Would Lower Drug Prices

It is common for people in elite circles to engage in magical thinking disconnected from reality.

For example, it is common for people engaged in policy debates to claim that we can get returns in the stock market that are totally unconnected to the rate of growth in the economy or to current levels of the price-to-earnings ratio.

We can’t.

That leads ostensibly serious people to project that we can get stock returns of 10 percent a year indefinitely, even when the price-to-earnings ratio is already near 40 to 1. (Before the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes, the ratio was around 20 to 1, or about half the wildly inflated p-e ratio today.

It was also the standard wisdom that we could reduce tariff barriers to manufactured goods without any substantial negative impact on employment and wages. Even when the data clearly showed that a soaring trade deficit was costing millions of manufacturing jobs, most of the people who dominate policy debates denied reality.

The first decade of this Century was pretty awful for manufacturing workers. In December of 1999, we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. By December 2009, this fell to 11.5 million, a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.

Patent Monopolies

In this vein, it is a widespread view among policy types that we can’t get innovation without patent monopolies.

This should strike the reality-based community as pretty whacked out.

After all, patent monopolies are only one way to provide incentives for innovation. So why in the world would any serious person think it’s the only way? After all, it’s undisputed that people will work for money.

Patent monopolies are especially problematic in the case of prescription drugs.

Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. Most drugs would sell for just five or ten dollars per prescription in a free market, but because we give a drug company a patent monopoly, a drug can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Inviting Corruption

As everyone who has taken any economics knows, these patent-protected prices are an invitation for corruption.

When a company can sell a drug for $500 that costs $5 to manufacture and distribute, they have an enormous incentive to lie about its safety and effectiveness to get as many people as possible to buy it.

We saw this corruption most dramatically with the opioid crisis, where the manufacturers of the new generation of opioids misrepresented their addictiveness to have them prescribed as widely as possible. (This scandal is the motivating story in the CBS drama Matlock starring Kathy Bates.)

Opioids are an extreme case, but the problem of misrepresented research is widely recognized. Medical journals have to contend with ghost-authored articles, while medical associations have to worry that drug companies are paying conference speakers.

Cheaper Alternative

We could largely eliminate corruption by simply paying upfront for the research and then selling new drugs in a free market without expensive patent monopolies or related protections.

This is where Representative Rashida Tlaib’s Medicine for the People’s Act comes in. Her idea is to create a new division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Biomedical Research and Development.

This institute would be charged with developing drugs in important areas. It would be responsible for everything from basic research to developing an actual drug, running clinical trials, and eventually shepherding successful drugs through the FDA approval process. At that point, since it has all the rights to the new drug, the institute could allow the drug to be sold at a low free-market price.

In addition to the advantages of cheap drugs and reduced incentives for corruption, advanced funding of research should also enable greater transparency and faster sharing of research results. (No law requires drug companies to disclose results of  testing on the many failed drugs.)

With patent monopoly financing, however, drug companies have an incentive to squirrel away their findings until they can secure them with a patent. By contrast, the institute’s interest would be in promoting good healthcare.

The bill would not prohibit drug companies from developing drugs on their own. And they could pitch ideas for funding to the proposed institute.

To that end, it would want to publicize any notable finding as quickly as possible.

Obviously, Representative Tlaib’s bill will not become law. Republicans control both houses of Congress and are not likely to give it a warm reception. Even if the Democrats controlled Congress, it’s unclear whether Tlaib’s bill would have much better prospects.

But Tlaib’s bill can be a jumping-off point for robust, serious debate about the best way to finance the development of new drugs. It is absurd that an archaic system like patent financing continues, unquestioned, in the 21st Century.

We can do much better with an alternative system like the one outlined in Tlaib’s bill.

We need—at the very least—to discuss better and cheaper ways to develop new and better drugs.

This opinion column, in slightly different form, was originally published on March 6, 2026, by the Center for Economic and Political Research.

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