By Tom Woods
November 1, 2025
As a kid growing up in the 1980s, war seemed like a video game I could watch on my TV.
And if you were unsure about some military action, you must be some commie who hates America.
Yes, dear reader, that was where I was. I thought only "liberals" hesitated to use the military, so I as a non-liberal had to stand up and cheer every time.
Now, the reality is this:
Progressives overwhelmingly supported the Spanish-American War, the world wars, and the "vital center" Democrats supported the entire Cold War. Then after the Cold War they were ready to go in Bosnia, Serbia, and a long list of other places.
Antiwar? Don't make me laugh.
The left has always recognized the revolutionary potential of war. You think Mao Tse-Tung was "antiwar"?
Progressive intellectuals urged U.S. intervention into World War I in part because they knew it would undermine American fidelity to the free market, and begin the process of government management of the economy and society. These people were not "antiwar."
So I was wrong about that.
When I went off to college in 1990, I couldn't tell my new roommate enthusiastically enough how much I favored going after Saddam Hussein. I couldn't understand why Pat Buchanan was against it, but I figured he just had a blind spot.
Then the bombs started falling, and within a month it was all over. The Bob Hope special celebrating the victory was dutifully aired.
And I thought: why am I cheering when there are now who knows how many widows and orphans in a country that never harmed me?
Even if the war had been strictly necessary, I could not take part in that. That was inhuman.
I went in to see Charles Maier, my left-liberal European history professor, to ask about his support for the war (again, these people are not antiwar) and my own misgivings. He directed me to the current cover story in the left-liberal New Republic in defense of the war.
Around that time I discovered Chronicles magazine, whose writers put the superficial and not very bright Sean Hannity and other neoconservative radio hosts to shame. Here in these pages was conservatism, as opposed to the hideous parody most people knew.
And these guys were all against the war, too.
I later discovered that Russell Kirk, whose book The Conservative Mind was a foundational text of the modern American conservative movement, had said in a private letter that George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn for war crimes.
Was Russell Kirk a commie? Come on.
So I realized: I've been lied to, big time.
Fast forward to 2010. I'm speaking at an event hosted by the Tenth Amendment Center. It's a mixed crowd. There are plenty of people who believe in the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus. (By that time, I didn't believe in any bipartisan anything, because they were always terrible.)
I briefly had the thought: maybe I won't discuss foreign policy in my speech. Maybe I'll just stick to issues we all agree on.
And then I felt a sting of shame: would Ron Paul act like this? Would he be a coward who backed away from controversy for the sake of applause?
So I determined to do it.
For half an hour I built up my capital with them by making them laugh and applaud.
And then in the final 15 minutes I said, I hate to break it to you, but I'm not only against the domestic idiocy, but I'm against the foreign policy, too. A rough transcript is in bold:
And I say this knowing that some of you are going to disagree with me. But I'm telling you, I am not a leftist in any way. I have come to the conclusion that they're lying sociopaths domestically and that they don't magically transform into angels when it comes to foreign policy. They are also lying to us.
I think back to the 1990s when I was, you know, well, younger than I am now. And I, I basically believed that, well, I'm a good little conservative. And so when the authorities tell me that military action is necessary, only a pinko commie would question them. Now, that was a big, big moral mistake. I made an intellectual mistake, and I'm sorry I made it.
I think back to the disgraceful ways I used to make up excuses for these people. They would do commit horrific atrocities on the most flimsy pretexts. The arguments they made for some of these wars were so transparent, how can a conservative who's supposed to be dedicated to reason and Western civilization be swept up in this? It's beneath us to fall for some of this stuff, and yet I fell for it. I would go around searching for corroborating evidence to support the lies of my overlords in the regime.
If I had seen a poor Russian in the Soviet Union doing the same thing, saying, what Pravda is telling us is true,I've been looking it up and I've found all this evidence, I would have treated that person with contempt. But for some reason, when it was my own looting expropriators, it was okay for me to make excuses for them and to search out corroborating evidence even for arguments that they themselves had abandoned.
And I finally just decided, and this was back in the early 1990s, after the first Persian Gulf War. And this is a war a lot of people thought was unobjectionable: Saddam's a bad guy, he's said to be massing his troops on the Saudi border, etc. But I remember hearing about people retreating, being incinerated.
I'm being asked to have a Bob Hope special to celebrate this? I thought to myself, what's happening to me? What have I allowed this institution to do to me that I could look so callously on these poor people?
These people were conscripted, most of them. I don't care that the sociopaths in DC have told me I'm supposed to hate these people, because I don't hate them.
You know, if there had been an earthquake over there, we would all be tears and pity about it. But when they're incinerated alive? Nothing. These people are treated like human garbage. And I just decided at that point: I'm not doing this anymore. I don't believe what you are telling me. I don't believe your phony baloney reasons for your wars, and I'm done making excuses for them.
Because unlike the regime, I really do believe in absolute moral standards.
As the 1990s progressed, we got the sanctions regime on Saddam. The UN says 500,000 children have died of malnutrition because of the sanctions. I don't like or trust the UN any more than you do. The usual response was: that's a phony statistic. Or if Saddam hadn't spent all his money on palaces, the kids could have eaten - whatever. That's neither here nor there.
The point is, neither Madeleine Albright nor Bill Richardson questioned that figure. They said that price was "worth it." They didn't say: the UN is lying. They said that price is worth it.
I am expected to defend the idea that an atrocity like that is "worth it"? You cannot possibly be a conservative if this is how you think.
It is indeed impossible for a conservative, who lectures the world about moral relativism, to make excuses for moral outrages just because they happen to be committed by Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton.
I might add, in case you need to be reminded: Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton are not your friends, so you need not do unpaid labor making excuses for their crimes.
We are better than this. How can we allow ourselves to be so dehumanized that we sit here and allow ourselves make excuses for outrages like this? Do we believe in moral absolutes or do we not?
People used to say, "I like Ron Paul except for his foreign policy." But his foreign policy is the best thing about him.
It took me a while to understand all this, but eventually I got there.
And one of our great heroes in all this, who has shown the right wing that they're under no moral obligation to support a foreign policy whose premises were agreed on by the establishment of both parties, has been the brilliant Scott Horton.
This guy knows more truth about U.S. foreign policy than I have ever known about anything.
And now he's teaching it, so our brains can be filled with facts rather than the absurdities of Lindsey Graham.
It's the Scott Horton Academy, and his launch discount expires tonight.
I know how hard Scott worked on it, to make it the best it can possibly be for you.
Click the link, for the work of this great hero is what the world needs now:
