A cartoon serves to get us all straight on the complex narrative war over the Hormuz impasse, without FOX spin or Iran double talk:
The Iran situation, and the sad reversal of Trump on the subject of getting mired in foreign conflicts is noted by our party’s national Chair. The comments (from a donation message) are quoted in full, as this “one week war” is clearly spiraling into a crisis that will damage our entire economy this year. It’s not just an idle intellectual issue anymore, as it seems the chickens of fiscal and militarist insanity are coming home to roost:
Donald Trump returned to office promising strength, restraint, and relief. He promised to put America first. He promised to avoid new wars. He promised to lower costs, tame inflation, and focus Washington back on the American people. He delivered another Middle East war, another foreign policy disaster sold on fantasy, and another crisis whose costs will be paid by ordinary Americans.
The irony is obvious. The man who ran as a repudiation of Bush-era interventionism revived its logic and marched us back into the same swamp under a different banner.
Years ago, Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack revealed that George W. Bush cited the threat to Israel as part of the rationale for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he warned, could strike Israel and trigger a wider international conflict. That logic survived Iraq. It survived the lies, the dead, and the wreckage. It returned, rebranded and repackaged in the language of urgency and necessity.
Trump sought regime change in Iran. He said so. In the video announcing the attack, he spoke like a man opening a political overthrow, telling the Iranian people that when we are finished, they should take over their government, that it would be theirs to take, and that this might be their only chance for generations. It was regime change language. It was the language of decapitation followed by hoped-for collapse.
The opening blow matched it. Israeli reporting described a surprise daylight strike on the Supreme Leader’s compound in Tehran, reportedly killing him along with senior political and security officials. The Iranian regime is authoritarian, corrupt, and hostile. That was never the question. The question was whether decapitating it would produce the outcome Trump and Netanyahu imagined.
By all available reporting, it would not. The administration had reason to know that. A week before the attack, the National Intelligence Council reportedly concluded that even a major American operation would not topple the regime. Reuters reported that the CIA assessed that if the Supreme Leader were assassinated, he would likely be replaced quickly by harder-line Revolutionary Guard elements. That appears to be exactly what happened.
It was a failure of judgment. The intelligence was there. The warnings were there. The administration chose fantasy anyway.
Then came the scramble. Cabinet officials began sanding down the language. Suddenly the war had narrower aims. Suddenly the objective was only nuclear rollback, only deterrence, only strategic degradation. Trump briefly shifted to safer ground, talking about preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Days later, he returned to demanding unconditional surrender and the selection of a “great and acceptable leader.” Pete Hegseth later suggested regime change had already occurred. Marco Rubio tried to square the circle, denying regime change as an objective while welcoming it as an outcome.
The story lurched because reality had begun tearing at the sales pitch.
Rubio also revealed something more damning at the outset. He admitted the administration knew Israel intended to strike Iran and understood that such an attack would likely bring retaliation against the United States. America joined a war because Washington knew another government was about to light the fuse and decided it had better jump in.
It is entanglement. It is subordination of American policy to another government’s timetable. It is a direct betrayal of what voters were promised.
And those assumptions were sold hard. Israeli officials later indicated the operation had been planned months in advance. Reuters reported that regime change was one of Netanyahu’s arguments in the final call before Trump gave the order. Other reporting described Netanyahu briefing Trump’s team directly in the White House Situation Room, promising that Iran’s missile program could be broken quickly, that the regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, that retaliation against American interests would be minimal, and that internal unrest inside Iran could help finish the job.
It was the same old pitch. Easy war. Fast collapse. Limited blowback. A brittle regime ready to shatter after one decisive strike.
We have seen this before. Iraq. Libya. Syria. The map is always simple in the briefing room. Reality is always more expensive.
And according to multiple reports, people around Trump knew better. J.D. Vance, who once spoke clearly about the folly of stupid wars and the burden they place on young Americans, reportedly had serious reservations. General Dan Caine reportedly warned that the Israelis were overselling the ease and speed of the operation. Intelligence professionals reportedly rejected the regime change scenario as unrealistic. Even Rubio, by some accounts, understood that the pitch was nonsense.
Trump went anyway.
Despite intelligence to the contrary, Trump plunged headlong into another Middle East war. This was a war of choice. It was entered despite warnings. It was sold on fantasy. It is now being justified after the fact with contradiction, drift, and rhetorical smoke.
There was no quick collapse. There was no neat uprising. There was no clean political transition. Iran responded as weaker states do. It fought asymmetrically. It struck where it could cause the most damage. Missiles and drones targeted bases and cities. Shipping lanes were harassed. Proxies activated. The broader regional escalation that had been minimized or dismissed materialized anyway.
Trump reportedly believed Iran would cave before it closed the Strait of Hormuz. The world got an energy shock of historic proportions instead. By some assessments, the disruption now unfolding could exceed the shocks of 1973, 1979, and 2022 combined.
That is where this war stops being a foreign policy abstraction and starts landing squarely at home.
Trump won in no small part by promising relief from inflation and economic disorder. He promised lower costs, more stability, and a government focused on Americans rather than foreign adventurism. By choosing this war, he helped trigger the opposite. Fuel prices were only the first tremor. The bigger shock is still moving through the system. The last tankers that cleared Hormuz before closure are still arriving.
After that, reserves tighten, supply chains strain, and the effects spread through shipping, consumer prices, industrial inputs, utilities, airfare, and food.
Reopening the Strait tomorrow would not fix it. Major infrastructure in the Gulf has been damaged. LNG capacity has been disrupted. Production elsewhere has been curtailed. Storage and export systems do not snap back on command. Wells cannot be turned back on like a light switch. Restoration takes months. In some cases, years.
That means the pain does not end with a headline. It moves through the bloodstream of the economy. Fuel. Freight. Fertilizer. Food. Utilities. Credit. Everything touched by energy, which is to say everything.
This is the deeper betrayal.
Trump railed against high interest rates, against the Federal Reserve, against the rising cost of living. He wanted lower rates, stronger growth, and economic relief. By launching this war, he helped reinforce the exact conditions that make relief harder to deliver. War inflation. Supply shocks. Strategic uncertainty. Rising energy costs. A population already worn down by years of inflation is now being asked to absorb another blow because the administration chose to chase a regime change fantasy its own intelligence did not support.
Promises made. Promises broken.
He promised no more stupid wars. Now we are in one.
He promised America First. American power has been yoked to another state’s strategic gamble.
He promised competence. He ignored warnings from intelligence and senior officials who understood the operation was being oversold.
He promised prosperity. He helped unleash a crisis that will make daily life more expensive for the very people who put him back in office.
He promised realism. He embraced delusion.
Nor has he achieved what he appears to have set out to do. On regime change, he failed. On missiles, reporting suggests Iran retains significant launch capability, much of it hardened and buried precisely for this kind of conflict. On the broader regional front, the threat network remains. Hezbollah, despite years of damage and repeated boasts of its demise, appears far from gone. Washington and Tel Aviv once again believed they could bomb away the region’s political and military realities. The region answered back.
Even in Israel, confidence in the outcome has reportedly been weak. That should tell us something. This war was sold as decisive. It pushed the region further toward permanent confrontation, territorial seizure, and long-war management, another forever war in the long roll call of American interventionism.
And who pays for that?
Not the men who sell it on late-night television.
Not the think tank war priests.
Not the consultants, contractors, or foreign policy careerists who move between cable news, government posts, and defense boards.
The American people pay for it.
The family paying more at the pump.
The worker whose wages never quite catch up.
The borrower trapped by higher rates.
The small business hit by higher freight and input costs.
The young man who may yet be asked to carry the burden of someone else’s grand strategy.
Libertarians should have no trouble saying this plainly. One does not need to admire the Iranian regime to oppose this war. One does not need to pretend the mullahs are good in order to see that Washington was reckless, gullible, captured, or some combination of all three. The first duty of an American administration is to the liberty, life, and prosperity of the American people. That duty was discarded here in favor of regime change fantasy, foreign pressure, and interventionist delusion.
That is the real indictment.
Trump was handed an opportunity to break from the old pattern. He was elected in part because millions of Americans were tired of being lied to by the war crowd, tired of subsidizing empire, tired of watching Washington serve everyone except the people who actually live here.
He revived the pattern. He embodied the swamp he claimed he would drain.
He ran against Bushism and adopted its logic.
He ran against the deep state and empowered it.
He ran on relief for Americans and handed them another bill, paid in debt, inflation, and blood.
Promises made. Promises broken.
Chase Oliver, our Libertarian presidential nominee said it best in his acceptance speech: end the genocide, ceasefire now, and support peace around the world.
The Libertarian position is clear. War does not serve the American people, especially a war as aimless, escalatory, and stupid as the one we now find ourselves in.
We will continue to stand with the American people against war. Stand with us.
Donate Today!
Sincerely,
Steven Nekhaila
Chairman, LNC
Join us for LPQC/QL’s open discussion of the upcoming petition drive and 2026 campaign matters on April 11 at noon. It will be held at our Astoria location, Stamatis Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant at 29-09 23rd Avenue (in the back area, menu details at stamatisrestaurant.net). You can travel there by taking the N subway train to the last stop at Astoria-Ditmars Blvd, or taking the nearby Q69 bus to 31st St (in both cases walk 1 block to 23rd Avenue).
Dave DeCamp, editor of Antiwar.com on the real-or-faux ceasefire “agreed to” by the US and Iran on April 7. It appears neither side was directly negotiating (sit down, in person dialogue) to be on the same page on terms, and Trump may not have even read the 10-point deal Iran proposed before announcing his approval of it. Perhaps the point was for both countries to agree to a “framework” while each spun it as a “victory.” Either way, we need a final PEACEfire, not another “pause before a new round of war” ceasefire at this point:
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that a ceasefire deal with the US must include a halt to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which have dramatically escalated since President Trump announced the truce on Tuesday night.
“The Iran-US Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the US must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Araghchi wrote on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
Iranian media reported that Iran has halted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing campaign in Lebanon.
“The passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has been halted following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon,” Iran’s Fars news agency has reported.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the US-Iran ceasefire deal, said in his initial announcement of the agreement that it would also include a ceasefire in Lebanon, a point reaffirmed by Iranian officials. But it has since been denied by both the US and Israel that Lebanon was part of the deal.
“The two-week ceasefire does not include Lebanon,” the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X. On Wednesday morning, Israel launched a massive bombardment across Lebanon, killing and injuring hundreds of people, as part of a new escalation it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness.”
President Trump was asked if the ceasefire included Lebanon and called it a “separate skirmish” that was “not included” in the deal. “Yeah, they were not included in the deal,” he said. “Because of Hezbollah. They were not included in the deal. That’ll get taken care of, too. It’s alright.” Read More
Mayor Zo remains oblivious to the bad impact of his pending tax hikes on middle class access to home ownership and free markets, as this episode at the Allen AME church displays. From the New York Post:
Zohran Mamdani has a problem with the black political establishment, as well as the black middle class.
And he knows it, hence his pilgrimage to Greater Allen AME Cathedral in Queens on Palm Sunday.
It was no accident that he was seated next to Rep. Gregory Meeks, the boss of the Queens Democratic machine, and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards.
But proximity to establishment leadership does not make up for the lack of a working political relationship — or bad ideas.
Greater Allen AME, and in particular that section of Queens, is home to New York’s greatest concentration of the black middle class — professionals, civil servants, corporate workers, Democratic operatives and, most importantly, homeowners.
These are the people Mamdani addressed on Palm Sunday about the evil of . . . city tax liens sales and how those sales force black New Yorkers out of the city.
Surprisingly, the mayor didn’t attempt to quell concerns about his own two tax proposals, which directly threaten their ability to own their homes or to pass on the wealth generated by those properties to their heirs.
Feeling robbed
Mamdani didn’t dare speak about his threatened 9.5% property tax hike or his push to lower the “death” tax threshold, the state’s estate-tax exemption, from $7 million to $750,000, and tripling the top rate to 50%.
The median sale price for a home in Southeast Queens is fast approaching $750,000… See More
In this case, civil liberties lawyers are teaming up with a Bronx pastor. As the good old free speech advocates at the Institute for Justice report:
For years, New York-based nonprofit Upsolve, Inc., trained volunteers to give basic legal advice to New Yorkers facing debt-collection lawsuits under the protection of an injunction holding that this kind of advice was protected free speech. Upsolve’s program was successful, 
and in recent years other states have increasingly recognized that trained nonlawyer volunteers can offer valuable and necessary help to people who can’t afford lawyers—which is most people. But yesterday, a federal district court dismissed Upsolve’s lawsuit, holding that the First Amendment provides no right to talk to people about the law without a license. The Institute for Justice (IJ), a nonprofit, public interest law firm that protects the First Amendment nationwide and that represents Upsolve in the lawsuit, promised to appeal.
“The First Amendment protects your right to talk to people about their lives, their problems, and even the law,” said IJ Attorney Betsy Sanz. “Realistically, New Yorkers get this kind of advice all the time from bartenders, barbers, and even chatbots. The only difference here is that Upsolve wants the advice to come from people with some relevant training and experience.” More
In local Libertarian news, a changing of the guard has occurred. At our humble LPQC convention on March 14, our current slate of officers were reaffirmed, with the major change of Francisco Olvera accepting the position as county Chair, as off and on long time chair John Clifton 
retires from local and state LPNY related officer roles. Olvera will also continue his work as primary online media promotion person for the county committee, while the position of Vice Chair will be vacant for the interim.
Clifton will continue to contribute to the website and some social media promotion activity. He says “I intend to pursue other projects such as a general speaker campaign, to discuss various liberty topics, and explore developing a NY political action committee to help keep the party on the ballot going forward.” He noted to his fellow QL members, “It has been my honor to serve the LP in official local and state roles for decades. I hope Queens is stabilized enough at this point to be left in your capable hands going forward.” The meetings of QL/LPQC/LP Queens will continue at our monthly luncheons at Stamatis Restaurant in Astoria, held on the second Saturday of each month at noon.