The mousetrap motif plays a major role in tales and literature, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who set one to find his father’s murderer, to Agatha Cristie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, that opened in London’s West End in 1952 and is still running today 30,000 performances later. The mousetrap theme is ancient and enduring because the idea is so simple, yet utterly transparent. A trap is baited. Taking the bait leads to the victim’s entrapment or destruction, as anyone can later see. Which is basically how we got into the Iran war. No one expects mice to be smarter than the trap. We should,...

You don’t even have to turn on the financial news. You can tell whether oil prices will be up or down in the morning by simply reading the president’s midnight social media posts. If he announces confidence in the ceasefire with Iran, oil will be down in the morning. If he posts about Iran glowing in the dark or about the stone age, you don’t want to be short petroleum. Here’s a representative example from May 6, posted by The Kobeissi Letter, a capital market commentary: "At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news. This is...

Some called it "Operation Grim Beeper." That may seem clever to adolescents, but there is nothing funny about the promiscuous mutilation of human beings. On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon. Their purported target? Hezbollah operatives. Forty-two people, including children, were killed by the indiscriminating devices. More than 3,500 were injured in an instant, the booby-trap blast blowing open abdomens and claiming fingers and eyes. Although purchased from a Taiwan company, the pagers were produced by a shell company...

Are the people as clueless as the Deep State expects them to be? You have to wonder. Standing on the tarmac in France before meetings with European foreign ministers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained to reporters that for Iran to ever get nuclear weapons would be crazy. “Look what they're willing to do with the weapons they have now.” It doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary that a country attacked repeatedly by the most fearsome nation on earth and its companion war provocateur should want to use the weapons in has now in self-defense. Rubio knows who attacked whom and is...

“We've won. Let me tell you, we've won. You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the – in the first hour it was over. We won," President Donald Trump declared, claiming “we won” five times in just thirteen seconds at a Kentucky rally on March 11. We’ve seen such misbegotten braggadocio before. Six weeks into the elective invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush starred in a campaign stunt when he landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit. He stood under a "Mission Accomplished" banner ordered up and paid for by White House...

“Maybe I had a brain tumor.” That was NBC News anchorman Brian Williams in 2015 desperately fishing for an explanation when his ever-evolving fantasy claims on national television about his combat experience in the Iraq War were finally exposed. But it wasn’t a brain tumor. In my new book THE EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole I identify Williams as just one more example of a strange malady I call “combat envy.” It doesn’t appear in any standard psychiatric diagnostic manual, but it should. It is a more common and dangerous syndrome than you might suspect. War hero posturing has...

Benjamin Franklin said it best: "There never was a good war, or a bad peace." Now that war is again underway—the third attack on Iran in two years—people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited. Yet the trajectory appears to be grim. Wars often progress in unexpected ways. The Persian Gulf region is a tangled spaghetti plate of interests including economic, religious, cultural, and geopolitical. None of our politicians have proved capable of comprehending those interests and foreseeing the consequences of their elective wars. President George W....

In the endless parade of Fox News neocons, Ari Fleisher, the press secretary who helped George W. Bush gaslight the American people into the Iraq War, explained recently that while Donald Trump appears to have desisted from fresh attacks on Iran, he’s merely buying time, “waiting to get the correct military options in place.” Stating the obvious was only a prelude to war fomenting. Fomenting is always next. Fleischer offers up the latest regime-change rationale, today’s equivalent of the old Iraqi WMD lies: “Iran is responsible for killing more Americans than any other nation that is in...