Newspaper Reader considers the political project of a notorious Neo-Conservative!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 26, 2026

Editor: Reader begin with these paragraphs of Stephens political refractions!

Most Americans probably don’t look back at March 2012 — if they remember it at all — and think of terrifyingly high gas prices. In the month when “The Hunger Games” ruled the box office and President Barack Obama was on his way to a comfortable re-election, the price of Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. That would be about $175 a barrel in today’s dollars.

As of Tuesday, despite Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors’ energy facilities, it’s hovering around $100, slightly higher than the average inflation-adjusted price since January 2001, roughly $95.

That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East. To hear the critics’ version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

Editor: Stephens begins his potted history via his ‘Under the rubric of ‘Really? Let’s take a tour of some of the recent history’ Reader I will selectively offer to forshorten this Historical pastisch!

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During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein,…

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The U.S. air and land campaign in that operation lasted a full six weeks….

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In the 1989-90 invasion of Panama, whose military phase lasted a few days, the United States lost 23 soldiers, with 325 more wounded.

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During the Persian Gulf crisis that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the U.S. economy went into recession and the Dow fell by about 13 percent before the allied air war began.

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At the outset of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States made a failed decapitation strike against Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership, some of whom became leaders of the insurgency.

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Between 1987 and 1988, in the final stages of the so-called tanker war, the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and had the U.S. Navy escort them out of the Strait of Hormuz.

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In 1991, Iraq fired roughly 40 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there.

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In the months leading up to the second Iraq war, the George W. Bush administration made a case based on erroneous information that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

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One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by U.S. administrators to remake societies in both countries — well-intended efforts with some noble results that nonetheless were beyond our grasp.

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The Bush administration had little support from Arab nations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

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In hindsight, the single biggest error of the gulf war was to end it too soon, before Saddam Hussein’s forces were thoroughly routed.

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Editor: Stephens knows nothing about War! except his unslakable desires to chatter at full volume, as if he possesed comething akin to combat expiernce, as imagined in his fictional account of himself!

Newspaper Reader.