The Tom Woods Show, episode 439.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

Hello, everybody, it's Tom Woods, and today we're going to talk about Afghanistan.

A lot of people talk about the Iraq War, and they say, what a disaster that was, but

Afghanistan gets partly a pass.

Also, I think there are libertarians out there who are against the war in Afghanistan, but

just don't really know very many details about it.

It's a war, so they're going to be against it.

But let's fill in some

of these gaps, and joining us to talk about this is our friend Ray McGovern. Ray McGovern is a retired

CIA officer. He was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990. In the 1980s, he chaired

national intelligence estimates and prepared the president's daily brief.

He was responsible for the analysis of Soviet policy in Vietnam.

He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement, but he returned it in 2006 in protest at the CIA's involvement in torture.

In 2003, he co-founded veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.

Find out more about Ray at Ray McGovern.com. Ray, welcome back. Thank you, Tom.

As I told you before we went on, I'm interested in talking about Afghanistan because of the number of people who seem to be of the opinion, along with the president, I might add, that although we can all see what a disaster the war in Iraq turned out to be, we have to prosecute the war in Afghanistan because that was the good war, so to speak, in the war on terror, And that after all, what else could we do, given that this was the headquarters of Osama bin Laden? He had taken up residence there. He was being protected by the regime there. And after what happened on 9-11, what else could we do but invade Afghanistan and try to clear out all the terrorist training camps?

I mean, this is what people read in the New York Times, and I perfectly well understand

why they would hold such a view.

But I would suspect that your view is that the reality is a little bit more nuanced than this.

Well, it is, Tom.

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