He's Dan Carlin, and this is Common Sense.

My apologies for not getting this emergency broadcast of Common Sense out more quickly.

As fate would have it, I'm in the midst of a very time consuming and intensive part of the hard-creastry creation process.

It's difficult to both talk that many hours in the day, do that audio, do this audio, and have your voice hold up and all that.

I'm a little gravely as it is, so I apologize.

If there's any brain-damaged commentary today, we're going to blame it on all of that.

It's nice to have an excuse, isn't it?

I expect that in the not-too-distant future, all of this will be outdated.

I took a few notes on my phone on a walk the other day, and as I look at them now, I mean many of them appear outdated, over-taken by the pace of events.

The events I'm speaking of is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which happened the other day, maybe four or five days ago now.

The shock that that's created, and I thought, well, the first thing that we ought to lay out here is my own biases and history on all this, so that everybody's on the same page.

So you know my personal angle on all this.

First of all, I'm just generally an anti-war person, not for any religious or ideological or philosophical beliefs, per se.

Just because usually they fail to achieve the Karol von Klauswitz goal, right? The policy or politics by other means, right?

Your military is supposed to be a tool for achieving that, and so often, you know, the difference between means and ends is noticeable and costs a lot in blood and treasure.

And if I look at any of the major US military involved events of my lifetime, I don't see any one of them that meets that standard, right?

Where it achieved the Karol von Klauswitz goal.

It depends, though, because horizons matter.

So for example, look at the United States and Britain's toppling of the democratically elected government of Muhammad, Dr. Muhammad Mosaday in Iran in 1953, right?

On a short-term basis, they achieved the Karol von Klauswitz policy by other means.

But in the long-term basis, the blowback from that's still affecting us today.

So maybe it depends on the horizon that you set your, you know, your measurements to.

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