Quite a few readers want to know what specifically I objected to in Ron Paul’s comments last night (video
here). Here’s a more-civil-than-most e-mail from a reader:
The last debate you complimented him on making a good case for a noninterventionalist foreign policy. This time you state "And good for Rudy. Sticking it to Ron Paul on his blame America First Isolationism." Time for Ron to go, heh?
Does it occur to you and Guliani that maybe the Saudi prince was telling Rudy the truth that it is our presence in the mideast that has turned these people against us? No, I know, it is our wealth, and our rock music and Madonna that makes them want to kill us.
It’s difficult to tease out all of my objections to Paul’s approach to foreign policy, but I’ll try to cover the big points as they relate to last night.
Whom Are We Listening To?First, Ron Paul anointed Osama bin Laden the authentic expression of the entire Middle East. “I’m suggesting we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” he declared. And: “We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody did it to us.”
So, in other words, Osama bin Laden & Co. get to determine the legitimacy of our policies because these terrorists are the truest expression of the will of the people? Isn’t this a bit like saying a farmer can’t clear a field if it might upset a rattlesnake?
There are far, far, far more Arabs and other Muslims who did not become terrorists because of our actions in the Middle East. But their “perspective” accounts for nothing in Paul’s analysis. The upshot seems to be that our foreign policy must always be held hostage to whichever group of murderers decides to get pissed off at us. Sorry, no sale.
Even more annoying, Paul seems to invest in bin Laden a certain strategic omnipotence and takes his word for everything. This is usually a leftwing trope. The terrorists are “delighted” we’re in Iraq, he claims, because Osama bin Laden says so. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t (my guess is that opinions vary wildly between those terrorists who are dead and in Hell and those who are still awaiting their travel orders). But either way, why on earth is their opinion dispositive? If, as Paul gushed, the CIA is correct that there is such a thing as “blowback” (and there obviously is) surely Osama bin Laden is as subject to this immutable law of the universe as the rest of us are. “Careful what you wish for” is good advice for terrorists and dictators, too. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein is still cackling with laughter about how he has the Americans exactly where he wants them?
Again, blowback hardly blows in only one direction. Paul invokes Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal from Beirut as a wise response to blowback. But many students of the rise of Islamism see Reagan’s painful decision as a terrible error, in that it provided one of the first lessons that America has a glass jaw. One could just as easily argue that the blowback from the pullout was worse than the decision to send the Marines there in the first place. Moreover, the moral variable is left out entirely. If you send cops into a mob hangout, the cops will face blowback from criminals with guns. That hardly means the cops had it coming.
When Paul suggests that we were attacked on 9/11 because we bombed Iraq for ten years, he seems to be suggesting that a) we were wrong to be bombing Iraq in the 1990s, b) we were wrong to have put Saddam Hussein in a “box” after the first Gulf War, and c) the first Gulf War was wrong in the first place (Paul essentially says as much elsewhere, so this seems like a fair interpretation). Now, before you even consider the soundness of these positions, you should at least recognize how they disprove his understanding of the Middle East. Kuwaitis and Saudis, for example, did not support Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Kurds and Shia were quite glad that we invaded, but then upset that we didn’t follow it through, though at least grateful that we ultimately prevented Saddam from re-launching his genocidal campaigns in the north and the south. And yet, all of these concerns matter nothing compared to the One True Voice of Osama bin Laden.
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