In last year’s prediction, Alex Knepper predicted:
Ron Paul shocks no one by saying something crazy.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dmoibUDdy8″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dmoibUDdy8[/youtube]
Isolationist libertarianism has turned Paul into an apologist for thugs and terrorists that want to kill innocent Americans and this is at the top of the reasons why he will never be President and he never should be president.
December 30th, 2009 at 9:50 am
On this issue, Ron Paul absolutely infuriates me!! Does he HONESTLY think that if we pulled EVERY single American soldier back to the U.S. the terrorists would abruptly stop with their madness? What idiotic lunacy!
The fact that he actually DEFENDS and justifies what and why they commit abominable actions blows my mind. On foreign policy, Ron Paul is fundamentally and dangerously wrong.
December 30th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Yeah…way, way, way off base here. The fact that terrorists claim to have political goals does not mean that appeasment will stop them. Furthermore – even if giving the badguys what they want would stop them, it doesn’t make it right or even smart.
December 30th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Hasn’t Bin Laden stated that atleast part of why they are at war with us is because we have servicemen/women in places like Saudi Arabia? I’m not saying we need to totally pull back but perhaps cut our presence in foreign countries atleast in half. We aren’t the world police and never should be.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
I agree with Sean M. While Paul is certainly almost entirely wrong- the jihadists would hate us anyway, and can we really trust Bin Laden’s word?- he does hit on some key points. First, why are we in every country around the world? It’s not necessary for world security, and is that our job? Two, even if we do MOSTLY good things, we’re still killing a lot of innocent people whose relatives terrorist leaders can turn against us, and sometimes we’re doing it even though the country doesn’t want us there.
That said, Paul is way off base on whom to blame for the terrorist attack attempt. See Ed Morrissey tear Paul apart here, based on the same video: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/29/ron-paul-on-the-airline-plot-theyre-terrorists-because-were-occupiers/
Not that this matters, but I met Paul in NH a bit over two years ago and asked him about his being isolationist directly, and while I don’t just take politicians at their word, his explanation (which I won’t go into here, just take my word for it?) was pretty decent. He doesn’t represent himself well most of the time, unfortunately. I actually voted for the guy in the primary.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I’m no fan of Paul but to say he’s an isolationist is being flat out dishonest.How are diplomacy and trading with other nations isolationist?
December 30th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Paul was one of only two republicans to vote against the 8-year Iraq occupation. He also supports civil liberties.
So while most of his colleagues are jackasses, he’s shown consistent good judgment.
Paul 2012!
December 30th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Sean M,
Sorry- I didn’t clarify correctly. I meant to say that I thought he was militarily isolationist until I met him and asked him about it, and he appeased my concerns. I do not think he is isolationist.
December 30th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Ron Paul is actually spot on here. Any Islamic terrorism specialist at the CIA worth their salt would concur that the worldwide insurgency being headed by bin Laden is a response not to hatred of American values, culture, or freedom, but rather a response to the US federal government’s foreign policy in Muslim lands. In fact, I think Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, has written a book giving mountains of explicit evidence saying just that.
December 30th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Ron Paul makes libertarians look bad.
Most of us who hold to the general libertarian principles of individual rights and small government also understand that it is necessary to defend those principles. The LP does not understand that, but most libertarian Republicans do.
Unfortunately, Ron Paul has become to a great extent the public face of libertarianism, and it will take us a long time to recover.
December 30th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
-sigh-
Ron Paul is not explicitly wrong, but he makes dire errors that completely disintegrate the foundation of his argument. I wrote an essay for class on a book that he always recommends about this called “Dying to Win” which claims that suicide bombings are a response to occupation, not a Muslim thing. I’ll post relevant parts.
December 30th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Recent Developments
Recent developments have been very unkind to Dying to Win. Events in the second half of the 2000s in the conflicts with both Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan have put serious dents in Pape’s analysis. Pape claims that suicide terrorists are and always have been chiefly concerned with expelling occupiers from their homelands. But Pakistan, which has been subject to suicide bombings from Islamic radicals just in the past year, is not the homeland of the Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, and the Pakistani government — to the extent that there is one, that is — is not an occupying force. It is not Islamic in character, though, by the definition of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and it is working against the implementation of sharia. Thus, an orchestrated campaign against it.
More devastatingly to Pape, while even more American troops are in Iraq than when he penned this tome, the number of suicide bombings has actually drastically decreased. This book’s thesis was much more defensible in 2005, before this piece of incredibly striking evidence. This appears to me to be a mortal blow to the Dying to Win thesis: if held consistently, there should be a direct correlation between occupation and suicide bombing. Indeed, more Americans than ever are in Iraq, the American-sponsored government is still in place, the radical sects still believe what they do — but yet, the people of Iraq have largely accepted their country’s new makeup. The practice of suicide bombing is practically dead in the Iraq of December 2009. The Chechens, the Tamil Tigers, Hamas — they did not or have not given up after a few years. Pape’s thesis tells us that Iraq should still be a chaotic mess right now, and yet it has become incredibly stable. This tells us, I believe, that something more than simple resistance to occupation has to explain the existence suicide bombing.
My own ideas appear at first to face this same issue, though: Islam has not changed, so why has there been a decrease in suicide bombings and resistance forces? The answer, as best I can discern, is rooted in two factors. First, the surge strategy of David Petraeus: contrary to over-hyped media reports, the surge was about far more than just sending additional soldiers to Iraq, as important as that was. It was also a concentrated, door-to-door/hearts-and-minds campaign to win over those with grievances. Combine that factor with the Anbar Awakening of 2007 in which radicals decided to join the electoral process, and there is a recipe for stabilization. This is incredible progress — not perfect, by any means (the Sons of Iraq have threatened, for instance, to set streets ablaze after performing poorly in elections), but as the Iraqi people have come to learn that America is not there to conquer, but to stabilize and leave, the culture has changed with it. Moreover, while many may sympathize with suicide bombers, the number willing to actually commit such an act is few. With a more stable country comes decreased incentives to partake in such acts.
This is not a perfect answer, but it is what the current evidence points to. This is an open-ended subject of research, and as conflicts continue and wars are waged, more data will emerge. For now, all that we can do is make our best estimates. There might not even be trends that are directly analyzable: each case could be different. The honest truth is that, to some degree, we just do not know. But there are trends that can be fairly definitively be disproved. And Pape’s hypothesis has not held up well against the events of the last half of the decade.
The Question of Bases
One of the most trenchant pieces of evidence that Pape presents is that Islamic countries in which American bases have not existed, only one suicide bomber for every seventy-one million people has been produced, while one has been produced for every million in countries in which they have. Contrast, say, Egypt with Saudi Arabia.
The main problem with this is that correlation does not always amount to causation. It is akin, in some ways, to pointing out that more crime exists in areas with lots of policemen stationed. American troops were stationed in those countries because they are global hot-spots more likely to produce violence and unrest. There is a great strategic importance to being stationed in Saudi Arabia that really does not exist in a country like Nigeria.
Moreover, al-Qaeda’s disdain toward Saudi Arabia runs deeper than the fact that American military bases once existed there. Indeed, there has been no allaying of hatred toward the West since the United States’ withdrawal earlier this decade. The Saudis are so loathed by Islamic radicals for reasons that Pape’s recommendations — generally reducing our military involvement in the Middle East — do nothing to help with. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden have condemned Saudi Arabia in general. They are angry because the House of Saud, sitting upon Mecca and Medina as it does, refuses to speak out for the Palestinian cause. They are angry at the government for being complicit with the United States — for instance, in helping the West “loot Arab oil.” (In other words: the oil that Saudi Arabia controls is a collective resource of Muslims, and allowing the West to benefit is an assault on Islamic ideals.) The friendly diplomatic between Saudi Arabia and the United States run far deeper than that, of course, and are well-known — and it would be strategic foolishness for either the House of Saud or the United States to abandon that.
December 30th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
By the way, if the writing in that essay seems a bit casual for a class essay, note it was from a ten-page paper that I started four hours before the deadline. >_> …Yeah, I procrastinate…
December 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
LOL!! Good excerpt, by the way.
January 2nd, 2010 at 1:08 am
Time and again,our government cannot “make us safe” from terrorists.
Do you really believe our country can attack, invade and occupy other people’s countries and not expect retaliation? Remember Albert Einstein’s quote about the definition of insanity?
You call Ron Paul’s foreign policy isolationist; yet, it was the stated policy of Presidents Washington, Jefferson and others. Oh yeah, the world didn’t have WMDs in the days of Washington and Jefferson. Does that mean you can now challenge other nations to use WMDs against the United States by attacking them? If so, you are a warmonger and an accomplice in mass murder.
February 14th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
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