Ron Paul and Foreign Entanglements

Ron Paul Photo from: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/about/

Sean Hannity photo from: http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/150507_ron_paul_debate.html

I like Congressman and former multiple-election Libertarian party presidential candidate Ron Paul. I do. I admire him for his straight talk, and even more for the fact that he actually does walk it too. I had a conversation with a brother of mine (who I respect immensely and who has researched and thought through many of the aspects of his affiliation with Ron Paul's ideals) at our family reunion recently that helped me understand what appeal he might have in the Republican primary. So between that and a recent Michael Medved interview with him, where he answered so frankly and unapologetically that I almost had a hard time reminding myself that this was a politician, I think it's time I finally address his candidacy and policy positions.

First, I espouse the fundamental libertarian ideals on most issues. I think Ron Paul is right on about the border, about taxes, about abortion, about home schooling (maybe more on that in another post--I'm still forming my opinion on that one), about property, about health care, and even on the general principles from which he derives his chicken-little-esque policy positions on individual rights to privacy.

However, he's an isolationist. He doesn't call himself that--in fact he believes Americans should not isolate themselves, but rather should roam freely studying, consuming, trading, working and communicating with all other nations. What he's not willing to admit is that the freedom he'd like Americans to be able to exercise can only exist when undergirded--minimally in some places, and in a very overt way in more hostile territory--by military presence. It may seem sad, and I guess it is in the sense that the world should be a friendly and peaceful enough place for everyone, but I don't see how it should be anyone else's responsibility to ensure our own protection. So while his goals for freedom are laudable, they unfortunately come at the expense of a misunderstanding of the conditions of existence of those freedoms he claims to promote--without military involvement, isolationism is inevitable and claims to be able to enjoy freedoms without military presence are naive.

One of my biggest disagreements with Paul stems from my belief that he is fundamentally misreading the founders' understanding of domestic freedom from government and how it relates to "entanglements" abroad. So let's read together some Ron Paul policy and position statements directly from his official campaign site and see if we can untangle the basis of his malliteracies (my neologism).

"Both Jefferson and Washington warned us about entangling ourselves in the affairs of other nations. Today, we have troops in 130 countries. We are spread so thin that we have too few troops defending America. And now, there are new calls for a draft of our young men and women."

Jefferson and Washington lived in an era where it was the order of the day for NON-DEMOCRATIC state superpowers to bribe, force, meddle, and in all other words interfere with the affairs of other nations as a way to prop up their own power and pursue their own interests. The key is that none of those states were democratic, and as such, only represented the small elite minority who could serve the whims of the king/state. Washington and Jefferson were right to observe that state interference in other states' affairs almost always resulted in over-reaching which then caused catastrophic loss of power despite the goal of consolidating it. On the other hand, neither Jefferson nor Washington refused the aid of the French in the Revolutionary war. And when the beys (was that their title, I can't recall quite) of the Maghreb didn't cooperate, Jefferson forced them to deal with the Barbary pirates, who interfered in American trade with Europe, by entangling himself in two wars, which eventually defeated the pirates. Foreign entanglements are in large measure unavoidable, necessary, and in many cases desirable. The issue is the kind of entanglement, not the entanglement itself. If there is a need to protect the interests of the US abroad, the US must get entangled in a way that maximizes the protection (most desirably by working with the state within that state's jurisdiction to enforce its own laws, the violation of which become threats to US interests), and minimizes US responsibility for failure.

Our troops are barely at token presence levels in over 100 of those countries, and are only in significant fighting force numbers in 2 of them. The strategy is not to enforce anything, but rather to maintain a position on the globe from which we can rapidly build up a staging area if the need for military protection ever arises. Those areas represent no current threat, but may neighbor places that might, therefore it is unwarranted to claim we are stretched thin there. America itself needs more border presence, but not because our neighbors are a military threat, rather because illegal activities occur there frequently. In that sense America doesn't really need troops to defend her, but rather need more law enforcement agents to defend her way of life and the rule of law better. In any case, there would be more than sufficient numbers of volunteers for such jobs should the funding priority be placed there. All of the current proposals and calls for a draft come from non-military sources (none of the military leaders on the ground think a draft is necessary), and are completely non-serious, having no chance at legislative success anywhere, therefore the latter of Paul's assertions is at least a little disingenuous.

"The war in Iraq was sold to us with false information. The area is more dangerous now than when we entered it. We destroyed a regime hated by our direct enemies, the jihadists, and created thousands of new recruits for them. This war has cost more than 3,000 American lives, thousands of seriously wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars."

Let's take this one point for point:

1. The information from the intelligence community that justified the war turned out to have been overstated (although they HAVE found WMDs in Iraq, and there was ample time for Saddam to move them into Syria with alleged Russian help in the 14-month lead-up to the war), but it is either misinformed or disingenuous to claim that we were lied into it: even French intelligence sources were convinced that our sources were correct that Saddam had WMDs, and they were not allies at the time in this casus belli.
   
2. The area is not more dangerous than when we entered it. The only way you could say that is by understating the effect of the oppression that the fear of Saddam and his henchmen truly caused. The prime example of this is the Kurds in the north who, now no longer under threat, are free to pursue their dreams, and this has resulted in an economic boom. What we have done is force the Iraqis to choose sides: with the terrorists or against the terrorists. The bombings we hear about are mostly from the few areas of the country still deciding to support terrorism, and even then the fact that the terrorists must resort to terroristic tactics is proof that they are not supported by the majority of the people--otherwise their political agenda would have a legitimate representation among those of the people convinced by their programme. I should make a comment here about how the current "surge" is working, and about how the Iraqi people and their local leaders are beginning to decide that Al-Qaeda's way can no longer be tolerated, and that America's way is not to be feared or resisted, but I'll refrain for now.
   
3. The Hussein regime was hated by Iran because of a long bloody war in which Iraq was supported by the US because he stood on the right side of the Communist question in the Cold War, and because Iran flirted with the other side. Once the Cold War was over and the US (via the World bank and IMF in some cases) began requiring democratic reforms in the countries where they had formerly supported dictators he promptly became an enemy of the US--he was most assuredly not hated by the jihadists for that. But he was hated by the anti-American "jihadists" (which is, I believe, an intentionally nebulous term covering many different national origins, philosophies, sects, and beliefs of Moslems) also for being secular at the beginning of his rule, but he became more and more Islamicized, authentically or not, after the first Gulf War as he realized that his support in an Islamic Middle-East, and his popularity as having turned on the US depended on a return to his Islamic roots. I doubt very much that the Palestinian families who happily received the pension he offered them for encouraging their children to blow themselves up in crowded Israeli areas thought of Saddam as particularly anti-jihad.
   
4. This war has cost the fewest lives and limbs per unit time in the history of modern warfare. And if it results in convincing terrorists to battle us where they are, as it appears to be doing, then it will prove much less expensive than allowing them to come into the US, blow up buildings, disrupt the economy, force the government to crack down on our freedoms, etc. The purpose of war is not profit, but security of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: therefore it must be supported by all necessary expenses, and cost is more or less irrelevant.
   
5. Finally, why is it such a problem that thousands would convert into jihadis as a result of the US involvement in Iraq? It's certainly not unpredictable. It's definitely sad. But we essentially forced a choice upon them: them or us--should we be surprised that some of them would choose them? This way of stating the support the jihadis receive from converts to their cause obfuscates two important other ways of interpreting the results of the same forced choice: a. It avoids relating that these "thousands" are an infinitesimal minority and that the vast majority made the right choice; and b. It makes the assumption that the status quo of a tacit support of terrorism (by a people who could either not choose for themselves because of fear of a dictator who had chosen the terrorists for them or who among whom the terrorists were prevalent enough that they lived in real fear of the terrorists themselves and could not openly choose against them) was just fine and tolerably dandy, which it wasn't. In both cases, creating the environment where the open choice could be made was beneficial both to Iraq and to the US because: a. Most did choose freedom (the courage of the purple finger crowd is inspiring to those of us who allow ourselves to be moved by such courage); and b. Even the thousands that didn't choose freedom have been forced off the fence and into the line of fire and it will only be a matter of time before we get them too. The US military is certainly not afraid of "thousands", especially now that the people are so openly behind them on this.

   "No war should ever be fought without a declaration of war voted upon by the Congress, as required by the Constitution."

   Conceded. We should have done it that way. Does that make it okay for Congress to act as if it's not Congress's responsibility to see the current war through? What would be the consequences of pulling out? The fact on the ground in Iraq right now is that we're there. We must consider very carefully the consequences, to them and to us, if we should pull out. President Bush was right recently to invoke the only serious comparison possible of this war to Vietnam: if we leave, Cambodia will result. And furthermore the terrorists will be emboldened to have brought the paper tiger down, resulting in more and more ambitious attacks on US soil. This threat, in a world where WMD-armed states can support such terroristic and extremist individuals and groups, however small, is not to be underestimated except at our peril.

   "Under no circumstances should the U.S. again go to war as the result of a resolution that comes from an unelected, foreign body, such as the United Nations."

   "Again" is the only word that really breaks this one for me. Of course the US should not give up its sovereignty in the matter of war-making, if ever it needs to come to that (and we all pray and work for it not to), to any foreign body. And it should especially not concede war-making decisions to a body whose corpus is drawn from almost any and all countries' governments around the world without regard to what kind of power such governments claim and exercise over their people, nor to how such governments got such power. Democratic elections have become the norm in many areas of the world, but there is still a whole lot of shammin' goin' on out there, and the result is that the majority of the UN member states appoint representatives of dictators, not of their peoples. This results in such blatant, but PC, hypocrisy and moral equivalency as Zimbabwe running the Human Rights commission, and Koffi Anan's son profiteering from the Oil for Food program. If Mosiah, a prophet-king famous in LDS circles for his political-science treatise related in the Book of Mormon (he abolished monarchy under his own rule and set up a democratic system of legislation with a constitutional system for the judiciary), was anywhere close to right that it is uncommon for the majority of the people to choose the wrong, then the UN might be an appropriate collaborative diplomatic forum (but never a legislative one--I believe in local government where possible, national government because necessary, but unless we meet aliens and need a global body to represent us the UN should never need to make laws for the world) if and only if only members were allowed who could demonstrate, by their form of government, that they were representing the will of the people of a nation and not simply the interests of the current ruler or ruling class. If the majority of the people do choose evil over good, then they are becoming ripe for destruction and God will appoint them to such in His time. But they mostly don't, so if their governments govern according to the people's will, such governments would be choosing the right most of the time and would therefore justly pressure their neighbors to behave appropriately with WMDs, to not financially, morally, or in any other way contribute to terrorist causes--and all this BEFORE wars became necessary. In this case, however, the UN is the wrong body to legitimate US involvement in war (of course the thugs and dictators would vote against us to militarily oblige Saddam to cease and desist his support of terrorism--they might be next!), and that's exactly why we didn't. We decided to go to war because of our own reasons, without requiring UN involvement in our decision. We decided to work with them in order to: a. Convince as many other countries as would submit to our evidence to go along with us; and b. give the UN a chance to demonstrate whether it would be a relevant world decision-making body, or whether it would succumb to the separate interests of the dictator and thug appointed representatives that populate its majority. Surprisingly, without us needing it or even really expecting it, the UN did support us with a resolution, and therefore the US could claim "world" support. It was a brilliant move on the part of the Bush administration because it flushed out the fanatical and oppressive foes and consolidated the loyalty of the freedom-loving friends with the same obligation of making a choice. France oppressive and fanatical you ask? Not exactly, in their case senior government officials were too busy profiteering from Saddam's government for them to behave as their people would have wanted them to. Nicolas Sarkozy, a proud US supporter, was elected the very next President of France, and has popularly vowed to make life hard on Iran if it should ever go nuclear. This is a sign that the French people were not being well represented while France was opposing the Iraq war resolutions (but which granted the security council resolution nonetheless).

   But I digress, back to Ron Paul.

   "Too often we give foreign aid and intervene on behalf of governments that are despised. Then, we become despised. Too often we have supported those who turn on us"

   Here we are back to misrepresenting the political philosophies of Washington and Jefferson, not to mention history. I agree that foreign aid is counterproductive--I don't have a link, but the Michael Medved interview I cited earlier featured a statistic on this matter which showed that growth in GDP is inversely proportional to the amount of foreign aid a given country receives--which is analogous to what we know about the majority of welfare recipients on a smaller more domestic scale. But this philosophy is contradictory with just a little thought. His argument is that we don't get the respect we deserve when we support other governments so let's stop supporting them at all--so what a ludicrous proposition, then, to imply that if we don't help others they will respect us as they ought. This is my major disagreement with Paul on issues surrounding the war in Iraq and national security: he's too willing to take the detractors' word for it when they describe their own motivations by saying America is hated for its policies. The hate is not as prevalent as they suggest (as evidenced by the recent elections in Germany and France, both countries who were reported by the press as being anti-American, both electing pro-American leaders), and it is not solely reactive to US policies in the Middle-East. This is the excuse they use, but it is not the reason for terroristic behavior. The reason stems from a philosophy, ideology, or worldview that allows this kind of unjustifiable evil and violence. Some supporters are more passive than others, but all who support terrorist causes fundamentally misunderstand (or choose to misunderstand) the nature of freedom and happiness, supposing that evil actions can lead to either. Again, although I have perhaps been even more nebulous than the President on this matter (perhaps I'll clearly think through the terms more specifically in another post), I believe he's basically right about them hating us because of our freedom. Of course that's a ridiculous proposition when taken only at face value because freedom is such a universal positive, but when you stop listening to their words and just judge terrorists for their actions, it's clear that underlying their "freedom fighting" (as infamous anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan once put it) the goals and aspirations of the terrorists are domination, not freedom; oppression, not freedom from fear to pursue happiness; division, not union; war at all costs, not peaceful coexistence; in short their programme leads only to the antithesis of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; death, enslavement, and the pursuit of another's happiness.