Titanic Post

Ron Paul simply spoke truth

by Bryan Hyde Printed in The Spectrum May 21, 2007

It must be a sign of the times. A presidential candidate was recently shouted down in a televised debate for saying something that was patently offensive to the other candidates and the media talking heads - the truth. Not surprisingly, the offender was Congressman Ron Paul and the truth to which he spoke was the unintended consequences of heavy-handed foreign policy decisions on the part of the federal government.

Paul suggested that the U.S. government should learn from its failed policies of interventionism and world policing to prevent future blowback manifesting itself as radicalism, hatred and terrorism directed against not just the U.S. Government, but America in general.

Predictably, the panicked response of the Republican vanguard was to distort and misrepresent Paul’s position into the threadbare cliché of “He blames America for 9/11.”
Rudy Giuliani, perhaps seeking to distract the South Carolina audience from his own authoritarian and pro-abortion stances, cast the first stone by falsely accusing Paul of saying that America had “invited” the attacks of 9/11. Rudy invited Ron Paul to retract his statement about the negative impact of decades of U.S. government intervention in the Middle East, but Paul stood his ground citing the 9/11 Commission Report and testimony from FBI and CIA experts alike refuting the claim that the terrorist attacks stemmed from Islamic “hatred of our freedoms.”

There are two points that must be made concerning Giuliani’s shameful distortion. First of all, the federal government and America are not one and the same. The U.S. government is just one small part of the nation as a whole, though its policies have had the tendency to do things in our names that have come back to impact us all.

Secondly, the real motives behind the “blowback” described by the CIA had everything to do with U.S. government interventionism in numerous Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Iraq. At this point, many of our self styled “great Americans” will angrily thump their chests and ask “why we should care about the motives of terrorists?”

It’s a fair question. Why do homicide detectives concern themselves with motive when investigating a murder? Does their seeking to establish a motive for the crime suggest that the victim had “invited” the attack? Of course not, though several Republican candidates clucked and strutted like flustered roosters over Ron Paul’s suggestion that altering our government’s current might-makes right foreign policy toward other nations could do much to deny motivation for other nations or groups to lash out at us.

Though critics incorrectly label nonintervention as isolationism, the concept of minding our own business militarily while engaging in commerce with the world was a concept championed by the Founders and one that, as Ron Paul pointed out, “we ignore at our own risk.”

While campaigning for president in 2000, Pat Buchanan warned:

“How can all of our meddling fail to spark some terrible retribution? Have we not suffered enough - Pan Am 103, World Trade Center (1993), the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dares Salaam - not to know that intervention is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on U.S. Soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire.

America today faces a choice of destinies. We can choose to be a peacemaker of the world, or its policeman who goes around night-sticking troublemakers until we, too, find ourselves in some bloody brawl we cannot handle.”

Few people were listening then and unless we learn to distinguish between true patriotism and fanatical nationalism, we’re unlikely to elect leaders capable of charting a correct course for our government.