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Ron Paul vs. the Seven Dwarfs: American Foreign Policy That Makes Sense

While he still only gets a small amount of time in the debates, his message is beginning to reach Republicans who aren't blinded by Bushian, neo-con machismo. Are they listening?

by Walt Thiessen
(Libertarian)
http://www.nolanchart.com/article333.html



Unlike every other Republican candidate on the stage in last night's CNN/YouTube debate, only Ron Paul demonstrated that he truly "gets it" when it comes to foreign policy. Witness his comment in reply to an attack on his position on Iraq. He said, "The best thing we can do for the Iraqi people is to give them their country back. That's the most important thing that we can do." He went on to make a great point about Vietnam. He said, "Just think of the cleaning up of the mess after we left Vietnam. Vietnam is now a friend of ours. We trade with them. Their president comes here. What we achieved in peace was unachievable in 20 years of the Americans and the French being in Vietnam. So it's time for us to take care of America first."

How true! What we and the French and the Chinese (don't forget them!) did in Vietnam was terrible, yet Vietnam survived. They rebuilt. And what Dr. Paul did not say, because there wasn't enough time to say it all in 30 seconds, is that Vietnam represented the nightmare scenario of cold-war hawks. It was the key domino in the Domino Theory. Remember the Domino Theory? That was the idea that if Vietnam fell to communism, then the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to communism, and this would be a catastrophe for American interests. President Eisenhower first voiced the idea in an April 1954 press conference in which he said, "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

Well, America ended up withdrawing from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, and sure enough, Vietnam fell to communism, as did the rest of Southeast Asia. Now here's the key point. Despite this, despite the fact that the worst DID happen, Vietnam is our peaceful trading partner today! And I submit that if we hadn't interfered for 20 years, Vietnam would be much closer to becoming a free society today. It was our interference that has helped keep them in the communist embrace, but over time it is becoming increasingly clear that the communist embrace will dissipate and is dissipating.

So when I hear modern day neo-con hawks and their allies claiming that we can't leave Iraq because it will undermine American interests, I have to ask myself what kind of drugs are they smoking? It's clear to me that the hawks are never going to learn that continued American military presence in other countries based on fear of what might happen to American interests if they withdraw does not produce positive results (except if you're a company like Halliburton, of course).

The discouraging part is that every Republican candidate on that stage last night talked the neo-con line except for one. The encouraging part was that the one exception was Ron Paul. Call it the contrast of Ron Paul vs. the Seven Dwarfs.

Senator McCain shot back that, "We never lost the battle in Vietnam; it was American public opinion that cost us the war." Senator McCain obviously doesn't get it. Public opinion didn't cost us the war in Vietnam. Rather public opinion pulled us out of a bad foreign policy in Vietnam, which resulted in things getting better, not worse. McCain's limited vision that wars are all about "winning" the war (by which he means using military intervention to force other countries to bend to our national will) shows its tattered logic when compared to the reality of what happened after we left Vietnam as the "losers." The reality is that America's leaders over that 20 year period set us up to be the losers by putting us there in the first place. In that scenario, the only way to "win" was to withdraw.

McCain went on to claim that the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that Vietnam didn't want to follow us home, that Al-Qaedda wants to have a base in Iraq in order to launch attacks against the U.S. He said, "Their ultimate destination isn't Iraq. Their ultimate destination is New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Arizona." Ron Paul isn't the most graceful speaker in the world. He stumbles and trips over his own words. But the message is what is driving his campaign and his supporters, not the man himself. He managed to shoot back at McCain the following, "[Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz even admitted that Al-Qaedda was organized and energized by our military base in Saudi Arabia. He understood why they came here. They come here because we're occupying their country, just as we would object if they occupied our country." This kind of clear understanding is why Ron Paul has more financial support from active duty servicemen than John McCain has. That financial support is also why McCain is so upset with Ron Paul.


The only thing wrong with his statement is that Paul should have said that we're occupying their countries, in the plural, and I'm sure that's what he intended. Al-Qaedda isn't just about Iraq. They're also about Saudi Arabia, and Palestine, and Egypt, and all of the other more than 100 countries around the world where American troops reside on a regular basis and are used to force American views and American pressure on the governments of those nations and other nations in those same regions. And before some neo-con objects that Palestine isn't a country, can we agree that they should be? Even President Bush, in his fevered mind, thinks so these days. He's holding talks at the Naval Academy toward that end. His approach can't work, because it's based on forcing America's will on other countries, but nevertheless even he now recognizes that there must be a country called Palestine.

Tom Tancredo shot back that America is under threat from Radical Islam and that we would be under threat even if there was not a single American serviceman outside of this country. But what's his evidence for this claim? What is the evidence of any advocate for this claim? The only evidence is their own fear. Tancredo gave no evidence, and neither did anyone else. All of the other six Republican dwarfs on that stage accepted Tancredo's claim as a given truth, not to be touched, not to be questioned.

It's nonsense, of course. But what's worse is that it flies in the face of what American public opinion says: that we shouldn't remain in Iraq, that it's time to find a way to leave. McCain claimed that American public opinion is what lost Vietnam. As I showed above, his claim is wrong, because his idea of what is a "loss" turned out to be not a loss at all, but McCain and the rest of the Seven Dwarfs are using that ill-named "loss" to convince themselves to ignore American opinion and blame it for our failures, atrocities, and horrible mistakes regarding Iraq. They're threatening that if America withdraws from Iraq, then American public opinion is at fault.

The reality, however, is quite different. It is the Bush administration, the neo-cons, the hawks, who are at fault where Iraq is concerned. They're the ones who got us in that mess in the first place, in pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) which we know didn't even exist. Bush knew they didn't exist all along, but neo-cons try to sweep that under the rug. Instead, they keep chanting their same old mantra about not leaving Iraq until we "finish the job." Except it's a job that America can't finish. It's time to hand Iraq back to the Iraqi people.

The Seven Dwarfs are out of step with American public opinion, and by insisting on rallying the Republican Party behind any other candidate besides Ron Paul, they are guaranteeing a showdown on Election Day where the majority of Americans are asked to voice their support for Bush administration foreign policy, which the Seven Dwarfs all support. That will mean almost certain defeat for the Republican candidate if it's not Ron Paul, regardless of whether Paul stays in the race as a third-party candidate or not.