Imagine

Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up check points on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome’s did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

-Ron Paul
9 March 2009

He wants to conserve all the failed policies of Bush.

Have we lost our minds? Why such support for Keynesian? I'm just so confused to how more debt will save us. Free Market forces cannot be controlled any more than Gravitational forces.

Link: http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_11130293

By Rod Dreher

I didn't vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary (I was a Mike Huckabee man), nor did I write him in on Election Day (I penciled in farmer-poet Wendell Berry). But no Texan this year did more good for conservatism and his country than the congressman from the coast.

Lord knows there was no Republican in the 2008 campaign who talked straighter.

Dr. Paul — he's a physician — never had a chance, of course. He is too peculiar in his opinions and doesn't know how to spin like a TV slick. What he had was ideas, integrity and authenticity. On the most critical challenges facing America, Paul was more right than the well-funded GOP regulars who bigfooted the campaign trail.

His best moment came in a May debate aired on Fox News. Paul asserted that too much U.S. meddling in the Middle East invites terrorist blowback — a conclusion shared by the 9/11 commission and former CIA Osama bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer. Rudy Giuliani pounced, accusing Ron Paul of trying to blame America for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But Paul's point — lost on the demagogic New York mayor — was simply that America should rethink its role in Iraq and the region. "We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics," he said in the debate.

Who can doubt it today, given an Iraq war debacle conceived and executed by a president and an elite team blinded by ideology? The Iraq war did deep damage to our military, our economy and our prestige -- and it has destroyed the Republican Party's credibility on national security issues.

Ron Paul, who has always stood against U.S. imperial overreach, was right about the Iraq war. And that's not the only thing he saw that most Republicans did not.

His libertarian economic views are far from mainstream. For example, he's against income taxes, period, and believes the U.S. should go back on the gold standard. Eccentricities like this keep him from being taken seriously.

But the truth is, if U.S. economic policy looked a lot more like Ron Paul's ideal than what we've had these past decades, the nation wouldn't be tottering on the financial abyss. Paul has long argued that an economy built on easy credit, insatiable consumption and deficit spending is a time bomb. He backs a national economic model based on savings, investment and production.

An economy that depends so heavily on government intervention to keep it afloat is one that creates of necessity an ever more powerful state. The nationalization of the banking sector only increases the power of the central government and decreases liberty. Paul warned for years against what we're seeing happen today. But nobody — including me — listened to the old crank.

How much better off would America be today if we had? We'll never know. Poor us.

It's not true, really, that nobody listened. Paul had a relatively small but intensely devoted following and raised astonishing amounts of campaign cash for his outsider presidential bid. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm didn't amount to much of anything in the primaries. So much for the Ron Paul Revolution, right?

Maybe not. The same GOP establishment that mocked and reviled Paul now lies shattered. Who believes in this Republican Party anymore? The party destroyed itself with its own unprincipled recklessness, both in foreign and fiscal policy. And it has ruined its reputation among the young — the most ardent of Paul's supporters, incidentally — who are far more likely to identify with the Democrats.

Out of this destruction, some creative young conservatives may rise up and decide to take back the Republican Party. Perhaps they'll run against the overweening power of the federal government and in favor of decentralizing power (but unlike today's Republicans, they'll actually mean it). Maybe they'll fight for an America that lives responsibly, within its natural limits both overseas and at home. And maybe, just maybe, they might make the Republican Party worth following again.

If that day comes, it will be thanks to the lifelong labors of Ron Paul and his 2008 campaign based on ideas. If those ideas germinate into genuine reform and restoration of sanity in our government, America will look back on Paul as a gift from Texas.

And having once given the nation George W. Bush -- and given him to our countrymen good and hard -- we Texans sure as hell owe them one.

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, Communications Center, Dallas, Texas 75265. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.