Ron Paul: Another Letter on Iran? House Sends Letter to President...
Is the US House acting in a Constitutional manner in the letter it recently sent to the US President regarding the Iran talks? Yes, says Ron Paul in his Liberty Report, but their goal is to scuttle an agreement with Iran, which is a very bad idea.
Is the US House acting in a Constitutional manner in the letter it recently sent to the US President regarding the Iran talks? Yes, says Ron Paul in his Liberty Report, but their goal is to scuttle an agreement with Iran, which is a very bad idea.
Is the US House acting in a Constitutional manner in the letter it recently sent to the US President regarding the Iran talks? Yes, says Ron Paul in his Liberty Report, but their goal is to scuttle an agreement with Iran, which is a very bad idea.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Daniel, good to have you here today.
Thank you.
Daniel, there's another letter written.
I can't believe it.
You know, these members of Congress like to write letters and tell the president what to do, and they certainly have a responsibility to do so.
I wish they would tell them what to do by passing decent legislation, put the pressure on the president and override his vetoes on a lot of this.
But no, they like to write letters.
And sometimes when these letters are dealing with foreign policy or anything, they're bipartisan.
All of a sudden, you know, when push comes to, yes, these two parties are very much alone.
I'm very much the same.
But this letter had 367 signatures.
It was just sent last week, and it has to do with Iran and their nuclear programs and Obama's negotiations with the Iranians, along with five other members of the Security Council of the United Nations.
It's just not Obama over there by himself.
And I think it's pretty safe grounds to say the president has some authority to deal with diplomacy.
But Congress has a lot of responsibility.
When it comes to war issues and trade issues, they do.
But here's a letter that is written, and the letter is strong.
I consider the letter proper in the constitutional sense, and I consider it something that they're doing for other than constitutional reasons.
Did you come across this letter and see a little bit about that?
I did, and it seemed clear that their intent, as you say, they certainly have a right to express, and they should express themselves.
You've fought for many years for Congress to assert itself, but it's clear that the intent was to scuttle these talks.
But you had a lot of these letters put in front of you over the years, didn't you?
Yeah, and early on I learned my lesson because what happens on the House floor is a friend comes up, somebody may be on your committee, or you just get along with them real well and say, hey, Ron, I have this thing, and he'll give you three or four sentences, maybe, or three or four words.
This bill is just to urge the president to negotiate fairly, you know, with the Iranians.
U.N. vs. Neocons00:04:46
Oh, okay, I'm for that.
And you put your name down.
And that's the worst thing you can do.
And that's how most members of Congress signs these things.
I'll bet you most of the members of Congress sign on the House floor when there's a lot of commotion going on and probably never carried a copy of the letter back to their office to study and have a staffer help you go over it.
And look at the details of this.
So these letters are propaganda tools, but they're very important because they get out and there's media attention to it and said, you know, the president should do this and the Congress is going to not allow this to stand.
And then, of course, what does the president say?
Well, if you guys are going to obstruct, I'm going to go around you.
I'm going to the UN.
Well, you know, I sort of like the idea of what he's trying to do if he's being straightforward with us.
But I don't like the idea that he should go to the UN and get his permission from the UN.
Our presidents have gotten way too much permission from the UN to go to war and get ourselves into trouble.
And yet, I find what the Congress is doing, whether it's the Senate or the House, their motivation is anti-diplomacy.
They don't want anything to happen.
You know, one of the reasons that the UN gets involved in the first place is that the U.S. bullies its allies, it bullies the other members of the Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.
So the U.S. internationalized its sanctions regime in the first place, and now they have to go to the UN to undo it.
But my question is, if these signatories, if these signers get their way, if the neocons get their way and these talks are scuttled, that doesn't mean that the other four members of the Security Council are just going to walk away and say, oh, well, because they're putting a lot of effort into it.
You talk about U.S. influence.
If all of a sudden the U.S. is seen as a non-reliable partner, might these four others just say, you know what, let's don't do sanctions anymore.
We can't rely on the U.S.
Well, maybe long term it'll be a blessing in disguise.
Maybe it will undermine our empire to some degree where we will lose credibility.
But unfortunately, I think that this is going to continue because the propaganda machine is so powerful.
I mean, even though there's been a change in regime, I think in a favorable way in Iran, it's been stigmatized and they're working on a bomb.
I've never, I've often said this, I says, I can't imagine how much energy has been put in to getting rid of a bomb that doesn't exist for the last 10 or 15 years.
They're on the verge of it.
They're on the verge of it.
And nobody has ever proven it.
Our own CIA never says that is the case.
The UN never says it's the case.
The Mossad never said it.
The Mossad.
So, but they signed a treaty.
Oh, oh, they don't follow treaties.
But they have followed the treaties.
Do you think that if they had violated the non-proliferation treaty and enriched beyond what they were allowed, do you think the UN and our side wouldn't have had them sanctioned by now?
They haven't ever been.
And they're allowed to.
They're allowed to have peaceful enrichment.
So it's one of these things you wonder, where do they get this motivation to do this?
You know, if they really had to have something to worry about overtime, why don't they worry about Pakistan?
They're probably not the most reliable group, people with a nuke.
They're asking now for tactical nukes because, well, we have to deal with the Indians.
And yet it's always the Iranians putting on sanctions.
And it may go back to a battle between the Saudis and the Iranians and who controls oil.
And, you know, our original break with Iran had to do with oil.
You know, they had an elected leader.
And we've been having problems with Iran ever since.
Absolutely.
So let's hope someday that we can end that.
But once again, the Congress has a right to write a letter.
They have a constitutional defense of that.
But unfortunately, their motivation is wrong.
They just want to scuttle the diplomacy.
In this case, narrowly speaking, and hopefully speaking, the president's on the right track, but his foreign policy is not exactly consistent.
Some days he says something that seems like he's sort of moving toward a more peaceful solution to some of these problems, and other times he wants to start a good war.