Ron Paul Liberty Report - Neocons Demand Escalation in Syria
Aired: 2015-10-08
Duration: 10:15


=== Planes in Syrian Skies (07:47) ===

[00:00:12]  Hello everybody.
[00:00:13]  Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
[00:00:16]  Daniel McAdams is with me today.
[00:00:18]  Daniel, good to see you.
[00:00:19]  Good morning, Dr. Paul.
[00:00:21]  I wanted to talk about the Middle East.
[00:00:23]  That's a hot spot.
[00:00:24]  Probably the hottest of the hotspot is in Syria.
[00:00:27]  There's been a lot of news on there and what's been happening.
[00:00:30]  And it looks like it's escalating.
[00:00:32]  The Russians are becoming more firm on their willingness to defend their ally, the Syrian government.
[00:00:40]  They're talking about warships shooting missiles.
[00:00:42]  They have some planes down there now.
[00:00:45]  And there's talk about a coordinated Iranian troop movement in there.
[00:00:51]  So it is escalating.
[00:00:54]  But there is also something seriously going on in airspace.
[00:00:57]  You know, we have planes over there.
[00:01:00]  The Russians have planes over there.
[00:01:02]  How about going into that a little bit?
[00:01:05]  Who has the most planes and where are they?
[00:01:08]  Where are they allowed to fly?
[00:01:09]  And who's doing it legally if there is such a thing?
[00:01:12]  But all I know is it's very, very dangerous.
[00:01:15]  And our government stands for sending a lot of planes over there.
[00:01:20]  But just talk a little bit about the airspace argument going on.
[00:01:25]  Sure.
[00:01:25]  Well, according to press reports, you know, the deal was made with Turkey that we would be allowed to use Incirlik base.
[00:01:32]  And what we would give Turkey would be a no-fly zone in northern Syria from which our rebels could hold, take a base, and then move on to Damascus.
[00:01:42]  That was the plan.
[00:01:43]  The Russians preempted the plan by heeding a call from the government in Syria for help.
[00:01:50]  And they've essentially established a de facto no-fly zone over most, if not all, of Syria.
[00:01:56]  And they've been hitting targets for the past week now, a little over a week.
[00:02:01]  But if you'll see, there's actually a map behind me.
[00:02:03]  And this is interesting because the big thing this week is Russia violated Turkey's airspace.
[00:02:09]  And NATO has issued a warning.
[00:02:13]  But the fact of the matter, Russia went a few meters into Turkish airspace.
[00:02:18]  They apologized, said it was bad weather that led them to do it.
[00:02:22]  But NATO and the U.S. keep ratcheting this up.
[00:02:24]  You're threatening NATO.
[00:02:26]  But this is an interesting graphic if you look at it.
[00:02:29]  The white line, the graphic behind me, the white line is the Turkish-Syrian border.
[00:02:34]  You talk about violating airspace.
[00:02:36]  This is, say, as we do as we say, not as we do.
[00:02:39]  Because the yellow planes in there are over Syrian territory.
[00:02:43]  Those are Russian planes.
[00:02:45]  But all the green planes that are over Syrian airspace are U.S. fighter planes.
[00:02:51]  So who is violating whose airspace?
[00:02:53]  The U.S. is violating Syria's airspace because they don't have permission, unlike the Russians, not to defend what Russia's doing, but a sovereign state has given permission, and the U.S. is violating Syrian airspace.
[00:03:05]  So it's not as cut and tried as the mainstream media would like to believe.
[00:03:08]  So Assad didn't invite us in over there, to say the least.
[00:03:11]  It seems like our mission is there is to get rid of Assad, and that's been our position for four years and the basis of so many problems that we have.
[00:03:22]  But you know, this thing is escalating.
[00:03:24]  It's getting worse, and they're getting more determined, and the neocons are going to come flying back here more and more and more.
[00:03:31]  But I think it's so serious that we are going to be tempted and we're likely to overreact.
[00:03:38]  First, the American people are sick and tired of this.
[00:03:40]  Just think of the election of 08.
[00:03:42]  No more wars, bring the troops home, no more foot soldiers and all this.
[00:03:47]  At the same time, nobody wants to get pushed around.
[00:03:51]  But I see this problem building as almost a victory for Iraq and Iran.
[00:03:59]  Iran, Iraq, and Syria now, along with Russia, I mean, they are really dictating.
[00:04:06]  And what is the reaction to the neocon?
[00:04:08]  Well, we have to put our foot down.
[00:04:10]  We have to, you know, really go in and we send more planes and all.
[00:04:15]  But, you know, one of the Republican presidential candidates has a solution and is going to solve all this problem.
[00:04:22]  And I guess I'd like to see what you have to say about this.
[00:04:26]  Carly Fiorina said, all we need to do now is 300 battleships.
[00:04:34]  I think she's missed her calling here, maybe a little bit.
[00:04:37]  Yeah, I mean, everyone makes gaffes in these campaigns, but it shows where her instincts are and where her knowledge is.
[00:04:43]  And they're two very different things.
[00:04:44]  We haven't used battleships really since World War II.
[00:04:47]  So that's not what our use, but it just shows her first reaction to these things is we need to build a bunch more weapons.
[00:04:53]  We need to confront.
[00:04:54]  But, you know, you talk about the neocons, and, for example, what John McCain said, and he's not alone in this, Tom Cotton and a few others have suggested, he wants to send stingers to the rebels in Syria to get them to shoot down Russian airplanes.
[00:05:09]  And this is just an open invitation for a direct confrontation with Russia.
[00:05:13]  That's number one.
[00:05:15]  But number two, we've seen the history of U.S. involvement in this conflict.
[00:05:18]  We hand weapons over to the rebels who hand them over to ISIS, or they are ISIS, or they are Al-Qaeda in the first place.
[00:05:26]  So you're looking at the end of commercial airline travel over that region for the foreseeable future, and that's the best case scenario.
[00:05:35]  And I don't think John McCain has a very good record for picking out the moderates, you know, the friends.
[00:05:41]  And I think it'd be hard for anybody to do that.
[00:05:45]  But the most famous general in recent times, so to speak, General Petraeus, and he's still called upon for advice.
[00:05:53]  So he said that what we need to do is to get closer and help al-Qaeda to fight ISIS.
[00:06:00]  And I thought, well, you know, where is he?
[00:06:02]  He's going to fight Assad who's tri-fighting ISIS.
[00:06:04]  Now we're going to help Al-Qaeda fight ISIS.
[00:06:07]  It just seems so bizarre that this could add anything.
[00:06:12]  And you just pointed out these weapons, nobody even knows where they end up.
[00:06:16]  So I'm afraid this is going to continue this way because, you know, the emotions with the neocons are such that people sort of sympathize.
[00:06:26]  What bothers me is, first, the American people don't want more ground wars.
[00:06:31]  They don't want to see anybody get killed.
[00:06:35]  At the same time, Americans don't want to be pushed around.
[00:06:40]  You know, I'll take charge and Putin won't push me around.
[00:06:44]  And so many of them are just, you know, you want to be tough.
[00:06:49]  But how can you be tough if you're not fighting a war and why should we be fighting a war that we shouldn't be in?
[00:06:55]  I think they're trapped.
[00:06:57]  I think it's not that the countries there or Russia have put us in it.
[00:07:02]  I think we've dug a hole for ourselves.
[00:07:04]  It's funny, you know, for 15 years, for 14 years since 9-11, they said, don't forget 9-11, never forget 9-11.
[00:07:11]  Now they want us to forget 9-11.
[00:07:13]  And we need to ally with Al-Qaeda.
[00:07:15]  But it's funny if you see how the mainstream media covers it in the U.S.
[00:07:18]  They no longer, the New York Times, for example, has a map where they'll label the government areas in Syria.
[00:07:23]  They'll label the areas that are controlled by ISIS.
[00:07:26]  But the areas that are controlled by Al-Qaeda, they just call it rebels.
[00:07:29]  So they're really carrying water for the administration.
[00:07:32]  But don't you remember, Dr. Paul, it was just about a week and a half ago that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was before Congress, and he said, we only have about four or five vetted rebels in Syria.
[00:07:44]  But now all of a sudden we hear about it.
[00:07:46]  Our rebels are being hit.
[00:07:47]  Our rebels are being hit.
[00:07:48]  Where do they come from if you only had four or five?
[00:07:50]  You forget, they were well trained.
[00:07:52]  We spent $500 million on training these five guys.
[00:07:55]  So they're supermen and they're going to take, it's a farce.

=== Ought We Withdraw? (02:15) ===

[00:07:59]  And hopefully, I hope we finally wake up because intervention foreign policy doesn't work.
[00:08:08]  And we see the failure all around us.
[00:08:10]  And all we hear about is modify our intervention.
[00:08:14]  Just change it a little bit and it'll all be okay.
[00:08:17]  But this is doomed to fail.
[00:08:20]  And others should deal with this.
[00:08:23]  You know, the Russians, the Soviets, you know, got bogged down in Afghanistan.
[00:08:26]  We're bogged down still in Afghanistan.
[00:08:29]  And now the Russians are coming back in and we're bogged down.
[00:08:34]  We're right down in the middle of it and we can't fight and we can't leave because technically we don't know that we're at war.
[00:08:40]  We're not allowed to be at war.
[00:08:42]  We don't declare war.
[00:08:43]  We just have hit and this and react and in and out and spend money.
[00:08:48]  Now some people that say build the battleships would use the old arguments that wars get us out of recessions and depressions.
[00:08:56]  It helps it helps unemployment.
[00:08:58]  And I think there's a little bit behind that.
[00:09:00]  Some people don't worry too much about, you know, just preparing for war because I actually believe that everybody that makes money off the military industrial complex doesn't enjoy seeing a lot of people get killed.
[00:09:12]  What they enjoy doing is making money.
[00:09:14]  So if you can have the battleship mentality, more people can make more money.
[00:09:19]  At the same time, we won't have to worry about, you know, actually fighting for anything.
[00:09:24]  Well, I think what we should be doing is intellectually fighting for our liberty and fighting for common sense and a decent financial situation.
[00:09:33]  That means we ought to give up on this intervention overseas.
[00:09:36]  We ought to bring our troops home.
[00:09:38]  We ought to have a sound economy here and a sound monetary system and get the Federal Reserve out of the business of financing these wars and we'd all be a lot better off.
[00:09:47]  But the way this looks to me, the way it's going right now, does not look good because there's going to be a major accident and there's going to be a rapid escalation and all we have to do is have a few more Americans killed.
[00:10:00]  The others being killed won't bother so many Americans, but a few more Americans will be killed and then we're going to have somebody come in on a white horse and say, this is what we have to do.
[00:10:10]  This is what we're going to have to do for America.
[00:10:12]  That is what my biggest concern is.