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Sept. 8, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
13:21
The Colossal Error: From Peace To Empire

As we prepare for our yearly Peace Conference hosted by The Ron Paul Institute, please enjoy this flashback speech on America moving from a foreign policy of peace to military empire.

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Time Text
From Isolationism to Intervention 00:06:13
To me, it's not a complicated issue.
If you look at the traditions of this country, it really was built on a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And that is built on our Constitution because it did not give permission.
The Constitution has not given permission for us to so-called police the world or spread our goodness, our so-called goodness.
Everything changed at the beginning of the last century, and in particular in 1914 with Rogue Wilson, with his idealistic notion that through force you can spread our democracy around the world.
Although the people weren't ready for it, those demagogues who got control of our government were able to persuade the people.
And when you think about it throughout the 20th century, those individuals that advocated non-interference and non-intervention generally won the election almost always.
So it was Wilson who was contriving us to get into World War I all along.
In 1916, won on, I'm going to keep this out of the war.
And also, FTR, likewise in 1940, although Europe was in ablaze already, he promised to keep American boys at home.
So that was our tradition.
That was the American feeling of non-intervention and neutrality and minding our own business.
We were taking the advice of the founders who said don't get involved.
And quite frankly, the Constitution doesn't permit it.
The Constitution does talk about war, and it says that if need be, the war should go ahead only with a declaration of war.
One of the prime reasons of removing the control of foreign policy from the executive branch and this power to declare war was because of the oppression of the king, and they wanted to take it away from the executive branch.
And they were explicit in saying that the Congress, that body that was closest to the people, would have a say, that we would not go to war.
And the purpose of this is to go to war rarely.
And when you do, you go with a consensus and you go with the idea that you will go and win the war and get it over with.
Even though we got into wars, especially World War I, which was essentially a cause of World War II, the wars at least were declared.
But after World War II, once we had started to give up our concept of national sovereignty and came in under the United Nations, we went to war hardly with a blink from the Congress by going to war in Korea without a declaration.
The strongest opponents at that time were the old-right conservative Republicans who opposed this.
And yet, we ended up in Korea undeclared, and the war wasn't won.
We drifted once again because we rejected the notion of non-intervention.
We ended up going into Vietnam.
And we lost that war.
We are achieving so much more now in peace than we ever were able to achieve in war.
We went over there to tell them how to live and make sure that they were westernized and we had control.
It was a total failure.
Since we lost in Vietnam, we have followed more of the advice of the founders.
And the founders says, non-intervention, don't fight with people, have free trade, talk to people, trade with people, go back and forth, but don't get involved in their internal affairs.
It's good advice.
It was good advice then.
It's great advice today.
I wish we would follow it.
But there are a lot of shortcomings from interventionism.
One, it usually never, even though there are always justifications for it, always the good justification, inevitably, there are unintended consequences, all bad.
And there is this principle that we talked about in the debates next called blowback.
And when you interfere and get involved in other countries and you do it long enough, you're finally going to aggravate them.
And that is what happened.
All I'd like to suggest is that if you have a little bit of difficulty in accepting a total non-interventionist foreign policy, always see it through the light of a political aspect of looking at what it would be like if we were receiving the same treatment.
What would we think if the Chinese were over here and they had their navy in the Gulf of Mexico and they had troops on our land and they were teaching us to live like the Chinese and teaching us about their religion and their laws.
We would be outraged and we would fight and we would do anything.
And yet we go over complacently thinking that all we have to do is go over there and we are going to westernize that region.
Now I had used a quote from Ronald Reagan that he had a lesson he learned in a difficult situation.
He sent troops in the early 1980s to Lebanon.
I was in the Congress at the time and spoke out strongly against it.
And he, at the time, when he sent the troops, he said, one thing I'll never turn tail and run.
Before you know it, the Marines were killed and Reagan took the troops out.
And then he explained this in his biography.
And he said, I said, Reagan said, I would never turn tail and run.
But finally, after he realized the irrationality of the politics and the hatreds of that region, we changed our policy there.
And that's a down-to-earth lesson.
And he learned it, but we didn't learn it.
And here we are still proposing that we go over and get involved overseas.
In a practical sense, we've been involved for a long time.
World War I, we shouldn't have been in it.
We were demanding a spot at the table in the Versailles Treaty.
The Versailles Treaty led literally to World War II.
And also, those boundaries that exist after the Ottoman Empire broke down, the boundaries of the Middle East, drawn up by the West, Europeans and Americans.
And we're still fighting over those artificial boundaries.
And then in 1953, it was decided that democracy was not for the Iranians.
Now we're dying to spread democracy, but the Iranians have an election, elect Mohammad Mossadegh, who also was a physician, and we didn't like him because he was serving the interests of the Iranians and attacking the foreign interests of the British and the American Petroleum Company.
So he was standing up for his people.
Why We Left Iraq 00:07:05
So what do we do?
We throw him out of office through the CIA.
And we wonder why they get angry and upset.
So when did the blowback come?
Probably not until 1979.
After 25 years of the Shah, they get a bit annoyed, but they don't forget.
We remember nothing, they forget nothing.
So this helped precipitate the growth of the radical Islamists.
Matter of fact, we literally in the 80s subsidized the madrasa schools, the radical Islamists, because we thought, oh, this will be good.
We need radicals because they're going to attack the communists.
And besides, Osama bin Laden is our friend.
And we're fighting for him because he's a freedom fighter.
I mean, the absurdity of the intervention is just unbelievable that people still accept it because it always has negative consequences.
And it goes on and on and on.
We were partners with Saddam Hussein.
Matter of fact, we were his ally and said, go get Iranians, invade Iran.
So he did.
And of course, he was a bad guy.
And he used terrible weapons.
He used gas.
But where did he get the gas?
From us.
It has to stop.
And it can't stop by having a better managed war in Iraq.
Those who are changing their opinion and they're changing their opinion in droves today on Iraq.
And it's not because we have mismanaged the war.
It is because we have a bad foreign policy.
We have a foreign policy that endorses interventionism.
We need a foreign policy which is constitutional, conservative, wise, and that is a policy of non-intervention.
We ought to stay at home, mind our own business, trade with people, and be friends with people, and we all would be a lot better off.
First off, I'm just wondering whether I should still offer the vice presidency to Doug Casey.
But, you know, 9-11, they say we don't talk about 9-11, but we try to put it into perspective.
It was a criminal act, and part of it came about because it was so disastrous, mainly because we have so little respect for the Second Amendment and personal responsibility for our property.
If we would have treated our passengers and responsibility airlines like we do, well, like we allow the banks to control their money in their armored cars, people don't blow up and rob those cars.
If the responsibility had been on the airlines to protect their passengers and we didn't have the federal government taking over the security, the airlines might well have had guns in those cockpits, and they probably wouldn't even attack us.
If they did, they would have been shot.
But now we use 9-11 for the excuse for everything, perpetual war, for perpetual peace.
So where we go?
We go to Iraq.
They've been wanting to go to Iraq for five or six years before that.
The resolution for regime change occurred in 1998 under Clinton.
So it was on and on and on.
They were just looking for an excuse.
The first meeting of this administration, they were devising plans on how to go in.
Paul O'Neill couldn't believe his words, you know, what he was hearing.
And yet 9-11, the first meeting after 9-11, those in the up and administration said, ah, this is our chance.
And somebody said, well, they had nothing to do with 9-11.
That's beside the point.
Let's go get them.
They said, well, you have to at least stage an attempt to go into Afghanistan and pretend you're going after Osama bin Laden.
So they did that for a few weeks, backed away from Tora Bora, let Osama bin Laden escape into a country that we subsidized, who was a military dictatorship.
We helped them.
They have a nuclear weapon, and they're protecting Osama bin Laden.
I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever.
They say, well, conditions change, so we have to change our foreign policy.
Our foreign policy contributes, creates these conditions, and they always, and they always will.
I would like to put in a word for Christian non-intervention, because there is a just war theory which is very Christian, and it's very non-interventionist.
It means you don't go to war carelessly, and you don't preemptively strike a nation that has not attacked us.
So I say this war does not in any way compare to the Christian justification of a just war.
Also, if you're conservative and you believe you would endorse this war, you should at least have respect for the Constitution and never go into war without a declaration so we can fight it and get it over with.
You know, Michael Schur headed up the Osama bin Laden department in the CIA and has written extensively about this.
He is the world's expert on understanding Osama bin Laden.
He's read everything he's ever written.
He has said since the debates have started that Ron Paul is the greatest enemy of Osama bin Laden.
And he does not want me to win because it will ruin what he has going for him over there.
Because his recruiting, it has skyrocketed.
Before it was 100 or 200 crazy nuts willing to commit suicide.
Now he has thousands.
And Zawahiri has been heard to say and has written that they like us over there.
They don't want us to leave because we're in their backyard.
We're on their sand and they can pick us off.
They can wear us down.
So we had to succumb to exactly what they wanted.
We are over there and we're not doing well over there.
Also, understanding suicide terrorism is very, very important.
Suicide terrorism has a root cause and it's not radical Islam.
If you want the real information on this, you have to read Robert Pape's book on this subject.
He's done more research than anybody else by going back and studying every single case.
The country that commits the most suicide terrorism is not Islamic.
It happens to be Sri Lanka.
And the countries that are most radical in their Muslim philosophy, Iran and Sudan, commits no suicide terrorism.
And I was convinced he was wrong when I started to read his book, but he convinced me that that isn't the case.
And he said the most important element to get somebody willing to commit suicide terrorism is occupation by a foreign force.
Now, it is true.
We did not have troops in their holy city, but Osama bin Laden used that as a major excuse.
He used the Middle East.
He used the bombing of Iraq, which had been going on for nearly a decade, and he used troops on Saudi Arabia.
But he didn't say Saudi Arabia.
He says the Arabian Peninsula.
The whole peninsula is holy land to them, including Iraq.
And the confirmation of this whole idea of why they come here comes from none other than Paul Wolfowitz.
Paul Wolfowitz said, well, we invaded Iraq, and he said, oh, that is good, because now we can take away the troops, take the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which was the incentive for 9-11.
And we will just go into Iraq.
What he doesn't understand, and this is what Michael Schur explains, all of Saudi Arabia is holy land.
So the fact that we don't have troops in Saudi Arabia right now means nothing.
We're still over there.
So the incentive is still there.
So there is so much that could be done, and so much could be improved by following basic fundamentals.
If it were true that we had to deal with the people most responsible for 9-11, it was not the Iraqis.
It was not the Iranians.
It was Saudi Arabia.
15 of them.
So if you had to declare war, that's where you should have gone to declare war.
What we have to remember is the basic fundamentals of this country and our constitution is non-intervention.
Mind our own business.
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