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Sept. 21, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:15
'An Antiwar Conservative' - Rep. John Duncan, Jr.

Can an antiwar conservative survive? US Rep. John Duncan, Jr. (Ret.) speaks at the Ron Paul Institute's 2019 Washington Conference on taking difficult votes in the House against the Iraq war in 2002. Often when there were just a couple of "no" votes on a particularly bad bill, it would be Rep. Duncan along with Ron Paul voting together.

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Introducing Congressman Duncan 00:01:46
And I'm going to introduce our first speaker that we're so happy to have.
He was one of the first board members of the Ron Paul Institute.
He was at our opening when we started out back in April of 2013.
Congressman John Duncan was a hero in the House.
He was one of six Republicans who in 2002 voted against the Iraq War.
If you can remember back, that was not popular.
That was not popular for Republicans.
And I'm not going to steal Representative's speech, but I'll say that it's not popular in conservative districts.
Dr. Paul voted against it, of course, and a small handful of others.
And there were some times that we thought it was going to come down.
The leadership wasn't happy, but he took a tough vote because he did the right thing, because he took some time, went beyond the bullet points.
Congressman Duncan was at Dr. Paul's famous Thursday lunches, where some members hashed out the problems of the Iraq War among themselves and was a very important member of that group.
And we're just grateful to have him here to join us for the first time.
And it won't be the last time we're going to cajole him back here.
But Congressman Duncan.
Well, Daniel, thank you very much for that kind introduction.
I always appreciate being introduced.
Many years ago, I presented a flag to the Rogers Creek Elementary School in my district in Tennessee to all the 250 or so children out in front of the school.
And then after I'd done that, one of the second-grade teachers asked me to stop by her class.
A Young Listener's Question 00:14:18
And I walked in and she said, now, boys and girls, do you remember who this is?
And I'd just spoken to him out in front, and one little fella raised his hand in kind of a scared voice.
He said, are you the man on the nickel?
And so I explained that I was not the man on the nickel.
I want to begin by expressing my great admiration and respect for three other people who are on the program, one of whom is Daniel McAdams, whom you've just heard from.
What a great speaker he is.
Every time he's on television or writes something, I try to follow that.
And he did tell you about the luncheons that he put together, and that was a real treat for me.
I want to also tell you about or mention my admiration for David Stockman.
I've been following his career since he was in the Congress.
I sent my first paycheck as a bag boy at the AP grocery store.
I was making $1.10 an hour when I was in high school.
I sent $19 and some odd cents to the Barry Goldwater campaign.
So I followed this very closely in all that time.
And I remember when David was in the Congress and the great work that he did, and then as President Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget.
And also I want to express my admiration and respect for Lou Rockwell.
I read his, like I'm sure most of you, I go to his LewRockwell.com all of the time.
I also want to say it's an honor for me to be here with all of you, all of you Eisenhower Republicans.
And I say that sort of half-jokingly, but I mentioned yesterday when I was talking to the students, I mentioned a book called Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas.
And he wrote this.
He said when Defense Secretary Neil McElroy warned him that further budget cuts could harm national security, Eisenhower acerbically replied: if you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulders if he cuts his budget, there will be such a rush to cut costs that you will have to get out of the way.
Thomas added that Eisenhower, quote, would acerbically sigh to Andy Goodpastor, his chief of staff, God help the nation when it has a president who doesn't know as much about the military as I do.
And so you think about that, and when we look back, the Eisenhower years, Eisenhower administration becomes much more conservative, I think, every time you look at it.
But I want to also talk to you about my friend Ron Paul.
I can tell you that the Institute is peace and prosperity.
We're here talking about some of our anti-war activities, and that's very, very important, and it's very important to me and very important to him.
But the prosperity part was also important, and I know that we voted together on almost all things.
I cast 16,000 votes in my 30 years in Congress, and the 16 years that I served with Ron were the ones I think I enjoyed the most.
And we worked together on trying to audit the Federal Reserve, opposing the big bank bailouts.
There were 14 of us that voted not to do away with Head Start.
There were 10 of us that voted not to form the Homeland Security Department.
There were 45 that voted to oppose the No Child Left Behind law.
I did it on the very simple theory that I thought the principals and teachers in East Tennessee had enough sense and intelligence to run their own schools.
And that turned out to be a very popular vote.
But I will tell you that I served, there's greater turnover in elective office today than any time in our history.
And I served with some 1,500 other members.
And I can tell you that, in my opinion, Ron Paul was the best.
And an author, writer, and columnist named Bill Kaufman, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with, wrote a nice article about me one year in the American Conservative magazine.
And he put in there a quote from a book called The Lion's Den, a 1930 novel by Janet Eyre Fairbank.
And she wrote this about a fictional congressman named Zimmer and said, no matter how the espousal of a lost cause might hurt his prestige in the House, Zimmer had never hesitated to identify himself with it if it seemed to him to be right.
He knew only two ways, the right one and the wrong.
And if he made a mistake, it was never one of honor.
He voted as he believed he should.
And although sometimes his voice was raised alone on one side of a question, it was never stilled.
And I think while Mr. Kaufman was nice enough to say that those words applied to me, I think they apply even more to my friend Ron Paul.
Ron asked that I would come and tell you a little bit about my path to become an anti-war conservative.
I came to Congress.
I was first elected in 1988.
My first full year was 1989.
I came as a very conventional Republican.
I even voted for the First Gulf War.
I heard all these so-called classified briefings, which are not classified at all, really, but these briefings by General Schwartzkopf, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, all the cabinet.
And they made Saddam Hussein sound like the second coming of Hitler.
And they talked about his elite troops.
And then I saw those same elite troops surrendering to see and then camera crews and empty tanks.
And I thought then that the threat had been greatly exaggerated.
And so I started becoming a little more skeptical.
And then I've spoken many times to groups around the country.
I was speaking in between the two Gulf Wars.
I was speaking to a group at the Greenbrier.
And I saw in the newspaper a story called America's Forgotten War.
And it said we were bombing on an average of once every four days.
We were bombing Iraq.
And we were spending, I think, it said $4 million a day there.
And, you know, most of us in the Congress didn't even know we were doing that.
And so then as it came time or as the big Iraq war rolled around, I started looking at things very skeptically.
And I'll never forget, I read a little bit before that a front page story in the Washington Post where one of our bombs, one of our very unnecessary bombs, had gone astray and killed seven little boys who were playing soccer in a field in Iraq.
And it told of the anguish of a father whose little son had his head blown off.
And Ron, of course, has often talked about blowback.
Most of what we've done in the Middle East for the last many years has created more enemies for this country than it has friends.
But I also remember reading in the lead up to the Iraq war an article in U.S. News and World Report, and it said, why the rush to war?
And there was certainly a rush.
Everybody, too many of our people in Congress and in the administration wanted to be new Winston Churchills.
And they seemed to feel more important when they were dealing with war.
I remember also at that time reading in Fortune magazine an article that said that we win, what then?
And it said that a prolonged war in Iraq would turn American soldiers into sitting ducks for Islamic terrorism.
And how true and accurate that was.
And so then they called me, they found out that I was thinking about voting against the war.
So they called me down to a little secure room at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and George Tennant, the head of the CIA, and John McLaughlin, his deputy director.
And I asked them, just a couple days before that, Lawrence Lindsay, the Harvard professor, who was President Bush's main economics advisor, had said that a war with, Had gotten front page publicity saying that a war with Iraq would cost us as much as $200 billion or more.
I asked them about that estimate.
Condoleezza Rice said, oh no, it wouldn't cost $200 billion.
It'd be $50 or $60 billion, and we could get some of that back from their allies.
That had to be the worst estimate in the history of the world.
But I also asked them, I said, if you can get past the traditional conservative position of conservatives being against massive foreign aid, and if you can get past the traditional conservative position of conservatives being against huge deficit spending,
and this is going to lead to tremendous expense, and if you can get past the traditional conservative position of not wanting the U.S. to be the policeman of the world, and if you can get past the traditional conservative position of conservatives being the biggest critics of the U.N., and you're going to war to enforce U.N. resolutions, I said, if you can get past all those traditional conservative positions, do you have any evidence of any imminent threat?
And they didn't.
And George Tennant confirmed that in his first speech at Georgetown University the day after he resigned.
And so out of the 16,000 votes that I cast, I think really I wondered when I pushed the button to vote against that war, that was one time when I wondered if I was ending my political career, because it shocked my district.
I represented a very conservative and patriotic, very pro-military district.
And I believe that I'm pro-military and that I'm patriotic.
And as Daniel just said, I believe that all of you love this country too.
But that doesn't mean that we should go out and bomb people all over the world and go to war without even almost thinking about it.
Senator Taft, who was Mr. Republican in the 40s and 50s, he said, no foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted to the protection of the liberty of the American people with war only as a last resort and only to preserve that liberty.
I think that's the true American position about war.
And it really bothered me that all through the Iraq war that war had become a conservative position because there's nothing conservative about war.
Nothing conservative about war.
And in fact, I also was impressed.
William F. Buckley said a year or so after that war started, if he'd known then what he knew now, he would have opposed the war.
And a year later, in 2005, he wrote this: He said, a respect for the power of the United States is engendered by our success in engagements in which we take part.
A point is reached when tenacity conveys not steadfastness of purpose, but misapplication of pride.
And he said, if there were more soldiers who were going to be killed, and I think the number was at 500 at that time, it became many more.
But he said, where there had been skepticism about our venture, there will then be contempt.
Another columnist, Georgianne Guyer, who's now in her 80s and has been writing on foreign policy for many years, but she wrote around that time, she said, Americans will inevitably come to a point where they will see that they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire across the globe.
And how right that was when she wrote it many years ago, and how right it is today.
So I started becoming a pretty strongly anti-war Republican.
And in my district, a couple of years after I had done that vote, I was supposed to speak at a Baptist church one Sunday.
I'm a lifelong Presbyterian, but I do some missionary work in the Baptist church every once in a while.
But the minister called me on Monday morning and said that his main deacon had said he would pull out of the church if I came.
And then I had the mayor of the fastest-growing town in my district, Farragut, a suburb of Knoxville, who ran against me totally on the war in the Republican primary.
But I will tell you that he only got he got 12.7 percent of the vote.
So but but but what had been for three or four years, certainly the most unpopular vote I ever cast, slowly, slowly, slowly and much to my amazement became the most popular vote that I ever cast.
And it really surprised me how that ended up.
Money And Government Appetite 00:03:49
But I can tell you this: you can never satisfy government's appetite for money or land.
You can't do it.
And someday, somebody should write a book or do a dissertation or something about what I think was the biggest public relations scam in the history of this nation.
And that is that at a time when defense spending more than doubled, the Pentagon was able to convince practically the whole country, including the man we now have as president, that the Defense Department had been gutted over those years.
And when they were getting more money because they didn't just get money in the ordinary defense budget, they got it in supplemental appropriations bills.
They got it in numerous bills for other departments.
And so now we have continued all through the years all these wars.
I also, and I'm winding down here, but I will tell you this: the New York Times editorial board on October 22nd of 2017 had an editorial that they wrote, and I almost never agree with the New York Times editorial board, but it was called America's Forever Wars.
And it said that the U.S. has been at war continuously since the attacks of 9-11 and now has troops in at least 172 countries.
And it said the American people seem to accept all this militarism, but quote, it's a very real question whether, in addition to endorsing these commitments, which have cost trillions of dollars and many lives over 16 years, years, now 18 years, they will embrace new commitments.
And I don't think they will.
And I think I was very pleased that that was shown, I think, to some extent a couple of years ago when President Obama was being strongly encouraged to go to start bombing Syria and the phones of all the members of Congress were flooded with calls running 100 to 1 against that.
That was encouraging to me.
But we do continue all this stuff.
And I remember a fascinating thing, too, and this is the last thing that I'll mention.
I gave a speech on the floor of the House a couple of years ago, and I said this, Mr. Speaker, on September 4th, four days ago, the New York Times International Edition carried a story entitled The Empire Stopper, which said foreign powers have tried to control Afghanistan since the 19th century.
The story had a very interesting first paragraph.
When the American author James A. Michner went to Afghanistan to research his work of historical fiction, Caravans, it was 1955, and there were barely any roads in the country.
Yet there were already Americans and Russians there jogging for influence.
Continuing the Times quote, it said, later the book's Afghan protagonist would tell an American diplomat that one day both America and Russia would invade Afghanistan and that both would come to regret it.
Michner wrote that now 64 years ago, and yet we're still there.
We have to, ladies and gentlemen, end this addiction to war.
And it's much more about money and power than it is about any real threat to the people of this country.
Willingness To Stand 00:00:13
And so I appreciate your willingness to take the stands that you take and that you've come to this conference today.
And it's been a very special honor and privilege for me to be here with you.
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