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May 31, 2021 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
05:55
The Long Decline From The Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy of America's Founders

This speech was given in Oct. 2002 in opposition to the coming Iraq War.

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Time Text
Act of Aggression? 00:05:20
Madam Speaker, please yield five minutes to the senior member of our Leonard Minister Relations Committee, the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Bowl.
The gentleman has five minutes.
I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks.
Without objection.
Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution.
The wisdom of the war is one issue, but the process and the philosophy behind our foreign policy are other issues as well.
But I've come to the conclusion that I see no threat to our national security.
There's no convincing evidence that Iraq is capable of threatening the security of this country, and therefore very little reason, if any, to pursue a war.
But I'm very interested also in the process that we're pursuing.
This is not a resolution to declare war.
We know that.
This is a resolution that does something much different.
This resolution transfers the responsibility and the authority and the power of the Congress to the President so that he can declare war when if he wants to.
He has not even indicated that he wants to go to war or that he has to go to war, but he will make the full decision, not the Congress, not through the people, through the Congress of this country in that manner.
It does something else, though.
Moreover, the resolution delivers his power to the President, but also instructs him to enforce U.N. resolutions.
I'm often going to enjoy more listening to the President when he talks about unilateralism and national security interests than accepting this responsibility to follow the rules and the dictates of the United Nations.
And that's what this resolution does.
It instructs him to follow all the resolutions.
But an important aspect of the philosophy and the policy that we're endorsing here is the preemption.
This should not be passed off lightly.
It has been done to some degrees in the past, but not so explicitly, not so much put into law that we will preemptively strike another nation that has not attacked us.
No matter what the arguments may be, this policy is new, and it will have ramifications for our future, and it will have ramifications for the future of the world, because other countries will adopt this same philosophy.
I also want to mention very briefly something that has essentially never been brought out.
And that is, for more than a thousand years, there has been a doctrine and a definition of what the Christian definition of a just war is all about.
And I think this effort and this plan to go to war comes up short of that doctrine.
First, it says that there has to be an act of aggression.
And there has not been an act of aggression against the United States.
We're 6,000 miles from our core.
Also, it says that all efforts at negotiations must be exhausted.
I don't believe that is the case.
It seems to me that the opposition, the enemy right now, is begging for more negotiations.
And also, it says that the Christian doctrine says that the proper authority must be responsible for initiating the war.
And I do not believe that proper authority can be transferred to the President nor to the United Nations.
But there's a very practical reasons that I come up with a great deal of reservations about what we're doing.
And that has to do with the issue of military wars that we have been involved in for so long.
Once we give up our responsibility from here in the House in the Senate to make these decisions, it seems that we depend on the United Nations for our instructions.
And that's why essentially somebody indicated we're already at war.
And that's correct.
We're still in the present Gulf War I. We've been bombing for 12 years.
And the reason our President Bush senior didn't go all the way was he said the UN didn't give him permission to.
So my argument is that when you go to war through the back door, you're more likely to have the wars last longer and not have a completion of the war such as we had in Korean and Vietnam.
So we ought to consider this very seriously.
All five is you are wrong about the act of aggression.
There has been an act of aggression against us because Saddam Hussein has shot up our airplanes.
The fact that he has mixed every single airplane for 12 years and tens of thousands of those stories have been proven indicates the strength of our enemy, an introverted third world nation that doesn't have an air force, anti-aircraft weapons, or has a Navy.
But the indication is that because he signed us, therefore it's an act of aggression.
Nothing Fly Zones 00:00:35
But you know what is cited as the reason for us flying over the no-fly zone?
That's the UN Resolution 688, which instructs us and all the nations to contribute to humanitarian relief in the Kurdish and the Shiite areas.
It says nothing about no-fly zones.
It says nothing about bombing missions over Iran.
So to declare that the women have been attacked, I do not believe this permanent fulfills the requirement that we are retaliating against aggression against this country.
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