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March 21, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:20
Asking The Wrong Questions On Afghanistan Withdrawal

The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday held another hearing yesterday on the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Of all the finger-pointing and blame-sharing, one thing is never asked: why was the US in Afghanistan in the first place? Why is it so easy to get into wars but nearly impossible to get out? Also today...can Texas protect its borders...or not?

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War Profits in Afghanistan 00:15:20
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well, doing well.
Good.
Trying to straighten out a few problems around the world.
Yeah.
And there's politics going on, but nothing new there.
Same old junk, you know.
But something will be resolved, and maybe something positive will happen between now and November.
But my big beef about all the talk and hopes, not so much that parties aren't somewhat different, obviously there are some differences, but nothing ever really changes.
You know, when it comes to big things, the establishment, the deep state, or whoever they are, you know, the programs continue no matter what they say, whether it's on war and peace or whether it's on the FBI and security or whether it's whatever the subject, the spending continues.
So today we're not going to solve any of those problems, but hopefully we move in that direction.
But we want to talk about an incident, and they've had some hearings recently that occurred shortly after Biden got into the presidency, and it has to do with the closing down of the war in Afghanistan, which is still not closed down and will not be for a long time.
But Politico had an interesting article out.
It says, Republicans fixate on messy Afghanistan withdrawal.
Oh, it's Trump's fault.
But Trump was out of office.
Oh, it's Trump's fault.
The Republicans did it.
But, you know, in this short introduction on Politico, they have something in here that I will be talking about more in this program.
He says, there's no single causal factor that determine the outcome, which is partially true, but there are some single factors that I want to consider, and that is our overall foreign policy, because there has a lot to do with that.
But it is messy, and the airplane going down to run away with people was pathetic, it was sad and everything else.
And then also, you know, the other thing that they don't talk about, but really is part of a problem, is we go over, we are in some place where we shouldn't be, we get involved, and then we prey on the friendly people, and probably some of them are really, really sincere because they'd like to get out of that, some of those madhouses.
So they come over and they're friends to us.
So we have to protect them and we bring them here.
And, you know, it's been going on.
And, you know, the immigration problem is astounding.
And now, I wonder how many friends we have in Haiti.
I bet they're all our friends now.
And we're airplaning them in.
You know, you think they'd wake up.
But, you know, the philosophy behind this, it's bad philosophy versus good philosophy.
It's not difficult.
And I think if the majority of American people had a choice between the good and the bad, I know what they would pick.
They wouldn't pick all this monstrosities and bankruptcy and war.
So this is an example.
The hearings were there to find out who really messed up, you know, because it was astounding and it was a real tragedy.
It brought back memories for me about what went on in Vietnam.
Vietnam, we lost 58,000 plus soldiers over there.
And that is devastating.
So we don't have that to contend with, although there have been a lot of people killed, a lot of Americans too many, one Americans too many.
But it's a little bit different.
But, you know, the site was probably one of the most famous pictures in the world.
And that is when they were trying to leave, and those desperate to get out of the chaos, hanging onto that helicopter and going down on that roof and climbing.
It's just an astounding conclusion of a stupid war.
And here, I think the same thing has happened.
That large airplane going down that runway and hundreds, hundreds of people desperate for just to get away from it all.
Maybe I can escape this nonsense.
But it's a little bit more complicated.
And now they want to concentrate, Daniel, and they want to say, well, the problem is they didn't plan well enough.
They didn't plan well enough.
And it's sad, but that's the problem.
And I think that is the case.
But, you know, when they talk about planning and personnel and what we're doing, I think of ESG, you know, the environmental things that dictate all hiring.
You have to do it with the military, too.
But I noticed two things.
The military is starting to wake up and say, maybe that's not the way we should pick our generals.
And, you know, everybody's serving.
But you know, another place, there's a couple of medical schools that decided maybe your brain surgeon shouldn't be picked by ESG to dictate.
And that is what's going on.
And some of the doctors, but look how long it took the doctors.
They're still trying to wake up some doctors on lockdown, you know, on COVID.
You know, and the doctors, if the doctors had not gone along with that, it wouldn't have happened, but they rolled over.
So this is some rolling over now, and we're going to have a little blame game going on.
It is to me is a sad story what happened because my solution would have prevented all this.
We just should have stayed at home.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's put on this first clip.
This is from Politico.
And it was yesterday was a hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And the chairman of that committee, Michael McCall, probably a decent fellow, but very, very bad political views in our opinion.
Very, extremely pro-war.
But he basically wanted to make some political points.
They want to tie this albatross on the back of Joe Biden.
And there's no question that it was a very messy withdrawal.
But, you know, McCall wants to relitigate it.
But we have to remember that the U.S. occupation, invasion, and occupation of Afghanistan spanned four presidential administrations.
You know, what started under Bush, and then Obama inherited it for eight years, and then Trump had it for four years.
Now, Trump did want to get out, and we know this from our friend Colonel Doug McGregor, who was working for the Secretary of Defense, those chaotic last few weeks of the Trump administration.
He was tasked to try to get us out of Afghanistan and Syria.
And he's told the story before.
He wanted to get out, but in a way, Trump's situation was even worse than the others because his own administration wouldn't let him get out.
You know, they blocked him from getting out.
And he didn't obviously try hard enough.
But they're trying to make points now that this whole thing was going just fine.
It's just that Biden messed up the departure.
And let's put on the next clip because this is the setup for the hearing.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee hammered the administration on Tuesday for its 2021 withdrawal, seeking to keep the chaotic exit in the public eye, even as the two retired generals who oversaw the evacuation offered few new details.
And that's a fair enough kind of swipe back at McCall, I think, on this.
But he says, political rights, President Joe Biden's poll's numbers tanked three years ago as U.S. forces left Afghanistan, especially after the ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American service members.
Republicans have since tried to make the withdrawal a political albatross to hang around Biden's neck, leading Democrats to defend him on the committee, dais and beyond.
Yes, and hanging around his neck is sort of like saying all the problems of inflation right now, price inflation and the distortion of the market, it's all Biden's fault.
Well, he's a participant and he aggravates it and makes it worse.
All his friends have done that too.
But it is very bipartisan.
So foreign policy overall has been very bipartisan.
Did you hear the Republican Party standing up against us participation in Afghanistan?
No, or the Middle East or Ukraine or in any one of these places.
They went along with this because the money always gets spent.
There's always an emergency like that.
So this is a problem that exists because there's a support, and basically they can control the support by the people, even though I think the people's gut instinct is not for this nonsense.
But, you know, if you look at what comes out of our universities and the propagandists, you know, and they bring up all these schemes on our moral responsibility to protect the world, they don't back, a lot of them wouldn't back away by saying, yes, we shouldn't be the world's peacekeepers.
They just do a lousy job.
They go over and most of it ends badly.
And all I can think of is, you know, Korea.
I remember that ending.
I remember Vietnam ending.
I remember, you know, the Middle East being exaggerated.
And now we have the end of these things.
And it's because the philosophy has been drilled into the American people, though I am still convinced if we had a fair shot at them, the people would say, obviously this isn't good.
But like you said, when we had somebody in the Congress in the administration wanting to do something about that, his own party members appointed by Trump were resisting it.
So that's where the problem is.
We need more solidarity.
But I think it's the biggest nuisance is how the media, whether it was the old mainstream media or the social media, social history, you know, going on, they are able to reach a lot of people.
And we need more independent thinkers for sure.
Yeah, we were talking before the show, and we were trying to kind of hash out this topic.
One of the problems is the division between being in a state of war and a state of peace is now blurred.
You know, that division is completely blurred.
Whereas you were mentioning early in the previous wars, World War I and World War II, despite the other problems with him, there was a clear point where we are at war and a clear point where we are not at war.
And we don't have that anymore.
So, you know, our whole idea of wanting to talk about this today was to talk about how easy it is to get into war and how difficult it is to get out of war because we don't even define what a state of war is anymore.
And symbolically, that is because they don't declare war.
You know, we're in perpetual war.
I think somebody wrote about that one time: perpetual war for perpetual peace.
And that is a big problem.
And that is why, you know, when I tried to get the Congress to order to go into the Middle East, if you want to go in there and have this big war in Iraq, declare the war, be honest with the people.
And boy, there was hysteria with that.
They couldn't dare do that.
Oh, no, that would send a bad message.
Well, and as Flawed as the First and Second World War was and had problems, it was what you say.
The declaration is we were at war and we're going to end it.
And both of those wars ended with cheers on the street.
You know, because everybody knew, and there seemed to be, you know, not as many, there probably were some, but there weren't as many people rioting in the streets like what had to happen to get this Vietnam War over with, to get the attention of the politician.
So it is the way we go to war.
It has to be addressed before they're going to stall this.
They're going to have hearings from here to kingdom come about how you get out of a war easily.
Then they get done, you know, they say, well, how are we going to take our oil well?
Guess what?
We're still, did you know that we were still in Syria?
We're in the part of Syria that has the oil well.
And so it's you can't divest yourself of what you can engage in because they're fearful they'll lose power.
They claim they have a moral responsibility.
There are some people involved in this actually make money off war tragically.
Yeah, they do.
And look how easy it is to get in war.
I mean, we have been at war, by any definition, with Yemen for three months, four months.
Was it December that we started bombing Yemen because Yemen closed off the Red Sea to Israeli shipping after Israel decided to bomb Gaza to smithereens?
So we started bombing Yemen.
We're doing their fighting for them.
But there was never a debate here as to whether we should go to war with Yemen.
In fact, they don't even consider it a war.
But I bet if you're sitting in Yemen right now with missiles coming in, you certainly feel that you're at a state of war.
You know, the missiles are incoming.
But Yemen, we're still bombing Somalia.
I just read the other day.
New bombing strikes in Somalia, Syria, as you say, Iraq, all these wars, they're never ending.
They never end.
And when you do try to end one, well, actually, put on this next clip.
You have people like McCall who never, ever, ever want us to leave.
McCall accused Biden of ignoring advice from two generals who had advocated for at least 2,500 troops to remain in Afghanistan.
The administration scrambled to secure the airport as hordes of Afghans rushed aboard evacuation.
So you're telling me, I'm not a military expert, Dr. Paul, by any stretch, but you're telling me as that country collapsed, 2,500 troops could have staved the whole thing off?
I don't think so.
These guys would have been mincemeat.
No.
You know, all this monstrosity is how we get into war, how much money we spend.
You'd think, well, at least if you think you're doing good, we'd like you to at least monitor things and measure success by some measurement.
And also make sure we know where our weapons are in case we have to leave.
But you're not even allowed to audit it.
You don't audit the Pentagon any more than they allow us to audit the Federal Reserve.
The big stuff is done in secrecy.
It's done in a bipartisan fashion.
And I'll tell you what, you know, I think Trump in many ways challenges that.
At least he gets credit for challenging this.
And look at what they're willing to do to stop Trump.
I mean, they dedicate their whole lives and all their emotions and everything they can think of is to stop one person that might be on to us.
And that actually can't end gracefully.
That's going to end badly.
Hopefully, what I hope for, the best we can hope for, is maybe a trend at the election where people will not solve their problems and go, you know, solve in the way we would like it to be solved, but at least move away from it.
You know, fight less wars, spend less money, you know, audit the Fed, audit the Pentagon.
Federal vs. State Supremacy 00:09:52
But so far, we don't see any signs of that.
Yeah.
Well, I wanted to show a couple of other things.
And this clip, just because it's funny, if you can put it up, the next one.
Funny but tragic.
Even as Afghan troops defended their country, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's decision to flee to Qatar the day after telling Secretary of State Blinken he would stay demoralized Kabul's forces and they melted away.
You probably remember this, Dr. Paul.
He literally was carrying suitcases full of money onto the helicopter and money was falling out of his suitcases from the helicopter into the it sounds like a comedy.
Yeah, it does sound like a comedy except that it's our money.
But the other thing that's that I took away from this article and from sort of the whole thing, and if you'll put that next one up, I'll try to explain it.
Now, this is the General McKenzie who was before the House and he talked about the Taliban had overrun the country.
He said, as you're aware, the decision to begin an evacuation rests with the Department of State, not the Department of Defense.
I'm sure that's technically true, but essentially what retired General McKenzie was saying is it's not our fault.
It's not our job.
And then it goes on to say the State Department's own report said the agency's preparation, participation in the evacuation, was hindered because it wasn't clear which department was taking the lead.
Quote, crisis preparation and planning were inhibited to a degree by concerns about the signals that might be sent.
So, and I would say sent not just to the Afghan government and the soldiers there, but I think more importantly, Dr. Paul sent signals sent back home.
They never started adequately planning a departure because they were all terrified of talking about planning a departure.
You know, so you get into trouble for leaving, not for going in.
Can you think of how many times the scapegoat, so to speak, as dangerous as they are, the Taliban, all you have to do is the Taliban, the Taliban.
But it turns, the way I look at it, they are.
But I also look at how much Taliban did we have before we really engaged ourselves in the Middle East and in Iraq and been engaged in Iran, all these things.
These are the radical reactions have something to do with our foreign policy because we wouldn't put up with it.
We right now are having a bit of an invasion and people are getting pretty disturbed.
But these times we go in these other countries, those are invasion.
And we throw our weight around militarily, financially.
If they don't do what we tell them, we can put sanctions on all our financial resources and we can literally bomb them too if they don't do what they say.
But that to me is the real problem is that people don't realize that so much of the stuff that we are frightened by, rightfully so, because there is a lot of danger out there.
And it really brings the meanness out of people and gives them credibility because they're going to get rid of the invaders.
And we become the invader too often.
But that's an American to say that.
Most Americans don't want to be.
But if they realized it, they would realize that the advice of the founders of having a peaceful foreign policy and not engaging in internationalism and to help run the world.
That was their advice.
And to trade with people.
So right now, I'm discouraged about the trade.
Is that both sides now are really getting super hawkish on protectionism.
In a way, that is winning, but that's one element that I think doesn't deserve to win.
Well, they create the danger.
There is a lot of danger, but a lot of it's created.
I mean, you can really say that the Taliban was created by the U.S.
It was Brzezinski's idea.
Let's get a bunch of radical Islamists to fight the Soviets and take down communism.
So we create this problem, and it provides the impetus for us to go in and fix the problem we created in the first place.
That's what it's all about.
It happened in the Middle East, too.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's move on to another topic, which is somewhat complicated, but there are a couple of things that we wanted to talk about with regard to it.
And getting into a description of this is going to be difficult, but I'll put on this next clip.
So, sorry, keep going.
We're going to skip over these now.
I think we go one more.
Here we go.
Appeals Court reinstates hold on Texas immigration law.
So I'll try to do it in a nutshell, Dr. Paul.
So SB4 was signed by Greg Abbott, our governor here in Texas in December.
It said that the Texas law enforcement officials can arrest and deport people who are here illegally.
Well, a federal court took a hold of that and said, no, you can't do that.
We're going to put a stop to that.
And then an appeals court said, well, yeah, you can.
And so Biden asked the Supreme Court, can you please deal with this in an emergency basis, get rid of the Supreme Court, or get rid of this ability for them to do it?
Supreme Court said, no, we're not going to do it.
So we're back at the part where they could do it.
And then an appeals court said, actually, you can't do it.
So I know that's like your head's turning back and forth like in a cartoon, but where we are right now is it's under appeal, the idea that the state of Texas can protect its own border.
And what they're arguing about is a supremacy clause.
You know, Texas says that they're invaders and the federal government is doing nothing.
We have a right to protect our state.
And then take it to court.
And then there is this supremacy clause that I don't want to debate right now, but it to me sounds like it sort of needs to be further defined because what if you had the supremacy clause and the states were protecting First Amendment rights, but the federal government wasn't.
Does that mean we always have to go by the federal government laws?
And that's why this problem occurs because the original intent wasn't that we were going to have a united group of 18 states, 13 states coming together, but all of a sudden it was one country, and then we fought a civil war to prove that, that you didn't have the right to be independent, and we don't have a republic in that sense.
But I think clarification there, and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that could deal with it.
Maybe we will hear about this, but I just think there are some things that if the Supreme, our courts are corrupt, our whole polity.
Our whole system is corrupt.
The justice system department doesn't even really exist.
What do you say?
Well, if you have a police problem, you go to the FBI, the CIA.
They'll take care of us.
So, oh, well, that's the supremacy.
They're federal.
So there's something about federal that is very annoying.
And I think something has been lost when we have lost confidence that our states can handle a lot of these problems.
I don't see anything reasoned with, well, what if a thousand people with guns landed and the federal government was nowhere to be found?
Can't you defend yourself?
And we have people landing right now, but instead of them coming with guns, we welcome them with open arms and take them to the hotel.
And debit cards.
How can it get any more outrageous?
But still, they say that half the people are still thinking, well, we've got to stick with Biden because Trump is so bad.
Well, they are pouring in.
I mean, we know that.
It's a huge issue.
It's a huge issue.
But one of the things that I found slightly humorous in the article, and we're going to keep an eye on this issue, but if you put on that next clip, so we talked about how Abbott signed the law SB4 into law.
It allows the local and state police to take into custody individuals who have entered the U.S. illegally, which, as we point out, as you point out, thousands and thousands and thousands.
But here's the funny part, and I underlined it.
On Tuesday, Mexico's government declared that it would not accept the return of illegal immigrants from Texas to its territory under any circumstances.
Deportations of individuals who are not Mexican citizens are not required to be accepted by Mexico.
So even Mexico says, We don't want any illegal aliens.
You can't come in.
But the U.S. says, come on in.
But this is their argument.
They're just talking, arguing about an illegal coming in, and we see them coming in, and it's very precise.
But what about if you go in about 500 miles, another state, and you have people breaking the law?
Do you, oh, you're illegal, we can't arrest you.
It's crazy.
So it's going to exist.
And that's why we do have a couple of good, very good judicial people that can answer this on our side, the legal stuff.
And they'll come out.
Yeah, well, I'm going to close out today by putting on that last clip.
And if you have not heard yet, you'll hear it now.
The Ron Paul Tucker Carlson interview dropped last night.
He has, at this point, a 15-minute excerpt available on TwitterX.
I checked it out just before we started the show, and it's at 2.5 million views, which is very, very good, I think.
I think the entire audio is available on Apple Podcasts, but you'll get a good taste of it if you're not subscribed to Tucker's channel.
You'll get a good taste of it in this 15-minute clip.
A Lot of Fun 00:01:50
It was a lot of fun, wasn't it, Talker?
Yeah, it was.
And Tucker, Tucker's pretty shrewd.
He is.
He's smart.
You know, I thought, I found it to be a lot of fun.
But the one part that I had that was funny because it was a joke on me.
You know, Tucker, I was talking, he was talking about my family and Randy, Rand, you know, we talked about him.
I said, you know, I really think Rand's better at politics than I am.
Tucker, yeah, I think so too.
I said, you aren't supposed to agree.
That was great.
That was a lot of fun.
So go and watch it.
Enjoy it.
Subscribe to Tucker if you want.
But we had a lot of fun.
I want to thank you for watching the show today.
And please come back and watch our show tomorrow and on in the future.
Good.
Thank you very much for all our listeners to tune in today.
And hopefully we can have fun every time, but some days it's harder than other days.
But since we're not going to have a perfect world tomorrow, about all we can be satisfied with, which way are we going?
And what are you doing?
What are you participating in?
Making things worse or trying to help things out and converting more people to think that their responsibility is to seek truth and at least move in that direction.
And it would be a much better world if that would be the case instead of relying on the lying and cheating and stealing and the pronounced and announced nihilism that people believe in.
You can't find a truth, so why sweat it?
You're messing around needlessly and worrying about things you can't do about it.
So we go with the old nihilism.
You don't have to have the truth.
I prefer that other, that there is truth out there.
It's been known for thousands of years.
And that seeking truth can be a lot of fun and very beneficial.
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