Michael Scheuer is the former head of the Bin Laden unit for the CIA. He was with the CIA for 22 years. He quit in disgust after the 9-11 commission report was released. He is the best-selling author of four books on the subject of foreign policy and the Middle East, and he is a painful thorn in the side of the establishment.
Iowa’s Choice: Ron Paul or U.S. Bankruptcy, More Wars, and Many More Dead Soldiers and Marines
Two recent experiences underlined for me what Iowans will vote for next week in the field of foreign policy if they do not vote for Dr. Ron Paul. On Christmas day, I heard Chris Wallace’s program on FOX. He had a guest — Mr. Charles Lane — who made the false and scurrilous claim that Dr. Paul’s foreign policy was the same as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s America-hating policy, a doctrine that appealed to Barack Obama for more than twenty years and which the President and his party are now implementing. Following this imbecilic assertion of Mr. Lane to its logical conclusion, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines also must be ardent devotees of Rev Wright’s anti-Americanism as they donate many times more money to Dr. Paul than to all the other Republican candidates combined.
Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon’s new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington’s Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington’s clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain’s interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues’ ignorance of Washington’s ideas, and U.S. history in general.
Based on these two experiences, let us examine what Iowans voting for someone other than Ron Paul will do to an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.
1.) A foreign policy that will complete U.S. bankruptcy. While there is a lot of talk about cutting domestic spending to bring the federal debt under control, it is obvious that neither party is willing to make substantial cuts in that area. Indeed, both are counting on drastic cuts in defense spending to help reduce the federal debt. While they may agree on and even make defense-spending cuts, any such reductions will be short-lived and then restored to much more than current levels. Obama and any Republican, save Dr. Paul, will continue to intervene in the Muslim world and so will motivate more Muslims to fight us. A third-grader could tell you that you cannot cut defense spending when Washington’s unrelenting interventionism is cultivating new enemies who are intent on attacking U.S. citizens and interests. If you are being attacked, our third grader would patiently explain, you have to spend whatever it takes to defend yourself. And there is no doubt that we and our vital interests are going to keep being attacked by Islamists as long as we continue to intervene in their world.
2.) Obama’s return, or the election of any Republican but Dr. Paul, means the continuation of the State Department’s not-so-secret computer/Facebook/Twitter proselytizing campaign to incite people to overthrow their governments in places like Iran, Russia, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. [NB: Three offices of Mrs. Clinton’s elitist democracy/feminism crusade in Cairo were raided and shut down by Egyptian authorities on 28 December 2011 for intervening in Egypt’s domestic affairs.] This mindless promotion of anarchy alienates the governments targeted and will motivate them to harm the United States in some manner. Of no concern to Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators McCain and Graham, of course, are the thousands of young and naive people who will die at the hands of the regimes they are instigated to overthrow by the democracy-pushing federal bureaucrats and their elitist political masters, all of whom are safe and secure here in North America. Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist policy will allow foreigners to work out their political destiny in their own way and at their own pace; prevent unnecessary additions to America’s growing list of enemies; and save countless young lives.
3.) All the Republican contenders and the Obama administration are wholehearted believers that the Arab Spring will bring the installation of secular democracy across that region. This has been and still is a nonsense that only adolescent idealists — or deliberate liars — could believe, and one that has been proven fatuous by the fact that Islamists have won every election held since the start of the Arab Spring. Neither the Obamaites nor the Republicans will admit they are wrong on this issue and they will pump billions of dollars in foreign aid into the Arab-Spring countries in a feckless, Muslim-alienating effort to build secular democracies and install the crazed feminism of Mrs. Clinton. Such aid not only will be wasted, but it surely will cause more Muslims take up arms against America. Indeed, the continuation of this bipartisan cultural/feminist war on Islam is likely to start the “clash of civilizations” Professor Huntington predicted.
4.) Electing anyone but Ron Paul will further increase the already strong chances of widespread Islamist-conducted violence inside the United States. Any other Republican candidate or a reelected Obama will keep lying to Americans by claiming that we are being attacked because of our liberties, gender-equality laws, and elections rather than because of Washington’s constant intervention in the Islamic world. This now two-decade-old lie — which is abetted by most of the media — has hidden from Americans the fact that all of the would-be Islamist attackers who have been captured in this country were motivated by the invasion of Iraq, U.S. support for Israel, or some other U.S. government action in the Muslim world. As Dr. Paul has explained, our Islamist enemies are motivated by Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy, and as long as that foreign policy does not change the number of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males willing to attack their fellow citizens will keep increasing. For those who doubt this reality, a quick look at the recently adopted Defense Appropriations Act will clear their eyes. That Act’s authorization for the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens in the United States is clear evidence that the leaders of both parties know that their foreign policy is going to bring war to America’s streets and towns and that the U.S. military will be called on to fight Islamist militants here at home.
5.) Obama and any Republican candidate, except for Dr. Paul, will slavishly obey the U.S.-citizen-dominated, pro-Israel lobby that bribes and suborns them by getting into a war with Iran. Indeed, Washington, Tel Aviv, and London are already conducting a lethal, covert-action war inside Iran which is killing Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying nuclear-related facilities, as well as trying to goad Tehran into reacting with violence and thereby give the West a casus belli. Such a war would be a financial and military disaster for the United States, and would be watched with glee by Russian and Chinese leaders who — while their countries would lose some trade with Iran during a war — would applaud another U.S. self-inflicted wound which further erodes the already failing economy that is the base of American power. Moreover, if U.S. political leaders would not permit the U.S. military to defeat Afghan and Iraqi mujahedin armed with Korean War-vintage weapons, they surely will not allow the military to defeat a much better armed nation-state like Iran. Thus we would have yet another politically imposed defeat for the U.S. military. More painful for Americans will be the Iran-sponsored attacks that will occur in the United States if Washington and/or Israel launch a first strike on Iran. The only serious threat Iran poses to the United States is the result of more than 35 years of near-criminal bipartisan negligence by the U.S. executive and legislative branches in the fields of U.S. border control and domestic security. Both Iran’s military and intelligence services and their Lebanese Hizballah surrogate have created clandestine entry points along our southern border, as well as a large clandestine infrastructure in the continental United States, one which works with similar networks in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Iran is too smart and fearful of U.S. military power to use this apparatus to strike first in North America, but the network clearly is meant to allow Tehran to respond violently here if Iran is attacked by America and/or Israel.
6.) While all of the Republican candidates and Obama talk about their plans to make America energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible, there is no reason to believe any of them. In the past 40 years, the two parties have made virtually no progress toward this goal, unless you count moving up Daylight Savings Time by three weeks as a major gain. Both parties have taken the easy and profitable route: dependence on oil-rich Arab tyrants, a policy that mandates that the U.S. military spends billions each year to defend the Arab Peninsula’s fundamentally anti-U.S. police states. Only Dr. Paul can be counted on to allow the unfettered development of all domestic energy resources to promote energy self-sufficiency and allow the gradual abandonment of our mujahedin-motivating exploitation of Muslim oil. But even Dr. Paul cannot prevent the United States from fighting an oil war that the Republicans and Democrats have fixed on the national agenda, one that America will wage in the Niger Delta region — from which we will soon get 20-25 percent of our crude — because of the Islamist insurgency that is gathering steam in Nigeria and threatening the oil-rich Delta region’s stability.
Notwithstanding the damnable lies about Dr. Paul’s foreign policy constantly proclaimed by his fellow Republican candidates, leading pro-Israel/pro-intervention U.S.-citizens and their journalist friends, and most of the media, only the gentleman from Texas speaks for the Founders’ non-interventionist vision of America’s role in world affairs and for plain common sense. In the Founders’ non-interventionist design for U.S. foreign policy that is championed by Dr. Paul, Iowans will find a proven road to the maintenance of America’s sovereignty, independence, peace, and prosperity. In the realm of common sense, Dr. Paul beats his fellow candidates, the Obamaites, and the media hands down. Dr. Paul challenges the interventionists in both parties on their plans for spreading secular democracy — and causing wars thereby — on historical grounds that are irrefutable because they are just good common sense. We, the British, the Australians, and the Canadians have been building our republics/democracies since Magna Charta in 1215 — that is for nearly 800 years — and we are not yet quite perfect. If Iowans and all Americans truly think about what Dr. Paul is saying — and not what the interventionists say he is saying — they would respond favorably to the Texan’s logical conclusion that what we have not fully accomplished in eight centuries cannot possibly be attained in Egypt, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Muslim world in 6 weeks, 6 months, or six years, not least because none of those places separate church from state. Dr. Paul’s precise use of history and common sense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause that is impossibly lost from the start and one that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.
In the words of Dr. Paul’s Republican opponents, the Obamaites, and most of the media, on the other hand, Iowans ought to easily be able to hear the elitist, racist, and war-causing Wilsonian doctrine of intervening abroad to impose democracy and secular social beliefs on foreigners at the point of bayonets. Indeed, the national-security policy advocated by Dr. Paul’s opponents and critics boils down to the clear and absurd argument that: America needs more and more wars — and the dead/maimed military personnel attendant thereto — that are motivated by Washington’s intervention abroad if Americans are to be safe and secure at home.
For Iowans and Americans as a whole, then, the best choice for their children, grandchildren, and country clearly lies in the Founder’s foreign-policy wisdom and Dr. Paul’s sturdy advocacy and promised application thereof.
