Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

The death of nearly 100 people — reportedly mostly women and children — over the weekend is a salutary reminder of an eternal truth which Western leaders seem unfamiliar: PEOPLE GET KILLED IN WARS. In the present Syrian case, both sides in the ongoing Syrian civil war appear to share responsibility for the deaths. And while the trigger pullers on each side bear responsibility, the line of responsibility also leads directly back to Britain’s David Cameron, the UN’s leaders, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Barack Obama, and especially Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. These interventionists have led an effective effort to prevent the legitimate Syrian regime from restoring order to the country, and have encouraged Syrian dissidents to provide the cannon fodder for what has become a face-off between Asaad’s army and Islamist militants aided by al-Qaeda and armed and funded by the Jordanians, Turks, Saudis, and other of the Gulf’s tyrants. Western intervention, in short, prolonged Syrian disorder and gave time for the ripening of today’s civil war there.

And what have the Syrians ever done to the United States to merit Washington’s decision to manipulate an internal Syrian dispute to oust Asaad? Maybe a better question is what could they possible do to harm the United States? Although for 40 years Washington under both parties has ominously preached to Americans about the dangers they face from evil Syria, a quick glance at the map makes this claim patently absurd. After a few minutes of trying, the average map examiner will find the small state of Syria in the Levant, and he or she may be forgiven for asking if that little place can really be a nation-state or is it merely an ink smudge? Surrounded by a nuclear-armed Israel, a conventionally powerful Turkey, and a Sunni world that would love to draw, quarter, and roast Asaad, his family, and all of the country’s Alalwites on the spit it reserves for heretics, Syria today does no more than survive in a tough neighborhood. Americans can rest easy, for despite the lies about the “Syrian threat” from Mrs. Clinton, McCain, and various soon-to-be-bankrupt European spendthrifts neither Milwaukee nor Portland will ever see the mighty Syrian military marching along their leafy boulevards.

Washington’s threat mongering about Syria for a long time had to do with both parties’ readiness to earn campaign donations by towing the anti-Syria propaganda line put forth by Israel and its AIPAC-led fifth column of U.S. citizens. (NB:Ironically, AIPAC’s deliberate corruption of the U.S. Congress and political system has always been a far greater threat to America than Syria.) And, indeed, the Russia-armed Syrians may have posed a threat to Israel and its ongoing expansion into Palestinian-owned territory. But this was a threat to Israel, never a threat to the United States, although U.S. leaders have spoken and spent, and still speak and spend as if the Syrian marines — if there are any — were soon going to splash ashore along the Hamptons’ beaches and ruin the holidays of many cocaine-addled but campaign-contributing Hollywood celebrities.

Given the reliable ability of Israel and its U.S. fifth column to determine and control the content of U.S. policy in the Islamic world, the ersatz Syrian threat remained front and center until the Arab Spring unleashed a fatal dementia that is likely to destroy Israel and embroil the United States and its allies in a losing clash of civilizations with the Islamic world. This fatal dementia can be found in the words and — to give them the benefit of the doubt — the thoughts of Mrs. Clinton, Obama, Rice, McCain, Cameron, and Graham that assert the Arab Spring ensures the installation of secular democracy across the Arab and Islamic worlds. Although Islamic parties have won all of the elections since the Tunisian regime fell — and Egyptians are poised to choose between Islamists on the one side, and the army and Mubarak‘s assistant tyrants on the other — Mrs. Clinton still insists that secular democracy is on the march. And it is, but only in the reality-proof brains of the Secretary of State and other of our Ivy-League educated (?) political and media leaders.

As the Syrian civil war lengthens and deepens as the result of the support of U.S.-Western interventionists for the Saudis’ funding and arming of the mujahideen already in Syria and those on the way there form other battle fronts, we will no doubt here more lies about the Syrian threat to the United States. We also will hear more about the Syrian threat to Israel, but what once was a lie now will be the truth as Mrs. Clinton and company — in their doctrinaire, Marxist-Leninist-like belief in democracy’s inevitable triumph — help to give to al-Qaeda and the Saudis what they could never attain alone; that is, the gradual entrenchment of militant Sunni regimes from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

And so U.S.-led Western intervention in Syria will bring what such intervention in the Muslim world always brings: government lies and deceit; quantum increases in dead Syrians; more U.S. taxpayer funds given to or wasted on Israelis and other foreigners; a deepening of Muslim hatred for the United States government; and the sharpening of the clash of civilizations which will cause Washington to further restrict civil liberties in a futile effort to stave off eventual defeat.

That is quite a price for the rest of us to pay for our leaders’ lust to intervene in the name of democracy in countries that are not worth an American life or a U.S. dollar.

The piece below was published this week on Foreign Policy’s website.

President Paul

• Ron Paul maybe a long shot in November, but he’s America’s best bet on foreign policy.

Ron Paul’s treatment by mainstream media, other Republican hopefuls, and the punditry makes me think the W.B. Yeats lines “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” also describe the year 2012 in the United States. Indeed, Paul’s experience in the nomination campaign suggests U.S. politics lacks reasoned substance, common sense, and an understanding of what America’s Founding Fathers intended.

Open up any newspaper to see the mess America has sunk itself into around the world: for example, facing off with China over a lone, non-American dissident whose safety has no relation to U.S. security. Yet today, Paul’s call for staying out of other people’s wars unless genuine U.S. national interests are at stake is deemed radical, immoral, even anti-American. Amazing.

If elected president, Paul’s most valuable contribution to a prosperous and secure American future might well lie in his application of a non-interventionist foreign policy, following the wishes of George Washington and the other founders.

Before explaining why Paul’s foreign policy would benefit the United States, it is worth rebutting those ill-educated jackasses in politics, the media, and the academy who denigrate the founders as “dead white males.” To them, the modern world is so different from Washington’s time that nothing the founders said or wrote pertains to contemporary foreign-policymaking. Such self-serving and ahistoric attitudes allow their advocates to pursue policies negating the Constitution, piling up debt, and fueling relentless intervention abroad.

Several years ago, Georgetown University’s distinguished professor emeritus Daniel Robinson cogently explained that the founding generation did not prescribe specific policies for unforeseeable future problems, but, rather, conducted a prolonged and profound seminar on “the nature of human nature.” They examined history and their own experiences and devised a set of principles true not only in their own era and in ancient Sparta, but also for the unknowable American future: Human nature never changes; man is not perfectible; individuals and governments must live within their means; man is hard-wired for conflict; and small government, frequent elections, and secure private property best protect liberty. Most crucial today is the principle that foreign interventions when no genuine U.S. interest is at risk will yield lost wars, deep debt, and decreased domestic liberty. These common-sense principles were the key to national security in the early republic and would regain that status in a Paul presidency.

A President Paul would infuse these principles into U.S. foreign policy and produce a non-interventionist doctrine: far fewer unnecessary and costly wars, far fewer dead soldiers, and far greater U.S. national security. This is a workable, adult approach to the world — especially the Muslim world — unlike the adolescent approach America’s bipartisan governing elite has hewed to for decades.

What the founders and Paul advocate, and what the U.S. political elite have forgotten, might be termed the “Schoolyard Rule.” Most of us, in the halcyon days of youth, learned at recess that every action elicits a reaction: Push someone in the schoolyard, and you will be pushed back. We also learned that a single, cavalier push meaning little to you might quickly turn into a bigger fracas, complete with cuts, bruises, or worse, until Sister Mary Lawrence and her metal-edged yardstick arrived to stop the fight and restore order.

We also learned the Schoolyard Rule’s corollary: If you are pushed during recess, you better push back — even if the instigator is bigger — and hope that the good sister arrives to save your bacon. If you do not push back, the pain you receive becomes a daily occurrence. Militant Islamists assiduously apply this corollary to defend a Muslim world they perceive as too-long passive in the face of murderous superpower pushing. The Islamists are pushing back and depending on Allah — in the role of Sister Mary Lawrence — to give eventual victory to the Muslim David.

This action-reaction lesson is a key part of a youngster’s practical education, and in the course of his or her pre-college schooling the Schoolyard Rule is reinforced by courses in subjects like history, physics, religion, and chemistry. At high school graduation, most American teenagers have a handle on the idea that if you push, you will be pushed back, and are confident that this is an iron law. When was the last time you met a schoolyard Gandhi?

But then comes college. The unfortunates who trundle off to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere in the Ivy League are cleansed of the Schoolyard Rule’s common sense, emerging four years later with few contact points with reality. They have learned to shape policies for the world they want, not the one on offer. They believe it their duty to use whatever tool available, be it laws, bayonets, or cruise missiles, to turn the world’s people into semi-socialist, spendthrift, ahistoric, anti-religious democrats — in short, mirror images of themselves.

These Ivy League graduates who have forgotten the Schoolyard Rule now dominate U.S. foreign policy. Eager to push hard any person or state they disagree with or dislike, they blithely assume the pushed will know such punishment is indispensable in becoming as smart, cool, and sophisticated as people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

Nearly alone among Republicans and Democrats, Paul knows that ignoring the Schoolyard Rule, its corollary, and the founders’ warning against nonessential intervention in foreigners’ affairs would be ruinous for America. As president, Paul would push only if a genuine U.S. national security interest were at stake. Wars would be fought only over life-and-death matters — like access to energy and freedom of the seas — and not over ephemera like Israel’s interests and women’s rights and human rights overseas.

Paul would listen to the enemy. Not to empathize or sympathize, but to understand his motivation and form policy to defeat him, ensuring the motivation of today’s enemies is not passed to the next generation. The failure of both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama to understand that it is U.S. government actions in the Islamic world that fire Islamist motivation, not hatred of freedom or how Americans live at home, proves that only Paul’s approach can restore U.S. security. The Islamists have educated Americans just as clearly and openly as Ho Chi Minh and General Giap did; the United States’ failure of perception has already ensured that much of the next generation of young Muslims will become Islamists.

A Ron Paul presidency would reverse a half-century of Republican and Democratic leaders maintaining national security policies that lethally push Muslims, premised on the delusion they will not push back. President Paul would replace the interventionism of these men and women — who are merely miseducated, not evil — with the founders’ guidance, the Schoolyard Rule, and a belief that the federal government is an engine of national destruction and bankruptcy. For President Paul, the protection of the United States’ genuine interests by avoiding unnecessary wars and frivolous interventions is first, last, and always the main foreign-policy priority of the U.S. government.

Source: ForeignPolicy.com, May 3, 2012 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/03/president_paul?page=full

Too often, I believe, Americans think about Washington’s interventionism only as the actual physical intervention of U.S. military forces abroad in places where no U.S. interest is at risk. That activity certainly is intervention, but President Obama’s despicable decision last week to have his administration leak intelligence claiming that Israel has concluded an agreement with the government of Azerbaijan to allow its use of Azeri airfields for an air strike on Iran is just as much an unwarranted intervention by the United States government.

Readers of this blog will know that I carry no brief for Israel, that I believe it is a state that is irrelevant to U.S. national interests, and one whose U.S.-citizen supporters are disloyal to America and involved in activities that compromise U.S. security and corrupt the U.S. political system. That said, Israel — like the United States and all other nations — has an absolute right to defend itself when it deems it necessary to do so. The right of self-defense is the first and most important right of both individuals and nations. While Israel has no right to exist — and neither does America or any other nation, for that matter — it has an absolute right to defend its national interests according to its own best lights.

In the present case, Obama and his leaking-lieutenants have tried to deny Israel its right to self-defense. Washington under Obama may not agree that Israel’s national security and even its survival are threatened by Iran, and they may well be right. But the Obama administration’s leaking of the Azeri airfields data is an arrogant interventionist action that undermines Israel’s ability to defend itself as it sees fit. It as much of an unwarranted and unconscionable foreign intervention by Washington in another nation’s affairs as was the invasion of Iraq.

This is not, of course, to argue that an Israeli attack on Iran is justified or in the interests of the United States. It seems unlikely that an Israeli air strike can more than marginally retard Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, and such an attack will surely cost Israel something given Iran’s air defense system and its worldwide terrorism capabilities. Justifying the war, then, comes down to balancing gains and losses and, on that score, it seems a close call for the Israelis. Such an attack would also further cement Israel’s unchallenged position as the Muslim world’s most hated enemy. But with all this said, only Israel can decide what its national interests require it to do to cope with or destroy the threat it believes Iran presents.

As far as U.S. interests are concerned an Israeli attack on Iran will be a disaster. Once underway, all the Muslim world will identify Obama’s Washington as an unqualified supporter of the attack based on the past history of complete and supine bipartisan U.S. support for Israel and the fact that the Israelis will be using U.S. aircraft, ordnance, and technology to kill Iranians. Once Israel’s attack commences, anything Washington has done to stop Israel from acting — be it behind-the-scenes pressure or the Azeri leak — will be irrelevant as Iran and the rest of the Islamic world will attribute ultimate responsibility for the attack to the United States. Iran will surely respond with violence against the oil industry and/or trade in its own region and via its operatives in the United States.

This surely is not a good result for the United States, and there are those who will argue that anything Washington can do to stop an Israeli strike is therefore justified, including the leak about Israel and the Azeri airfields. That argument, however, would be off the mark. As noted above, Israel and all nation-states — even Assad’s Syria and Omar Bashir‘s Sudan — have an absolute right to defend themselves at home and abroad when and as they see fit. For one nation to put obstacles in the way of another to prevent such an exercise of legitimate self-defense is unjustifiable intervention that the intervener will come to regret. Obama’s leaks, for example, have already ensured a damaging tit-for-tat Israeli leak of sensitive U.S. intelligence information, and has put an Azeri government heretofore friendly to the United States on Iran’s long-term hit list. Obama has incurred these costs for Americans whether or not Israel attacks Iran in the near term.

At day’s end it is vital that Americans understand that while an Israeli strike on Iran will damage U.S. interests, kill U.S. citizens, and involve the U.S. military in a war that will look very much like a clash of civilizations, the fault for this lies not with Israel but with the U.S. government and its bipartisan willingness to negate U.S. sovereignty and independence by allowing an alien foreign power to decide when the United States goes to war.

Under both political parties, Washington has performed as Israel’s unquestioning supporter, ready bully boy, eager weapons supplier, and abject apologist, in large part because all administrations have failed to enforce laws on the books that would properly designate AIPAC as an agent of a foreign power; discipline U.S. senators and congressman who meet privately with Israeli prime ministers and other leaders; and much more vigorously hunt, identify, and prosecute pro-Israel U.S. citizens in the private sector, intelligence community, military, Congress, and federal civil service who illegally pass Israel sensitive military, intelligence, technological, and economic information. Such action must begin if America’s sovereignty on the issue of going to war is to be restored, but for now the long record of massive U.S. government intervention on Israel’s side in the latter’s unending war with Muslims will be the main cause of the retribution Iran and other Muslim entities will exact from the United States if Israel attacks Iran.

Interventionism is surely among the most lethal of poisons from which our republic is suffering. But there are two sides to interventionism; one in which U.S. power is used to do something — removing Saddam, for example — and the other where it is used to prevent a nation from doing something Washington opposes, in the present case Israel’s right to self-defense. Many Americans who identify themselves as non-interventionists ignore this other side of the coin and act as though to be a non-interventionist one must be pro-Palestinian, pro-Iranian, anti-Israeli, or opposed to any and all U.S. military activities overseas. This is ahistorical and dangerous nonsense.

From the Founders’ era to today, the strength of non-interventionism lies in its relentless focus on keeping U.S. interests as the central determinant in drafting and implementing U.S. foreign policy. In our time, for example, Palestine is as irrelevant as Israel to U.S. interests and security; supporting the Palestinians in no way serves U.S. interests. Likewise, U.S. security and economic prosperity do not depend on Washington’s intervention to promote the creation of secular democratic regimes in Egypt, Russia, Sudan, Morocco Libya, Iran, Ivory Coast, Yemen, Bahrain, China, Pakistan, Burma, Mali, and Syria. Indeed, since early 2011 such intervention in the Muslim world by Obama and Mrs. Clinton — with strong Republican support — has done nothing but cultivate Islamism and a growing anti-Americanism which will hurt U.S. security and prosperity.

One would think that the disastrous results of ill-defined, failed, and/or unnecessary U.S. interventions overseas — most recently the U.S. military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and the deaths and debt they caused — would make Washington’s bipartisan interventionism anathema to Americans. And yet media coverage and popular reaction to Obama’s interventionist leak of the Azeri airfield information have been virtually nil, even though the leak will hurt America via Israel‘s coming disclosure of sensitive U.S. intelligence and by strengthening the ability of the pro-Israel Fifth Column of U.S. citizens to credibly claim that Obama’s leak prevented Israel from defending itself and so now Washington is responsible for protecting Israel by destroying Iran.

Unnecessary U.S. interventions overseas undermine the security, economy, and constitutional grounding of the American republic. It adds massive and utterly unpredictable costs — human and financial — to the debt burden of an already bankrupt nation, and it steadily increases the arbitrary power unwisely lodged in the hands of the president. The current election cycle ought to be the occasion for a searching debate on whether Americans really want to see their republic destroyed by unnecessary overseas commitments initiated by Ivy league-educated politicians to install their anti-religious and elitist view of how humans should be perfected by dictatorial central governments on the rest of the world. An overstatement? Yesterday, Secretary of State Clinton lectured the world on how to treat Syria and Burma — two states of no import to the United States — and promised steady U.S. involvement in each.

Meanwhile, this past weekend also saw local Tuareg tribesman and Islamist insurgents raise their flag over Timbuktu in Mali in an event that underscores the growing strength of Islamism in West Africa. The Islamists’ growing power in the region is at least in part due to the Obama-Clinton-McCain-Graham intervention in Africa to impose secular democracy since the start of the so-called Arab Spring. Unsurprisingly, there is no secular democracy on tap in the region, but the intervention of Washington, Britain, France, and the UN there has ensured a rising tide of Islamism. And, unlike Burma and Syria, the stability of the West African states is an important strategic interest for the United States because we are dependent on the region’s oil and strategic minerals, and because our maritime commerce is threatened by increasing piracy in the shipping lanes off its coast. As Mrs. Clinton’s behaves like a silly, democracy-obsessed co-ed playing to the equally silly media on non-issues like Syria and Burma, the U.S. military’s next target for intervention — West Africa — is emerging in ever clearer relief, thanks to the Obama administration’s Republican-supported democracy crusade in Africa and the Congress’s 40-year, bipartisan failure to assure America’s energy security.

I suppose our coming military intervention in West Africa is a third variety of intervention, that which is an absolute necessity to secure genuine live-and-death U.S. national interests after they long have been left unprotected by a feckless two-party system that attracts men and women who detest the Founders, have no contact with reality, and care only for reelection.

It is hard to imagine.

For almost a year Syria has been the scene of an increasingly intense civil war between Bashir al-Asaad’s regime and an assortment of its opponents — Islamists, foreign mujahideen, democrats, secularists, etc. Thousands on both sides have been killed, though the paragons of pro-interventionist “truth” like the BBC and CNN still report the war as if the opposition has only bare chests to present against the regime’s weapons. The United Nations, once again, has arrived on the scene as the West’s anti-Muslim hit man to help destroy a regime it deemed to be a UN-member in good standing until Asaad began trying to maintain domestic order. All of this has occurred, and yet …

U.S. military forces have not overtly become involved in Syria and U.S. dollar expenditures there so far appear to be minimal, except for Secretary of State Clinton’s spending on the few score so-called democrats and secularists who are mixed in with the millions of Syrians opposing Asaad, and whatever costs were incurred by the embarrassing, half-mad U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford as he scurried around Syria championing Mrs. Clinton’s now consistent policy of spurring Arab youngsters to get out on the street and get shot down by their regime. Senior Democratic Party officials, of course, cannot see their way clear to defend genuine U.S. national interests — like avoiding war with Iran or winning in Afghanistan — but their taste for spilling the blood of innocents is unquenchable.

U.S. avoidance of direct involvement in Syria is a good example of how non-intervention can benefit America. A year on and thousands of dead Syrians buried and not one American has lost a job, had a house foreclosed, or incurred any other problem here at home. Americans have thus far not been hurt by the Syrian problem, largely because Washington has yet to find a way to fully interfere in the process of Syrian self-determination. And in truthful but callous terms, many thousands of additional Syrian casualties would affect U.S. interests at home a whit.

This is not, of course, to say, that many Americans are not upset, angry, and eager to intervene in Syria and spend tax dollars and the lives of other American parents’ soldier-children to dethrone Asaad. One empathizes with their hurt and outraged feelings, and I for one hope they are principled enough to match words with deeds, quit their jobs and country, buy AK-47s, and go and fight alongside the Syrian “democrats” they so admire. To start the ball rolling, I am willing to donate enough money to buy AK-47s for Mrs. Clinton, Ambassador Ford, and Ambassador Susan Rice.

How long will America’s luck hold? Sadly, probably not much longer. Both parties are dedicated to relentless interventionism, and the calls for the U.S. to “do something” in Syria are steadily increasing among politicians and the media. This past weekend, for example, FOX allowed Charles Krauthammer and Senator John McCain to propagandize the network’s viewers in favor of U.S. intervention. Mr. Krauthammer earnestly called for Washington to arm the Syrian opposition as President Reagan armed the Afghan and Angolan insurgents, and Senator McCain demanded that the might of the U.S. military be used to stop “the massacres” in Syria. If this is not done, McCain added, it would mean that the $700 billion spent each year on U.S. defense capabilities would have been wasted.

It seems the Naval Academy did not teach Senator McCain that U.S. military forces are meant to be used to defend genuine U.S. national interests, not to satisfy his heartfelt if imperialistic desire, and that of Mr. Krauthammer and their brother and sister interventionists, to remake the world — especially the Muslim world — in America’s image via military force. These same folks, after all, have forcefully advocated and implemented this policy since the start of the so-called Arab Spring, and have so far helped to install anti-U.S. Islamic regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. In Spring-training terms, they are three for three. Syria would make it four-for-four, and that would augment and accelerate what is an on-going U.S. strategic disaster in the Muslim world.

In addition to the clear damage Washington’s intervention in Syria would do to U.S. national security — by putting another mujahideen-backed Islamic regime in power — such an intervention would again demonstrate the ability of Washington’s tyrannical and/or oil-rich Sunni Arab “friends” to get any U.S. administration spend American blood and money to promote their interests.

The repeated calls of Arab leaders — especially from the Gulf states — for “Western military intervention” in Syria has nothing to do with sympathy for the suffering of the Syrian opposition. They want the U.S. military to do their spending and dying for them to accomplish three goals:

First, to get rid of Asaad and his hated and heretical Alawite sect which has long ruled Syria, and thereby facilitate its replacement by a Sunni Islamist regime. The foreign Islamist fighters now flowing into Syria to fight the Asaad regime surely are being funded from the coffers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and the UAE.

Second, with Asaad and the Alawites destroyed by the Arabs’ U.S. mercenaries, the Sunni Arab leaders will have quashed one of their strongest fears, that which Jordan’s King Abdullah frequently describes as a “Shia arc running from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.” Because of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam that arc is today complete, and the only way to break it is to destroy the pro-Shia Asaad regime and replace it with a militant Sunni government.

Third, with the Sunnis in power in Damascus, militant Islamists backed by the Gulf states will have ensconced themselves on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. At that point, only Jordan’s border with Israel will be controlled by a regime that fears the Israelis. Once the relatively weak Jordanian regime is destroyed — and it will be — by the growing power of the militant Islamists the West has been ignoring as it dreams its Arab-Spring pipe dream, the mujahideen’s close-in encirclement of Israel will be complete.

In the foregoing context, then, the military intervention called for by Krauthammer and McCain — and silently approved and appreciated by Mrs. Clinton, et. al. — will do what interventionism by America’s bipartisan governing elite always does: undermine U.S. national security; strengthen America’s Islamist enemies; deepen the nearing-mortal wound inflicted on our country by the federal debt; and get more of America’s soldier-children killed.

And all this pain and damage from intervening in Syria will be, of course, only a tiny percentage of the disaster that will accrue to America at home and abroad when the interventionists start their pro-Israel war with Iran.

Even in the Internet Age, some news seems to travel slowly. Take, for example, the recent activities and words of President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in regard to the coming war with Iran. Neither seems aware that the U.S. Constitution was long ago amended to outlaw slavery.

Last weekend, Barack Obama dutifully reported to the AIPAC meeting and pathetically begged his audience of wealthy and disloyal U.S. citizens to be patient with him as he needs more time to prepare to attack Iran. To protect his reelection chances, Obama in essence explained, he needs to keep pursuing sanctions against Iran to prove to his party’s Pacifist/peace wing that he has exhausted all non-military options. (This, in itself, is a certain sign of Obama’s innate duplicity as there obviously is no Pacifist or pro-peace wing in the Democratic Party — nor is there an American peace movement — unless there is a Republican president in the White House.)

“Please, please, please — oh, please!,” the enslaved-to-AIPAC Obama pleaded, give me a few more months to fool the American electorate with talk of effective sanctions and then I will go to war for you against Iran and provide as many of America’s soldier-children as necessary to be killed for the Israeli theocracy. This sort of supine “Yes, Boss” performance meant to elicit campaign contributions must have been galling to an African-American like Obama — at least I hope it was. Tragically, such unmanly groveling before AIPAC is now a regular practice whoever is the president of our once-proud and once-independent republic.

Not able to tolerate the chance that he might be out-groveled — and so out fund-raised — while away on the hustings buying his party’s 2012 nomination, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney put on his best Buzz Lightyear war-face and thundered “me too — and then some!” to attract the same fifth-column, and its campaign contributions, that Obama had addressed in person. The Obama administration, said Romney, was weak and feckless when it comes to Iran, claiming that it had utterly failed to impose sanctions that would wreck what remains of Iran’s economy. This was just boilerplate, however, as Buzz Romney made clear — like Obama — that he thirsted for war with Iran. He pledged that a Romney administration would provide as much degradation of the U.S. economy and as many dead American soldier-children as needed to protect Israel and keep campaign contributions flowing from AIPAC leaders.

One can only conclude from the performances of Obama and Romney that it as not as onerous or personally degrading as it once was to be a slave. Indeed, both men were obviously secure and proud of their status, believing that a few thousand wealthy and disloyal U.S.-citizen AIPAC members wielded more retributive power than the American voters, who they simultaneously told that neither the Congress, nor the Constitution, nor genuine U.S. national interests, nor their economic future, nor their children’s lives would stand in their way of a certain-to-fail U.S. war against Iran on behalf of Democratic and Republican campaign coffers and Israel.

One can only imagine that at the end of a day in which Obama and Romney tugged their forelocks in obedience to this fifth-column, the AIPAC big-wigs must have joined their war-mongering Neocon operatives, retreated to Legree’s Big House restaurant, and enjoyed a lavish meal that resembled the barbeque-picnic scene from Gone With the Wind. There, over cigars and bourbon, they surely laughed heartily at the memory of the music-less minstrel show they had just watched, one in which two servile men masqueraded as U.S. leaders and, in their search for lucre, had willingly demeaned the security, integrity, manliness, independence, and future of the American Republic.

For much more than a decade, Dr. Ron Paul has warned Americans about the danger inherent in a bipartisan foreign policy that intervenes in other peoples’ affairs, seeks to impose Western values on others, and writes blank-check commitments to fight for other countries in wars where no genuine U.S. national interest at risk. Dr. Paul often cites George Washington’s words in this regard, as our first president — and the greatest American — clearly, starkly and eloquently warned of the disasters awaiting the United States if its leaders engaged in an interventionist foreign policy and favored one nation over all the others.

Many Americans, I think, admire Dr. Paul for his position on foreign policy not only for its substance but also for the personal courage it takes for him to be consistent in the face of the constant slandering he encounters. Damned as an isolationist, an America-hater, a Pollyanna, and an anti-Semite, Dr. Paul perseveres, telling Americans that the road to their nation‘s destruction has been paved over the last 35 years by Republican and Democratic leaders — and their smarmy acolytes in the media, the lobbies, and the academy — who have unrelentingly intervened in other peoples’ business and thereby consistently involved America in wars in which it has no dog in the fight.

Today all Americans have a chance to look into the abyss President Washington and Dr. Paul have described and see the horror that lies just ahead in the coming war with Iran. Because of the U.S. government’s endless intervention in Israeli and Muslim affairs, America is positioned to be taken to war against Iran if Israel decides to attack the Islamic Republic. This week’s media stories that Israeli leaders will not warn President Obama and his lieutenants when they set the date for attacking Iran so as to give Obama “deniability” is fodder for fools. When Israel attacks Iran, 1.4 billion Muslims — Shia and Sunni alike — well be sure the United States gave Israel the green light, and the AIPAC-owned Congress will subsequently confirm that belief when it sanctions — as it did in the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war — the very public resupply of Israel with sophisticated U.S. ordnance intended to kill more Muslims.

So what will ignoring Dr. Paul and General Washington cost the United States? Well, four things come to mind.

First, the constitution is in part negated. The prime minister of Israel will decide when America goes to war with Iran, not, as the constitution requires, the U.S. Congress.

Second, it will transform Barack Obama from the commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest military power into a semi-catatonic automaton who — in his lust for reelection — obeys Israel’s prime minister and the campaign-funding leaders of the Jewish-American community and takes the United States to war against a nation which — save for our “alliance” with Israel — would be a marginal threat to us.

Third, as noted in this morning’s front-pages, Iran’s U.S.-based intelligence apparatus and that of its Hizballah ally will attack in the United States. These attacks will be carried out by Iran and Hizballah, but they will possible mainly because of the unconstitutional picking and choosing of which federal laws to enforce that has been done Obama and all other presidents in the last 30 years, an illegal practice that has left our borders open and — with millions of undocumented aliens in the country — our domestic security in a shambles.

Fourth, and needles to say, war with Iran will wreck the already foundering U.S. economy and usher in a lengthy war with the entire Muslim world.

With time short before Israel attacks Iran, what can be done to stop America’s slide to disaster? The answer, I fear, is not much, and what can be done, can only be done by Barack Obama. Still, American history has a precedent and it is Mr. Obama’s for the taking. That precedent was established by George Washington in 1793 when he declared America’s neutrality in the war between Britain and France, then officially America’s ally. (See, avalon.law.yale.edu/18thcentury/neutra93.asp).

In the eerie manner in which history often works, only minimal changes are needed in President Washington’s neutrality declaration to make it pertinent to today’s crisis. If he has any desire to defend U.S. independence, sovereignty, and prosperity, President Obama could issue the following statement:

A Proclamation of Neutrality 2012

Whereas is appears that a state of war exists between Israel, of the one part, and Iran on the other, and the duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers.

I have therefore thought fit by these presents to declare the disposition of the United States to observe the conduct aforesaid towards those Powers respectfully; and to exhort and warn the citizens of the United States carefully to avoid all acts, and proceedings whatsoever, which may in any manner tend to contravene such disposition.

And I do hereby also make known, that whatsoever of the citizens of the United States shall render himself liable to punishment or forfeiture under the law of nations, by committing, aiding, or abetting hostilities against any of the said Powers, or by carrying to any of them those articles which are deemed contraband by the modern usage of nations, will not receive the protection of the United States, against such punishment or forfeiture; and further, that I have given instructions to those officers, to whom it belongs, to cause prosecutions to be instituted against all persons, who shall, within the cognizance of the courts of the United States, violate the law of nations, with respect to the Powers at war, or any of them.

In testimony whereof, I have caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed to these presents, and signed the same with my hand. Done at the city of Washington, D.C., the tenth day of March, two thousand and twelve, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-sixth.

Barack Obama March 10, 2012

So there is a way out — if Mr. Obama has a backbone, a desire to protect the United States, and any modicum of respect for the U.S. Constitution. The foregoing proclamation would defend U.S. interests without intervening in the affairs of either Israel or Iran; they can go to war and will find no U.S.-made obstacle in their way. In addition, such a proclamation by Obama would — at long last — unleash U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to legally smash not only Iran’s covert operations in America, but also Israel’s covert-action programs in the United States, programs that steal our military, economic, and technological secrets; suborn U.S. citizens to commit treason against their country; and benefit from the corrupt practices of a small, wealthy, and increasingly disloyal segment of the Jewish-American community that are administered through such agencies as AIPAC.

President Obama, then, has a chance to make history, and all he has to do is follow legitimate historical precedent and enforce the laws he swore to uphold. My guess is that there is not enough courage and patriotism in him to so act, and so he will go down in history not only as failed president, but as the president who listened neither to General Washington nor Dr. Paul and so confirmed the enslavement of 300 million Americans to the war-making lust of a foreign country, its leader, and and a small cabal of disloyal American citizens.

Driving to Mass this morning I was listening to FOX on the issue of Afghanistan and the killing of U.S. and NATO soldiers by our supposed Afghan allies. FOX had its “terrorism expert” on and he was blathering about how President Obama’s apology for the recent Koran burning was causing more violence in Afghanistan and across the Muslim world. The apology, said the “expert,” was typical of Obama’s weakness, and this weakness is contributing to the rise of Islamist power in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, and other places. Somehow Obama’s apology for the Koran burning was explained by FOX’s “expert” as an apology for “U.S. policy,” which surprised me as I did not know our policy was to burn Korans.

Anyway, that this sort of truly brain-dead stuff passes for acceptable — or even plausible — analysis on any U.S. network falls into the appalling but not surprising category. The violence in Afghanistan against U.S. and NATO forces, for example, has nothing to do with the repeated apologies of Obama, Bush, Secretary Clinton, etc. for various incidents. The violence comes from the fact that we and NATO are viewed by the overwhelming number of Afghans as, to quote an old but true phrase, “foreign infidel occupiers.”

Now, there is no doubt that burning Korans alienates Afghans, but it is the icing on the cake of 2,000-plus years of unrelenting, violent Afghan opposition to all occupiers — Greeks, Persians, Mongols, British, or Soviets. FOX’s “expert” said that Washington and NATO should be “partnering with pro-democracy Afghan social groups” to discredit the Taliban and other Afghan mujahideen and thereby reduce violence and spur democracy. This analysis is truly a howler as those Afghans who are killing Western soldiers are the only social forces that count in Afghanistan, and they are the only ones that have counted since we invaded in 2001. Had we smashed these folks to the edge of extinction and then left in the 18 months following 9/11, all would have been well. But we stayed to build a secular democracy and empower women, and today the world’s greatest power and its allies are acknowledging defeat at the hands of shaggy lads armed with weapons of Korean War vintage.

On the issue of “apologies,” it is clear that one is due, but it is due to the American people and especially to American parents who have lost sons or daughters to members of the so-called Afghan Forces who have shot the U.S. and NATO soldiers who trained them. I always try to avoid saying “I told you so,” but since I published Imperial Hubris in 2004 I have written on numerous occasions that the idea that the U.S. and NATO were going to be able to train an Afghan military/security/police force that could defend the country and the social and political values Washington and its allies sought to impose on Afghans was a piece of absolute of nonsense. I argued that those we trained would kill our soldiers, ultimately help the Taliban to throw NATO out of the country, and thereafter divide along ethnic lines for the coming civil war. Right and left came down hard on me for making these points, the former claiming I was a Bush hater and the latter that I was a an anti-Afghan racist because I refused to see how much the Afghans were desirous and capable of uniting their nation under a secular democracy. Well, I hated neither Bush nor the Afghans — I simply hate those U.S. and Western politicians who refuse to see reality and read history and so get our soldier-children killed for no good reason.

For my sins, I spent most of my CIA career working on Afghanistan in one way or another; my most intense Afghan experience came between 1985 and 1992 when I had the privilege to work on President Reagan’s (peace be upon him) covert-action program to help the Afghan mujahideen kill Soviet soldiers and their Afghan communist allies; drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan; and contribute to demise of the Soviet Union. To prepare for this assignment — pedant that I am — I read the history of the occupations of Afghanistan by Alexander, Britain, and the USSR. History as always was an excellent instructor, offering clear lessons not about what to do, but about what not to do. And one lesson was clear: DO NOT TRUST YOUR AFGHAN ALLIES. In each of the three occupations, the occupiers found that the Afghans they paid, armed, and trained ultimately either deserted and joined the enemy or simply turned on and killed them.

Study of this well-documented reality and not any special brain-power, then, led me to warn frequently over the last eight years that the Bush-and-Obama plan to achieve victory by training Afghans was a plan based on Western fantasies, not Afghan realities, and would yield defeat for America and many dead American trainers killed at the hands of their trainees. Many of the Afghans who joined the new Afghan military, police, and security services were sent by the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other insurgent commanders — and our enemies’ leaders helpfully told us in public statements that they were sending them — to join up and achieve three ends. First, some would stay in the service long enough to get a weapon and learn Western military tactics and then desert and return to fight the occupiers with the mujahideen and to instruct the insurgents on the tactics they had learned. Second, others would stay for a longer period, earn the trust and perhaps the friendship of their trainers, and then unexpectedly gun them down. Third, others would stay for undetermined periods and behave loyally so as to gain positions of trust that would allow them to aid the Taliban and their allies by leaving doors unlocked, by cutting communications systems, by passing data re NATO’s intentions to the insurgents, and/or by turning a blind-eye at a checkpoint.

Sadly, this is exactly what has happened and the two U.S. officers killed on Saturday were only the latest of dozens of U.S., British, Canadian, and French soldiers and Marines who have been killed by those they trained. (NB: It is, of course, no coincidence that almost all the NATO trainers who have been killed hailed from the NATO countries where public support for the continuation of the Afghan occupation/war is already marginal. The Taliban and the other muajhedin are many things, but dumb is not one of them) And I think it is important to keep in mind that these U.S.-NATO deaths cannot be tossed off as “unintended consequences.” While the deaths were not intended by U.S. and NATO leaders, they were completely and easily predictable to anyone who took the time to do a cursory review of Afghan history. These young men and women are dead because their leaders adopted a policy that they should have known had no chance of success, and who have stuck to that utterly failed policy even as the piles of U.S. and NATO corpses are stacked ever higher.

So at day’s end, FOX’s always silly “terrorism expert” was wrong in damning Obama’s apology. What he should have said was that Obama’s apology was misdirected toward the Afghans and, instead, should have been made to Americans. Words of atonement ought to be forthcoming soon from those whose hands are smeared with blood of our Army and Marine trainers killed by their trainees: namely, Presidents Bush and Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former-Secretaries of Defense Rumsfeld and Gates, and Generals McChrystal and Petreaus and their insurgency geniuses, like John Nagl and David Kilcullen.

These men and women — who know only how to lose wars, waste American lives, and intervene in other peoples’ business — were morally and legally required to know the Afghan context into which they were trying to wedge their damnable Western fantasies. They failed to do their home work or, worse, believed history did not pertain to them, and as a result of their arrogant negligence America has lost the Afghan War and many American parents are grieving for the wasted lives of their military youngsters, men and women killed by those they trained or, even worse, in the name of allowing Mrs. Muhammad to vote.

Living in Northern Virginia a person gets use to the Washington Post’s clear preference for an all-powerful federal government that ignores the Constitution. In terms of presidential candidates, this means the Post will support candidates who cover the maintain-the-status-quo political spectrum from the Democrats’ far left to reliably liberal country-club Republicans, like George H. W. Bush and that former-president’s unelectable clone Mit Romney. The Post has, for example, savaged Speaker Gingrich at every turn in his campaign. More recently, however, the Post has turned its fire on Dr. Ron Paul, running a negative front-page story on Sunday (1 January 2011) and an amazingly hysterical and panicky column by Michael Gerson Monday morning (2 January 2011). The Post’s editors cannot stand the thought of a president who will not keep the power and spending of the federal government growing, and so has decided that Speaker Gingrich and Dr. Paul must be destroyed because they are the enemies of what the Post defines as the “American way,” centralized federal power, relentless interventionism, constant wars, and bankruptcy.

Speaker Gingrich has defenders in the mainstream media, but few defend Dr. Paul, despite his growing grass-roots support across the country, and so I thought I would give it a shot. The New Year’s Day article in the Post mentioned above can be countered by the derisive laughter it deserves. The article criticized Dr. Paul because his message was not colored by the “American optimism” used by other Republican candidates and President Obama. Apparently the august editors of the Post want to return to the “don’t worry, be happy” attitude that helped to get America into the disastrous situation its faces today. At base, the Post’s critique of Dr. Paul’s campaign rhetoric is not that it is negative, but rather that is true.

Is Dr. Paul wrong about coming U.S. bankruptcy; the looming possibility of a second, deeper recession; the madness of the federal government campaigning for secular democracy across the Muslim world and thereby empowering Islamists; the Treasury pumping billions of wasted dollars into the already dead-on-its-feet Euro Zone; the corruption of the Congress and the U.S. electoral process by foreign lobbies and deep-pocketed campaign contributors; the expanding readiness of both parties to limit rights guaranteed by the 1st and 2nd Amendments; the inability of the U.S. military to win wars by destroying America’s enemies; court decisions that prevent state governments from defending their citizens, even though the federal government has abdicated that role; a bipartisan ruling elite that has involved Americans in numerous wars in which no U.S. interest is at stake; a Congress that has for 40 years failed to move the country toward energy self-sufficiency because it is owned by oil companies, foreign governments, and is scared to death of environmental fanatics, etc. etc. etc.?

Of course not. Dr. Paul is right on all these counts. His serious, worried, and warning demeanor is absolutely appropriate to the disaster the Democrats and most Republicans have wrought, but want to hide and smile about until the presidential election. Smiles and foolish optimism are hardly the correct response to important debates in a republic that is not far from its death throes. A photograph of most of the Republican candidates and Obama and his lieutenants would merit the caption: “Be optimistic and keep smiling, America’s enemies love idiots.”

Monday’s Post OpEd by Michael Gerson is entitled “Ron Paul’s Poison Pill” and it is a juvenile and panic-stricken performance by a major voice of country-club Republicanism. Apparently sensing that Dr. Paul’s concerns and manifestly appropriate worries about America’s future are shared by an increasing number of American voters — especially young voters — Mr. Gerson shriekingly paints Dr. Paul as a racist and a devotee of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy; an abettor of the Holocaust and so implicitly an anti-Semite; an isolationist who sins by wanting to protect America first, last, and always; a bigot ready to reverse the Civil Rights Act; and a blame-America-firster. Mr. Gerson’s essay reminds one of a high-school sophomore’s vitriolic, first-try at journalism that slips past the teacher who serves as the editor of the school’s paper.

And why does Dr. Paul merit these calumnies? Because Mr. Gerson and the Republican establishment he speaks for do not want to debate the dire problems America faces at home and abroad because such a debate would show there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between most Republicans and Obama’s Democrats, and that both parties are equally responsible for the near in-extremis condition of America’s economy, finances, and foreign policy.

Mr. Gerson’s OpEd makes it clear that most Republicans, like most Democrats, regard any resistance to more unnecessary bipartisan wars and endless and war-causing democracy-mongering interventionism as “isolationism”; opposition to unlimited federal government power as racist and neo-Confederate; support for fiscal responsibility to avoid national bankruptcy as a “lack of compassion”; and any questioning of the bipartisan elite’s definition of reality as it has been shaped and inculcated for several generations by the federal government’s Department of Education and their ill-educated operatives in the teacher’s unions as an antediluvian response by a man who refuses to see that that the federal government knows what is best for him better than he does. In essence, Mr. Gerson, on behalf of both parties, is telling Dr. Paul, his supporters, and all voters to shut up, go home, watch TV, and let the bipartisan political elite decide what is best for all Americans and their country. The proper response to this outrageous and anti-American arrogance is to suggest that Mr. Gerson and the elitists for whom he speaks should be collectively sent to hell.

Let me close by noting that I while I support Dr. Paul in the areas of foreign policy, fiscal conservatism, and a return to constitutionalism, I am a traditional conservative and not a libertarian. I cringe at, rebel against, and am willing to denounce many Libertarian views of events in American history, views which I regard as ahistorical, unrealistic, and, at times, just silly. I particularly oppose the Libertarian’s view of Abraham Lincoln. But their view of Lincoln is precisely that: their view. And they are perfectly entitled to it.

Those of us who are not Libertarians and yet support Dr. Paul — and those numbers are rising — might best explain our support and affection for him by quoting the Libertarians’ favorite bete noire. “Many free countries have lost their liberty and ours may lose hers,” Abraham Lincoln once said, “but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert her, but that I never deserted her.” Of the many things one can say about Dr. Paul, the one that cannot be contested is that he never deserted America and its constitution — as have so many of his peers — for office, power, and wealth. He can wear that plume with pride and the thanks of all Americans.

I just watched a television commercial paid for by the “Emergency Committee for Israel” in which Mr. Gary Bauer spends a minute or so defaming Dr. Paul as: a spinner of 9/11 conspiracies, an America-hater, an opponent of the U.S. military, a friend of Iran, and — that most lethal of all sins — a foe of “our ally Israel.” Now, that is a lot of lies to pack into a minute, but as a crazed-Christian one cannot expect the war-mongering Mr. Bauer to know that one of God’s commandments is “Thou shall not lie.”

The Republican Party’s fear of the potentially enormous popular appeal of Dr. Paul’s truth-telling in regard to foreign policy is palpable and understandable. Listen to Mr. Bauer’s commercial and you will know what the Republican establishment wants:

1. war with Iran, although Iran is no threat to the United States unless we or Israel attack Iran first.
2. all the U.S. blood and treasure needed to ensure Israel is free to do what it wants to Palestine, although both Israel and Palestine are irrelevant to the economic and national-security interests of the United States except in the negative sense that both entities bleed the U.S. Treasury and keep us mired in their endless religious war.
3. a popular belief that the U.S. military approves of Washington’s relentless, war-causing, and bankrupting interventionism, even though almost all campaign contributions from U.S. military personnel go to Dr. Paul.
4. complete popular faith in the fallacy that 9/11 has been fully explained, although the 9/11 Commission’s archive has yet to be released and so Americans do not know how easily Osama bin Laden could have been killed in 1998-1999.
5. Americans to hold the racist, counter-intuitive, and, indeed, brain-dead-Santorum-ite belief that Muslims are attacking us because of our freedom, gender equality, and liberty, a position the depends not on empirical evidence — there is none — but on the need of U.S. politicians to convince voters that their interventionism does not cause wars, which is as silly a belief as one that holds actions do not prompt reactions.

After listening to Mr. Bauer, I think FOX television would be missing a bet if it did not create a program called “Lets Kill U.S. Kids and Bankrupt America.” The show could feature Bauer, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and John Bolton explaining why America needs more and more wars and why the president is above the Constitution and can legally take the country to war without a declaration of war by Congress.

Two or three episodes of such a show would demonstrate the obvious to all Americans; that is, Dr. Paul is both the defender of the U.S. Constitution and the only Republican presidential candidate who champions America’s interests first, last, and always. Needless to say, it would also expose Mr. Bauer’s ignorance of the Lord’s prohibition against lying.

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 generally.

Based on these two experiences, let us look at what Iowans not voting for Ron Paul will help to inflict on 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 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 whole-hearted 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 Islamists 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 would that 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 mujahideen 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 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 could 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 mujahideen-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 Founder’s 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 commonsense. 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 commonsense 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.