Posted on 11/13/2011 5:15:53 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
Ron Paul, the outspoken libertarian congressman and Republican presidential candidate from Texas, disagreed with his fellow GOP hopefuls on the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons at the CBS/National Journal debate on Saturday.
While Paul refused to rule out the possibility of war with Iran, he insisted a war would not be worthwhile and that the president should go to Congress before launching any military action.
“The only way you would do that is you would have to go to the Congress,” he said. “We as commander in chief aren’t making the decision to go to war. The old fashioned way, the Constitution, you go to the Congress and find out if our national security is threatened and I’m afraid what’s going on right now is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq.”
Paul went on to say that he considered the Iraq War a “tragedy.”
Both former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were far more hawkish in their assessments of the threat posed by Iranian nuclear weapons program. Romney said “crippling sanctions” should be put into effect. If those fail to halt the nation’s weapons progress, however, Romney said military action should be considered because the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran was “unacceptable.”
“We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Gingrich said would adopt an “absolute strategic program comparable to what President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher did to the Soviet Union” utilizing every “possible aspect short of war of breaking the [Iranian] regime and bringing it down.” He said the U.S. should also embrace covert operations “to block and disrupt the Iranian program, including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable.”
Should covert operations and other activities fail, Gingrich said that military action should be considered. “I agree with Governor Romney,” he said. “If in the end despite all of those things, the dictatorship persists, you have to take whatever steps are necessary to break the capacity to have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran doesn’t have a nuke, and if they did they couldn’t launch it here anyway. Russia and China have ICBMs armed with nukes. Why aren’t you screaming for zero to attack them? N. Korea has nukes, how come we haven’t zotted them willy nilly?
The point here, is that if we believe that Iran is a threat we have ample time to a public debate and a declaration of war. Was Libya a threat? How about Vietnam? Korea? Bosnia? Kosovo? Now we are sending Special Forces troops to africa to help round up some thugs. Where is the threat there? Where does it end? The list just keeps getting longer and longer. When are you imperial presidency types gonna get tired of it all?
Paul set up a straw dog to make his little speech last night. Neither Romney nor Gingrich, who answered the question before him, said the Commander in Chief should go to war independently of Congress.
Read the transcript, like I just did, and you will see that I am right about that. Your guy Paul is a deceptive whiner. America will never elect a whiner to be President.
(If you’re not a Paulist, then let my comment serve as a hint that you sound very much like one with your comment on this thread.)
Where in those three paragraphs did I say you'd better watch it? Nothing like that or suggesting that are in that post anywhere. Nowhere in those three paragraphs is any sort of threat whatsoever. If you think otherwise, please quote the part that you think does that.
Nice rant.
Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but nice rant.
You people that believe the President should allow the US to be attacked unless he gets permission from congress to stop it, need to get your heads out of the sand.
Oh, so Iran has the capability to nuke us now? Really? Talk about head in the sand.
If you can’t discern the difference between an imminent threat, an attack, and a threat down the road, you have no business discussing this issue.
Read the last sentence of your screed. Do you understand what “implied” means. Figure it out, junior.
You might try a course in reading comprehension before you comment.
LOL! Go look in the mirror.
I never said Iran had a nuke, that was a hypothetical.
You obviously don’t have enough reading comprehension to understand hypothetical.
You don’t know the difference between ‘hint’ and ‘warning’?
If YOU will look more closely at my first post here, #29, you might notice that it was a reply to Colonel Kangaroo in Post #1. I added you to the To: line because you appeared to be posting in support of Paul.
But since my post was a reply to #1, who so you suppose my parenthetical statement was directed toward?
Is that enough of a hint? If you need to continue to vent your hate and anger, feel free, but know ahead of time I won’t be reading your replies or responding to them. You are just not worth it.
You are the one in a big sweat to bomb Iran. Now you are trying to backtrack. LOL! Nice try. Get lost.
You need to sit down and wait until the boy scouts find you because you’re already lost.
Go get yourself a rope and tie it to your butt, maybe then you’ll be able to find it without help.
Yawn. Go back to school so you can learn how to insult someone in an adult fashion, boy. LOL!
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