Posted on 08/16/2021 10:15:11 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Ron Paul: “Madam Speaker, I have a few questions for my colleagues. What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interest?
What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is the predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others, and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?
What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?
What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?
What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair tradeoff with the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistanian, Afghan people are killed or displaced?
What if we finally decide that torture, even if called “enhanced interrogation technique”, is self-destructive and produces no useful information and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?
What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?
What if all war-time spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?
What if we finally see that war-time conditions always undermine personal liberty?
What if Conservatives who preach small government wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?
What if Conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?
What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?
What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?
What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?
What if a military draft is being planned for for the wars that would spread if our foreign policy is not changed?
What if the American people learned the truth, that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security, that it never changes from one administration to the next?
What if war in preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?
What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?
What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?
What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?
What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded? Nothing.
But what happens if my concerns are justified and ignored? Nothing good.
And I yield back the balance of my time.”
Ping!
Goes all the way back to stupidly getting into WWI.
We are witnessing the end-days of American Progressivism. First abroad, then at home.
Sure; just let the Kaiser have his way, particularly with respect to forming “a United States of Europe against America”.
Blah Blah Blah, what was so great about England and France, who still had colonies in OUR Hemisphere, unlike Germany.
Ya think?
You need to stop listening to the revisionist liberals. As well as using red herrings.
It was the Kaiser, BTW, that was trying to induce Britain and France to violate the Monroe Doctrine with respect to said colonies.
German war plans against the US, as in the case of war plans that every country makes, were purely hypothetical and not seriously considered.
LOL, sure. Just like they left the Lusitania alone and socialist Wilson left it unavenged for three years.
The Kaiser’s regime was state socialism, as instituted by Bismarck. You’re very defensive of that regime . . . and on a thread about someone who has shown an affinity for its descendant regimes . . .
Was the Kaiser’s Germany any less State Socialist than France or Britain.
And did the Kaiser’s Germany commit the atrocities in Africa that the Belgians did?
There were no saints in Europe, and we were wrong to get into the fight.
We never should have allowed our ships to go to England while they had their crippling Naval Blockade on Germany. A “True” Neutral would have told Britain, that we would not risk our shipping unless they stopped their naval blockade of Germany. But we were never really “neutral” were we?
The UK was not near socialism until Labour got into power after WWII ended. Certainly post-Victorian UK was not socialist, although like most of the “West” they were beset with socialist agitators and sympathizers in high places.
Why the continued defense of the Kaiser?
Sure, just cower before the German imperial navy.
Oh please, Germany was never a threat to the US.
Furthermore, Britain should have stayed out of it, too.
LOL! A zillion threats out of the Kaiser and the sinking of ships and they were “no threat”.
I daresay that a president like George Washington would have crushed the Kaiser’s regime by 1916.
"American progressivism" = leftism. And leftism never goes quietly into the night, it goes leaving a trail of bleeding bodies and broken lives behind it.
We deserved it in other words?
The libertarian conceit that everyone will act like rational economic agents if we don't "meddle" is simply utter nonsense. We will be attacked by some parties for the same reason mountain climbers climb mountains: because they can.
Neither Stalin nor Hitler nor bin Laden gave a rat's ass about the final cost of victory or whether it passed a rational cost/benefit test.
Well, as the song goes:
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn’t happen again
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then
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