“How dare he subscribe to a theory that every foreign policy expert in the world accepts!”
Every single one of them huh?
Every single one of them huh?
I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could find some foreign policy expert somewhere that denies the existence of "blowback". I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could still find an economist who is a communist, but the point remains. Like the superiority of free markets among economists, blowback is not a subject of controversy in foreign policy circles. Even the President has acknowledged it. Let me show you what I mean. Here are quotes from several sources:
Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.It's hard for us in the west to comprehend the way these people think. The thought of foreign forces occupying our land is so alien to and the chances of it so remote that we don't even have to consider it, but mulling it over in your mind for five minutes is all it takes to make it obvious. Of course there's blowback. How could it be any other way?Paul Wolfowitz on the presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Bin Laden's 1998 fatwa
Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.
The 9/11 Commission Report
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export."
President Bush
Look, if you want to disagree with Congressman Paul on non-interventionism, fine. Maybe you think the benefits of certain interventions outweigh the costs. But when he talks about blowback, he's not some crazy person looking for an excuse to blame America; he's a serious man putting forth a serious argument about American policy. You owe it to yourself, to me and to every American that will be affected by the way you vote to consider that argument on its merits.