Rand Paul's Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Position Popular, for Now

Tea party Republican Rand Paul’s non-interventionist approach to foreign policy appears to be gaining traction with battle-fatigued Republicans but whether the majority of the party will support that position for the long haul remains a question mark, according to Washington Post political writer Aaron Blake.

Blake cites a December Pew Research poll that found 53 percent of Republicans — slightly more than Democrats — believe the United States should "mind its own business internationally," up from the 22 percent who felt that way after 9/11.

Members of the GOP also strongly favored going to war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but those feelings have faded over time, with just four in 10 Republicans in 2013 saying the wars weren’t worth fighting, according to Blake.

Paul, a senator from Kentucky, has said America is now suffering the consequences of its decision to occupy Iraq, which he characterized June 22 on CNN's "State of the Union" as a "Jihadist wonderland … because we got over involved, not because we had too little involvement."

Paul has been vocal about his objection to using military force as a first option and has decried U.S. involvement in both Syria and the Ukraine-Russia conflict, according to Fox News.

But whether members of the GOP will feel the same way over time, "when Republicans actually see a reason for foreign involvement that (Paul) doesn't necessarily agree with," is the great unknown, Blake writes.

Right on. Free trade with all, messy foreign entanglements with none.

Close the border, raise the drawbridge, man the battlements.

Fortress America.

Leave the Muzzies and the weenie Europeans to their fates.

And if anybody dares to mess with us, annihilate them utterly. Leave not a stone upon a stone. Kill them all.

They will never like us, but they certainly will respect us.

And since I personally don't give a rat's backside about them, respect laced with mortal fear suffices.

[ And if anybody dares to mess with us, annihilate them utterly. Leave not a stone upon a stone. Kill them all. ]

No, I prefer a quota system with a magnatude increase per event... Here is how it works...

Country stages a 9/11 type event, 3,000 people die, we go over to their country and kill 30,000 male adults then promptly leave. Factor = 10x.

Country retailiates and stages another 9/11 event, kills 500 people. We go over there and kill 50,000 adult males then leave. Factor = 100X.

Country is dumb as hell and again decides to come over here and kill 700 more people. We go back and kill 700,000 adult males and again promptly leave. Factor = 1,000X.

Eventually they will either run out of adult males or they will be taken over by their hopefully smarter neighbors becasue they ran out of adult males to protect their country.

Each time you increase the retaliation factor by a magatude per event, 10x, 100X, 1,000X, 10,000X, 100,000X etc.... Until the other country runs out of adult males....

While i supported Bush at the time i thought i understood what Afghanistan and Iraq we’re all about. I was wrong. I believed that we went to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and hopefully catch Bin Laden, and Iraq to put a force powerful enough on Iran’s eastern and western border to surround them and contain them and foment insurrection and when the time was right invade and kill the ayatollahs. All of that was wishful thinking!!! It’s clear we have leaders in both parties who’s only concerns are personal and not the far reaching goals of a peaceful world. Ideas can be dangerous things, especially religious ideas that foment barbarous, murderous beliefs of moral superiority.

[ While i supported Bush at the time i thought i understood what Afghanistan and Iraq we’re all about. I was wrong. I believed that we went to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and hopefully catch Bin Laden, and Iraq to put a force powerful enough on Iran’s eastern and western border to surround them and contain them and foment insurrection and when the time was right invade and kill the ayatollahs. All of that was wishful thinking!!! It’s clear we have leaders in both parties who’s only concerns are personal and not the far reaching goals of a peaceful world. Ideas can be dangerous things, especially religious ideas that foment barbarous, murderous beliefs of moral superiority. ]

If we are fighting a backwards culture you always must go in like the fist of an angry god and just a quickly leave like a thief in the night....

That is the only damned thing these primitives understand and respect is forces of nature so we HAVE TO BECOME A RESPECTED FORCE OF NATURE!

Army Special Forces knows better, a large part of their mission, and what makes them the only Special Operations force of their kind on earth, is to win hearts and minds and create fighting forces from among the indigenous populations, and empower and support locals who support our goals.

Their view is the long view, the Nazis and other military's tried your methods and it didn't work, it doesn't work.

"Fractured by internal conflict and foreign intervention for centuries, Afghanistan made several tentative steps toward modernization in the mid-20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, some of the biggest strides were made toward a more liberal and westernized lifestyle, while trying to maintain a respect for more conservative factions. Though officially a neutral nation, Afghanistan was courted and influenced by the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, accepting Soviet machinery and weapons, and U.S. financial aid. This time was a brief, relatively peaceful era, when modern buildings were constructed in Kabul alongside older traditional mud structures, when burqas became optional for a time, and the country appeared to be on a path toward a more open, prosperous society. Progress was halted in the 1970s, as a series of bloody coups, invasions, and civil wars began, continuing to this day, reversing almost all of the steps toward modernization taken in the 50s and 60s."

"Afghanistan once had Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. In the 1950s and '60s, such programs were very similar to their counterparts in the United States, with students in elementary and middle schools learning about nature trails, camping and public safety. But scouting troops disappeared entirely after the Soviet invasions in the late 1970s."

There is no point in being interventionist for mere short term goals (Libya) without any long term goals and a willingness and commitment to achieve them, which is a commitment and willingness that must be shared by the locals we are engaged with.

With Obama and Maliki that joint and shared thinking and commitment on long term goals for Iraq have been absent, from both men. Each has pursued a U.S.-Iraq relationship devoted to their personal partisan domestic political agendas which left the Iraqi people minus effective leadership & support, domestically and from the U.S.; making very fertile ground for the likes of ISIS and other terrorists to exploit the bad domestic situation Maliki has allowed to fester.

No. The U.S. did not create the bad domestic conditions in Iraq. The U.S. also did not do anything to seriously stymie or prevent them either, and it could have, beginning with obtaining a SOFA agreement that insured all the terrorists knew we would remain actively engaged with helping with Iraqi security issues. The caveat with that is the U.S. may not have gotten a SOFA agreement we needed with the Maliki government, no matter what. In the end our commitment cannot function as a one sided commitment, as a commitment our local partners don’t share.

If Rand Paul is right on Iraq he is right because the U.S. and Iraq’s political class were not possibly going to pursue common ground on long term goals for Iraq, because too much of Iraq and too many Iraqis are not giving COMMON and shared goals for Iraq as their priority. That is something the U.S. cannot fix.

Great post, but very respectfully I think you're missing the main point, which is that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN IRAQI.

There are Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs, and Muslim Kurds of various flavors, plus a few Chalean Christians, Turkomen Shias and so on and so forth.

But there are no Iraqis.

The great mistake of Bush II's foreign policy is that he naively thought that just because an area on the map says "Iraq" or, say "Rwanda" that the people living there are correspondingly "Iraqis" or "Rwandans." Turns out that simply isn't true.

The Hutus and Tutsis living in the contrived, designed-to-fail political entity called Rwanda sure didn't see it that way.

Nor did the various tribal and religious communities uneasily sharing a Brit-created entity called "Iraq." Whatever our policy should be, to be sane it must begin with the facts as they actually are, and the most salient of those facts is that there is not, never was and never will be any such critter as an "Iraqi."

The groups you are referring too, “Iraqis”, since the beginning of the Muslim era, in the south central core of “Mesopotamea” had been administered/governed most of the time through one governing administration all the way into the Ottoman era, with the heart of the administration either in Baghdad or Damascus, regardless of the diverse groups in the area. What they did have very often within that administration was a lot of local autonomy, as long as the central administration dictates were obeyed. No, it was not in our way of thinking a “nation state” in the modern sense, but governed together yes the diverse people of the area were.

One of the key historical problems in the area has always been the Shia-Sunni split, and the vast majority of the time Sunni leaders have had the central governing authority whether or not Sunni Muslims were the majority or not; in fact many Sunni Muslims in the area have most often believed it was their right to rule, as is still the case in the Gulf States ( where Sunni Muslims are the minority) and in Saudi Arabia.

This 700 year Sunni-Shia split in Islam is what keeps resurfacing in Iraq/Mesopotamea local divisions and historically is replayed again and again, with violence until some new balance/accommodation is reached by force or by agreement.

The Ottoman’s kept the peace in Iraq/Mesopotamea the longest by the combination of a lot of local autonomy and assurance the Ottoman rulers would get rid of any opposing their rule. However, to the Shia, it was the later part, acting as suppression of them, by the Sunni Ottoman’s that continued to subjugate them in spite of much local autonomy they often had.

Yes, the Kurds have always been a separate people joined by force of the governing power into rule by a common central governor that was never a Kurd and almost always an Arab or Turk Sunni. That is not new to the modern state of Iraq.

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