Posted on 12/27/2011 7:40:07 AM PST by KevinDavis
"None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It is weakness that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments.
America is the most peaceful, least warlike nation in modern history. We are not the cause of all the ills of the world. We’re a patient and generous people. But for the sake of our freedom and that of others, we cannot permit our reserve to be confused with a lack of resolve."
*Ronald Reagan*
(Excerpt) Read more at reagangirl.com ...
That’s RIGHT. This misunderstanding by Ron Paul is the main reason I cannot support him.
Ron Paul is only the symptom. Unfortunately the GOP has chosen to self destruct in an attempt to eliminate the symptom while clinging to the disease.
Ron Paul is no Reagan and Reagan was not a war president but he did understand the need to make sure everyone knew we carried a big gun.
It seems you have misunderstood Ron Paul's position, which was perfectly expressed by Ronald Reagan, above.
Our current foreign policy weakens our military, and saps our treasury and our resolve by spreading our military thinly all over the world.
Ron Paul's position is to rebuild our military strength and use it only for national defense.
For SURE! bttt
"....One cannot simply blindly apply first principles to every situation, for this ends in a dogmatic and false absolutism.
"This is, for example, what creeps people out about Ron Paul.
"He says plenty of things -- derived from first principles embodied in the Constitution -- that make perfect sense. However, he always goes too far, in that half of what he says results from a blind application of first principles, irrespective of empirical reality.
"The same moral confusion afflicts leftists who wouldn't waterboard a known terrorist with information about an imminent attack, owing to an unthinking allegiance to the principle of "non-torture" -- which any normal person shares, up to a point, the point of suicidal insanity. ..."
Cut and Run’s foreign policy is that of an ostrich.
The reason Ron Paul fails to make this argument is the religious pluralism that has metastasized among all of our politicians. Not one of them will condemn Islam as the oppressive and insufferable religion of conquest by the sword that it is because our national religion of secular humanism condescends to all other religions as lesser equals.
Paul's moral equivalence statements about accursed places like Iran drive me crazy but it's not as dangerous as the war on freedom that is being made by our country against it's own persons.
The GOP would be well served by looking to the middle ground.
Our big problem these days is Iran. I’m not sure what the best course of action there is but I know ignoring it is the wrong thing to do.
Except for the gold standard, Paul is William Jennings Bryan.
With a military establishment equipped and funded to higher levels than the next dozen powers or so in the world, the US is far from becoming militarily weak, except if we manage to go bankrupt from profligate use of it for minimal national benefit.
Odd - on the issue of alarm over Iranian nukes, for example, Peres http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=251066 and van Creveld,
http://www.forward.com/articles/11673/ and a fomer USCC commander sound a lot like Ron Paul, and for that matter, so does the current Israeli PM Netanyahu; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-KA-Nc3_k
Of course, they could be wrong... (and many of the reader feedback comments to the Peres article say as much, in emphatic language). But the Iranian threat to the Gulf of Hormuz http://gazday.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=953:iran-and-the-strait-of-hormuz-stratfor-commentary-&catid=1:latestnews&Itemid=111 still seems to be a much more credible “nuclear option” in the event of a military operation against Iran than their precarious and oft-delayed nuclear weapons (and delivery systems) development project. Perhaps the fate of Libya’s former dictator (having apparently abandoned his nuclear ambitions and been rewarded with a US/NATO-backed insurrection that took him and his ruling faction out, to be replaced by a coalition of Sunni Islamic radicals) has heightened the Iranian mullah-state’s ardor for getting their own nuke - - but maybe the rest of us can put this lower on the ranking of ‘serious threats’? As the reviews of his book on nuclear proliferation note, van Creveld doesn’t let us off the hook on the possibility of nuke-based attacks from ‘somewhere’, but his case there has more to do with the erosion of the control mechanisms of developed states, as described in his “Rise and Decline of the State” : http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-State-Martin-Creveld/dp/052165629X than the peculiarities of the apocalyptic outlooks of certain factions in the fractious and unstable Iranian polity.
‘Speculation of Israel’s nuclear arms deters Iran’
By GREER FAY CASHMAN AND JPOST.COM STAFF
12/27/2011 10:54 http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=251066
President Peres says that mystery, rumors surrounding Dimona nuclear facility serve as a powerful deterrent.
The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran
Opinion By Martin van Creveld
Published September 24, 2007, issue of September 28, 2007.
http://www.forward.com/articles/11673/
Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.
General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid.
Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict [Hardcover]
Martin Van Creveld (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Proliferation-Future-Conflict-Creveld/dp/0029331560
From Publishers Weekly
Though the possibility of nuclear confrontation between superpowers has greatly diminished since the end of the Cold War, the possession of nuclear weapons by states whose conflicts are unresolved could turn out to be equally threatening, notes Van Creveld ( The Transformation of War ). He here considers the likelihood of conflict between North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, China and India, India and Pakistan, Israel and the Arab states, as well as the nuclear status of other countries currently developing the scientific, technological and industrial infrastructure that would enable them to build weapons of mass destruction. Van Creveld begins this academic study by describing the basic characteristics of large-scale warfare as it evolved before the introduction of nuclear weapons and the effect of the latter on both the countries that possess them and on those countries threatened by them. Finally, he assesses the impact of nuclear proliferation on the future of war itself, including the configuration of the armies that would be prepared to wage it. For specialists.
From Kirkus Reviews
A somewhat reassuring audit of the residual threat posed by nuclear weapons, from a military analyst whose previous predictions have proved chillingly prescient. With defense budgets in both the US and the erstwhile USSR in full retreat, van Creveld (History/Hebrew University, Jersusalem; The Transformation of War, 1991, etc.) focuses on the state of the atomic-arms art in a clutch of less-developed countries—China, India, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, etc. Among other matters, his informed survey considers the impact of strategic circumstances on national nuclear policies, and provides estimates of each country’s atomic inventories. For various reasons, van Creveld concludes that the use of A-bombs or their tactical equivalents by Third World nations is effectively foreclosed. In the case of Pakistan, for instance, the author contends that the development of a nuclear arsenal has made its rulers ``simultaneously more confident of themselves and less adventurous.’’ Which is not to say that van Creveld believes the West to be home free. Indeed, he reiterates previous warnings as to the faltering capacity of even modern industrial powers to monopolize violence, let alone combat or contain terrorism, grass-roots insurgencies, and allied belligerencies. For the time being, however, van Creveld doesn’t see any danger of nuclear holocaust at the hands of the less- developed nations. A perceptive study that affords a measure of cold comfort on the score of deterrence.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan
“Except for the gold standard, Paul is William Jennings Bryan.”
That is a fairly large exception. Moreover, viewing the consequences of Wilson plunging the USA into the European Great War (immediately after winning a second term on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War”), and preventing a stalemate that would have forced the European powers to a less unstable settlement than the Versailles Treaty, WJ Bryan’s refusal to remain as Wilson’s SecState is not obviously mistaken.
Far from “making the world safe for democracy”, Wilson and his vigilante supporters suppressed democratic dissent at home and contributed to the making of a “peace to end all peace” http://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-20th-Anniversary/dp/0805088091 that led to a century populated with totalitarian states that took most of the century to reduce.
At least Wilson did get a declaration of war on carefully specified enemies from Congress before proceeding, however, unlike the wars commenced in recent years, which have blurred into a ‘perpetual war’ with enemies that now include, by vote of a large bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress, US citizens on US soil with the definition of ‘enemy’ left to the discretion of the commander in chief.
There is a difference between “isolationism” and “anti-interventionism” which critics of Paul seem incapable of grasping. Perhaps they don’t want to understand it. Another year or two of the consequences of break-the-bank interventionism may help to illuminate the difference.
Financial Arbitrage Capitalism After 10 Years
http://www.prudentbear.com/index.php/creditbubblebulletinview?art_id=10610
There should be an age limit for candidates. A 75 year old coot has no business entering the presidental race. He’s just a crazy little old man.
Even if Paul "wins" the Iowa caucuses with less than a quarter of the vote, that doesn't mean the GOP is self-destructing. There is no way he will win the nomination with his wacko neo-isolationist foreign policy.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The self destruction of the GOP doesn’t have anything to do with whether Ron Paul wins or not. It has to do with the desperate GOP attempt to eliminate the symptom while clinging to the disease.
The current tactic is only helping Ron Paul and Obama by extension.
If that were the whole of Paul's argument, it would be reasonable and even supportable, depending on the details. After all, with the Cold War now over for two decades, it's probably time for the Germans to defend themselves from the Russkies.
However, when the real core of his argument is moral equivalence blather one step removed from Ward Churchill (and the raw stupidity of believing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be deterred by MAD like he's a member of the Soviet Politburo sipping vodka in his daccha) there is no reason, no argument, only Medea Benjamin in a suit.
Recently, I heard a Ron Paul supporter calling in to WLS to express his absolute certainty that Iran would never nuke Israel because it "isn't logical." It caused my frontal lobe actual pain to realize that this sad sack thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a logical being, but what was really sad was his complete understanding of Islamofascism in the first place. I longed to ask this twit what is logical about an architect in ihis early thirties throwing his life--and the lives of innocent women and children--away to kill a bunch of stockbrokers.
When Paulestinians say Paul is like Reagan on foreign policy, it reminds me of the Reagan administration officials who pop up on NPR to tell us how Reagan would have loved this or that aspect of Obama's economic policies. Yeah, sure, and he was from Krypton, too.
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