The Oddness of Ron Paul

Ron Paul is an interesting man who adds some life to otherwise moribund Republican debates (as does Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats). He suffers from hard-case libertarian, even Utopian, values. He would virtually eliminate government in every aspect of our lives. When he turns his vision to foreign policy, it gets interesting.

The following is from a brief interview he did in Business Week (12/10/07, p22):

You want to take the troops out of Iraq, but what about Iran? What do we do if other nations turn hostile?

I’d treat them something like what we did with the Soviets. I was called to military duty [as a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon] in the ’60s when they were in Cuba, and they had 40,000 nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and we didn’t have to fight them. We didn’t have to invade their country. But to deal with terrorism, we can’t solve the problem if we don’t understand why they [attack us]. And they don’t come because we’re free and prosperous. They don’t go after Switzerland and Sweden and Canada. They come after us because we’ve occupied their land, and instead of reversing our foreign policy after 9/11, we made it worse by invading two more countries and then threatening a third. Why wouldn’t they be angry at us? It would be absolutely bizarre if they weren’t. We’ve been meddling over there for more than 50 years. We overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953; we were Saddam Hussein’s ally and encouraged him to invade Iran. If I was an Iranian, I’d be annoyed myself, you know. So we need to change our policy, and I think we would reduce the danger.

That “why” – why they attack us, why they hate us, is key and critical and studiously ignored by our largely right wing American media and virtually all the candidates.

Ron Paul’s not got a chance in hell. If he won the nomination, Republican handlers would probably organize a motorcade through Dealey Plaza. But he’s interesting to watch. He, like Kucinich, traffics without fear in areas otherwise verboten, saying things that are (gasp!) plainly true. That’s not allowed in American political campaigns.