Have you ever noticed that presidential candidates Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sound like conjoined twins when it comes to the Iraq War (second item) and U.S. foreign policy? Here’s how Paul answered Chris Matthews’ question on whether we went to war in Iraq over in the most recent Republican debate:
It’s neocolonialism that you have to maintain your supply routes and your natural resources.
But I think there’s still a lot of those kind of people around, and they believe - you know, we were told it was about oil and jobs when it first started in 1990, and this is just a continuation of that war. Indeed, this war is a mistake; it was a mistake to go in. It’s very costly, and it has a lot of economic ramifications. We’re going broke. We have this huge deficit. We’re spending nearly a trillion dollars with maintaining our empire overseas, and that’s a cost. Right now we owe foreigners $2.7 trillion. No wonder they have money to come back in here and buy stuff up, and then we object; but that has to do with our monetary system, as well as our foreign policy.
His libertarian supporters insist that every breath Paul takes and every move he makes is within the scope and intent of the U.S. Constitution. For instance, Paul believes the Iraq war is illegitimate, because Congress did not authorize military intervention with a formal declaration of war – a point he again brought up in the debate.
An editorial in last Friday’s edition of the New Hampshire Union Leader accused him of “unrealistic and dangerous isolationism,” because he “seems to think that the only national security threat America faces is from a direct military assault on our soil.” In his response to that editorial, Paul’s explanation that “a non-interventionist foreign policy is not an isolationist foreign policy” clearly demonstrates just how unrealistic and dangerous his ideological purity is. The Stiletto gives this round to the Union Leader.
Note: The Stiletto writes about politics and other stuff at The Stiletto Blog.
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