In my lifetime I cannot ever recall seeing a serious candidate–he is second in Iowa and third nationally in the polls I read–as carefully ignored by all media as Ron Paul.
If the primaries are undecided by the time they get to my state, he will get my vote.
I have long been a hawk, thinking we needed to go out and meet the enemies of America proactively, on their soil, and not ours. Like many others, I have long invoked the memory of Munich and the fallacious “peace in our time” negotiated there, and noted often that Churchill always called World War 2 the “unnecessary war”.
But we do not face a Nazi Germany. We do not face any coherent foe at all. We face a disorganized mob of radicals. I agree with the basic concept that they should not be granted safe places for organizing. At the same time, all we need in Afghanistan, in my view, is sufficient troops to trim the wings of the radicals from time to time. If they are organizing obvious training camps, we hit them and everyone dies or gets arrested. This benefits us and the Afghan government, and most of the people.
In the end, we have massive military power, far greater than that of any power before us, or present on the Earth today. It’s not even close.
What we have lacked is credibility. Saddam Hussein defied us and the UN because he thought we would never invade. We did. This provided a good lesson to many around the world.
At the same time, our greatest dangers, now, are from economic chaos and collapse, both of which are actually made worse by our massive military spending (although made “most worst” by our unfunded social spending mandates, by far).
I’m willing to give Paul a shot. I watched this video, and there are plainly some mistakes. Mossadegh was no Communist, but the Soviets were very actively trying to organize a coup to overthrow him so they could get access to Iranian oilfields. The Shah was no saint, but was much more humane than the radicals who followed him, and the Shah’s overthrow–far from being inevitable–was only made possible by Carter’s decision to abandon him, to cut off all support and aid, and refuse to allow the use of American assets to protect and defend him.
The poignant moment for me, though, was at the end (yes, the thing is plainly trying to tug on heartstrings), when children saw their fathers for the first time in a long time.
I know many, many soldiers, and deployments are hard. They change peoples personalities. They end marriages. They distance children from parents who were unable to be in their lives. This is true even of ordinary deployments, where the soldier, sailor, Marine, airman comes back psychologically normal.
Being a student of history, I think back to the Romans. The Roman Empire became as big as it did because they kept pushing the borders back to protect from barbarians. They would conquer one set of them, then be attacked anew from the new border by another set.
Now, Rome fell in large measure due to the failure of Augustus to establish a clear method of transferring power, which in turn led to numerous internecine conflicts that led to the decay of the caliber of the Legions, and the necessity of in effect using mercenaries. It did not fall because it was an Empire.
But it is also clear that no matter how far out they went, the fighting, somewhere, never stopped. They never conquered Germany. If memory serves, they may have conquered parts of Iraq, but not Iran. That’s where the Parthians were, who at one point–again if memory serves–captured and I believe killed a Roman emperor.
The United States is plainly not an Empire. You take stuff when you are an Empire. We don’t do that. We on the contrary spend money to build things, then leave. But the lesson here is that if you can’t end the fighting anyway, why not become so powerful on our home turf that no one can even consider attacking us, then waiting until credible, actionable threats emerge?
We are not going to invade Iran. Nor do I think a credible military solution short of that exists. To my mind, the rational solution is deterrance. Yes, many of them are nuts–or act nuts–but are they really going to risk the destruction of their nation when there is nothing in their actual theology to give them reason to think the Mahdi’s emergence can be coerced through stupidity and violence? Some believe this, but my suspicion is that much of this is merely bluffing. If you can convince someone you are nuts, you can get a lot of concessions.
Few thoughts.