BillyFromPhilly
Member
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2007
- Messages
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“Mr. Speaker, Peace Is Always Superior to War”
by Anthony Gregory, Posted December 12, 2007
A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship by Ron Paul (Lake Jackson, Texas: Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, 2007); 372 pages; $19.95.
“Mr. Speaker, peace is always superior to war,” said Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the House floor on September 18, 2002, six months before President Bush took America to war with Iraq. This viewpoint comes through consistently in his foreign-policy speeches to Congress, spanning the years 1976 to 2006, now collected together in his book A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.
Whereas Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, often derive their hawkish and dovish positions from partisan calculation, the winds of political opinion, or the urgings of special interests and domestic constituencies, and not by a set of coherent principles or deep understanding of the economics and history of American foreign policy, Ron Paul is different. From the Reagan years through the Clinton years and past the aftermath of 9/11, Paul has consistently upheld the Jeffersonian principles of nonintervention, peace, honest diplomacy, and free trade as the path to American security, freedom, and more harmonious relations with the rest of the world.
One theme he has often stressed is the irrationality of U.S. policy abroad, most clearly demonstrated by America’s shifting alliances and commitments to both sides of various squabbles. The United States has had commitments to both Britain and Argentina, both Israel and the Arab states, both Greece and Turkey, and so on, regardless of any conflicts that may arise between the two allied interests. One decade, the U.S. government will be supporting the Taliban or Saddam Hussein and the next decade it will be at all-out war with the former ally.
Given that Ron Paul’s audience has been his fellow members of Congress as well as the general American population, his speeches do not always rise to the level of detail of academic foreign-policy books. But this is only fitting, and the speeches still make an extraordinarily inspiring and interesting read.
We see here a man doing all he can to reverse the tide of American interventionism, against the warmongering inertia of both parties, and if his words at times become somewhat repetitive it is only because he is tirelessly repeating the neglected truths and wisdom of the noninterventionist strain traditional to America. These truths need to be heard, and although his 30 years’ worth of speeches may at times become frustrating to read, in light of how much his words have been ignored, we can only be enthralled by how boldly and heroically he has persisted in his mission to educate his compatriots.
Although Paul presents his message in clear, accessible language, he demonstrates a level of sophisticated understanding of foreign policy that is hard to imagine any other federal legislator remotely approaching. This knowledge and his willingness to share it have allowed him to serve as a sort of oracle, warning his fellow members in Congress of the trouble yet to come if the foolish policy of perpetual intervention isn’t reversed. In this light, A Foreign Policy of Freedom is a great resource for the historian, compiling the primary-source documentation of the one American congressman who saw the full danger of U.S. intervention far before 9/11.
U.S. intervention in Lebanon
One of the best examples of this comes in his dissent from Reagan’s policy toward Lebanon. In voting against one of those many seemingly innocuous congressional resolutions condemning foreign violence, Paul warned on June 17, 1981,
Since when have the people of the United States become the guarantor of Lebanon? Such a promise could require the use of troops.... [This] resolution could be used to justify who-knows-what use of dollars and lives in a future conflict or peacekeeping operation.
On September 28, 1982, Paul continued his warnings when civilian massacres in Lebanon inspired Congress to draft more resolutions, which Paul saw as potentially very dangerous:
Condemning the killing is fine. But the fact that our policies can lead to and even promote the killing is a more crucial issue than any public pronouncement of this kind.... Congressional resolutions — House Concurrent Resolution 409 and House Resolution 159 — are actually congressional stamps of approval for extensive presidential decisions to intervene with the use of troops, the use of dollars, the use of weapons. And once we are bogged down in a crisis like this one, it is difficult to withdraw gracefully.
Seven months later, the American embassy in Lebanon was bombed, and Paul accordingly intoned,
What do we do? I believe that with this attack on U.S. territory, and the death of American citizens, the time to answer that question has arrived.... [We] must remove our troops from the region immediately.
Throughout September of 1983, Paul repeated his words of caution several times, prophetically warning,
It is with great risk that we remain in Lebanon and with the chance that significant escalation of the conflict will come on the heels of some unforeseen incident.
His warnings were ignored and a month later Hezbollah bombed U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen. Finally, Reagan did what Paul had long suggested and pulled out of Lebanon.
continued...
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0709f.asp
by Anthony Gregory, Posted December 12, 2007
A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship by Ron Paul (Lake Jackson, Texas: Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, 2007); 372 pages; $19.95.
“Mr. Speaker, peace is always superior to war,” said Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the House floor on September 18, 2002, six months before President Bush took America to war with Iraq. This viewpoint comes through consistently in his foreign-policy speeches to Congress, spanning the years 1976 to 2006, now collected together in his book A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.
Whereas Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, often derive their hawkish and dovish positions from partisan calculation, the winds of political opinion, or the urgings of special interests and domestic constituencies, and not by a set of coherent principles or deep understanding of the economics and history of American foreign policy, Ron Paul is different. From the Reagan years through the Clinton years and past the aftermath of 9/11, Paul has consistently upheld the Jeffersonian principles of nonintervention, peace, honest diplomacy, and free trade as the path to American security, freedom, and more harmonious relations with the rest of the world.
One theme he has often stressed is the irrationality of U.S. policy abroad, most clearly demonstrated by America’s shifting alliances and commitments to both sides of various squabbles. The United States has had commitments to both Britain and Argentina, both Israel and the Arab states, both Greece and Turkey, and so on, regardless of any conflicts that may arise between the two allied interests. One decade, the U.S. government will be supporting the Taliban or Saddam Hussein and the next decade it will be at all-out war with the former ally.
Given that Ron Paul’s audience has been his fellow members of Congress as well as the general American population, his speeches do not always rise to the level of detail of academic foreign-policy books. But this is only fitting, and the speeches still make an extraordinarily inspiring and interesting read.
We see here a man doing all he can to reverse the tide of American interventionism, against the warmongering inertia of both parties, and if his words at times become somewhat repetitive it is only because he is tirelessly repeating the neglected truths and wisdom of the noninterventionist strain traditional to America. These truths need to be heard, and although his 30 years’ worth of speeches may at times become frustrating to read, in light of how much his words have been ignored, we can only be enthralled by how boldly and heroically he has persisted in his mission to educate his compatriots.
Although Paul presents his message in clear, accessible language, he demonstrates a level of sophisticated understanding of foreign policy that is hard to imagine any other federal legislator remotely approaching. This knowledge and his willingness to share it have allowed him to serve as a sort of oracle, warning his fellow members in Congress of the trouble yet to come if the foolish policy of perpetual intervention isn’t reversed. In this light, A Foreign Policy of Freedom is a great resource for the historian, compiling the primary-source documentation of the one American congressman who saw the full danger of U.S. intervention far before 9/11.
U.S. intervention in Lebanon
One of the best examples of this comes in his dissent from Reagan’s policy toward Lebanon. In voting against one of those many seemingly innocuous congressional resolutions condemning foreign violence, Paul warned on June 17, 1981,
Since when have the people of the United States become the guarantor of Lebanon? Such a promise could require the use of troops.... [This] resolution could be used to justify who-knows-what use of dollars and lives in a future conflict or peacekeeping operation.
On September 28, 1982, Paul continued his warnings when civilian massacres in Lebanon inspired Congress to draft more resolutions, which Paul saw as potentially very dangerous:
Condemning the killing is fine. But the fact that our policies can lead to and even promote the killing is a more crucial issue than any public pronouncement of this kind.... Congressional resolutions — House Concurrent Resolution 409 and House Resolution 159 — are actually congressional stamps of approval for extensive presidential decisions to intervene with the use of troops, the use of dollars, the use of weapons. And once we are bogged down in a crisis like this one, it is difficult to withdraw gracefully.
Seven months later, the American embassy in Lebanon was bombed, and Paul accordingly intoned,
What do we do? I believe that with this attack on U.S. territory, and the death of American citizens, the time to answer that question has arrived.... [We] must remove our troops from the region immediately.
Throughout September of 1983, Paul repeated his words of caution several times, prophetically warning,
It is with great risk that we remain in Lebanon and with the chance that significant escalation of the conflict will come on the heels of some unforeseen incident.
His warnings were ignored and a month later Hezbollah bombed U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen. Finally, Reagan did what Paul had long suggested and pulled out of Lebanon.
continued...
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0709f.asp
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