Those Who Say 'Meet Ron Paul's Jeremiah Wright' are All Wrong
Former Air Force lecturer Robert Pape and Ron Paul's foreign policy are under attack from those who refuse to learn the motivation for 9/11 and who ignore the real threat that only Paul understands by Evan Mazur
(libertarian)
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
World Net Daily published a front page Op-ed by Joel Richardson saying that Robert Pape is Ron Paul's Jeremiah Wright. Pape is known for his position that terrorist attacks are motivated by one government meddling in the affairs of another government, and the best way to prevent these attacks is to mind one's own business and stay out of the affairs of foreign countries. Robert Pape and Ron Paul often say that the cause of 9/11 was that 'they were over here because we were over there'. The war hawks of course claim that terrorists hate America because of the freedom of the American people, and that Paul's position of saying the 9/11 attacks were motivated by America's foreign policies is the same as "blaming America". Another way to look at it is that Richardson and the like are blaming the American people for being free so that's why the attacks occured, while Paul's position is to "blame" the government for mismanaging its foreign policy (for accuracy's sake, I've personally never heard Paul use the word 'blame', he just says that U.S. foreign policy 'motivates' the terrorists). So is Ron Paul right and is Joel Richardson wrong? Of course - just look at the evidence:
The Department of Defense in 2004 released a report saying Muslims don't hate our freedoms, they hate our policies:
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies. Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self determination.
Former Dep. Sec. of Defense Wolfowitz said in 2003 the presence of U.S. troops in Muslim lands was used as a recruiting tool of al Qaeda and was also a principle grievance of bin Laden:
"There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina."
"Terrorism is the price of empire. They were over here because we were over there"
Michael Scheuer, who has a 22-year career as an intelligence agent and who was the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit (Alec Station) affirms that Muslims hate America for its foreign policies, not for its freedoms. From page 205 of his book Marching Toward Hell:
"Ten years into the war declared by bin Laden, then, official Washington resolutely refuses to address the Islamists' true motivation: only a single member of America's governing elite - Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) - has publicly indicated that he has caught on to the reality that our enemies are motivated by U.S. foreign policy. Instead, U.S. government officials, and the leaders of both political parties, simply and reflexively repeat that the Islamists hate America and are waging war against it because of our freedoms, liberty, and gender equality, not because of what the U.S. government does in the Islamic world. This claim is a blatant lie, bad for that reason alone but worse because it keeps Americans from clearly gauging the enemy's motivations and intentions, or bin Laden's enormous potential appeal among the world's 1.4 billion Muslims. Frankly, persisting in this lie amounts to a death wish."
Is Scheuer right about the 'death wish'? I'd call it a financial suicide wish. Bin Laden's plan was to bankrupt the U.S. just like the Soviet Union, something even Glenn Beck has acknowledged:
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
All Praise is due to Allah.
So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.
Wars cost a lot of money. Bin Laden is estimated to have cost the U.S. over $2 trillion. Iraq wasn't cheap either. As Ron Paul wrote on p. 36 of The Revolution - A Manifesto in 2008:
"It isn't just the Iraq war that busts the budget - it's our overseas military presence as a whole. We have reached a point at which it now costs $1 trillion per year to maintain. One trillion dollars. The proposed Pentagon Budget alone was $623 billion for 2008. "What's remarkable about this year's military budget," wrote one military analyst, "is that it's the largest budget since World War II, but, of course, we're not fighting World War II"
So what's the consequence of all the foreign and domestic spending that's paid for on a credit card? The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued in April 2007 a report titled “The Nation’s Long-Term Fiscal Outlook” and the data shows that by 2040, nearly every dollar the government collects in taxes will be needed for Social Security, Medicare, and paying interest on the national debt. If another war is started, that year will approach even faster. We will all be tax slaves living in a black hole of debt with no money for defense in a country that will no longer be worth defending. The only hope to evade this is to elect Ron Paul who will make the most cuts in spending and who will handle foreign policy diplomatically. If diplomacy fails he will not hesitate to go to war - he voted in favor of using military force in Afghanistan to hunt the terrorists and he also authored legislation that authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden. Unlike previous administrations, Paul will fight to win as quickly as possible and then get out. No experiments in nation building and no undeclared wars outside the bounds of the Constitution.
If you agree that the debt from endless spending on liberal domestic policies is going to bankrupt this nation, you have to agree that the debt from endless spending on the war and military will also bankrupt America. If not, you might as well vote Obama as he is consuming America's blood and treasure through both domestic and foreign mismanagement. The real threat to America isn't extremist Islam, it's debt - the WMD ignored by all other candidates except for Ron Paul. If you think of yourself as tough on defense, vote for Ron Paul - the only candidate that will balance the budget so that America can afford to defend itself. Whatever you do, don't chicken out and surrender by supporting some candidate deemed by the mainstream media as the most "electable".
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in this article are those of Evan Mazur only and
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Evan Mazur is solely responsible for the contents
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