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U. S. Foreign Policy, Terrorism, and Ron Paul
Sirius
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I was glad to see from the Republican Debate thread just how many here were watching on Tuesday night. Those who were watching saw something really, really interesting happen. This congressman from Texas named Ron Paul did something pretty spectacularly ballsy.
He actually suggested that America's foreign policy might be partially to blame for the 9/11 attacks.
To summarize clumsily, he basically said that perhaps part of why we were attacked had to do with the fact that we've been fucking about in the Arab world for decades, parking our warships off their coasts as "displays of force," stationing our troops on their soil, backing totalitarian regimes, overthrowing rulers, and generally imposing our will, that such actions are bound to engender some animosity, and that we failed to anticipate the kind of backlash our actions were going to bring about.
Now, anyone acquainted with the work of Noam Chomsky (or of the 9/11 Commission) is already familiar with that position. Ron Paul's articulation of it wasn't quite as strident as mine would have been, but nonetheless, it was really impressive. Some people clapped, which was also impressive.
What happened next was the wild part, though.
Giuliani took the mic and loudly denounced him, saying that of all the absurd explanations he had ever heard for 9/11, the claim that America invited the attacks [straw man, much?] really took the cake. As the mayor of New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he said, he was personally offended, and called for Paul to retract his statement immediately. This was followed by thunderous applause.
(Giuliani's a dick.)
Momentary chaos ensued, there was a brief shouting match (!) before the moderators calmed things down and changed the subject abruptly and awkwardly, leaving lots of tension hanging in the air.
(Aside: Now IMO Ron Paul has sort of established himself as a crazy fucker in many areas. Fiscally, he's a total libertarian, as far as I can tell, and he basically wants to straight-up abolish affirmative action and welfare. In short, there's no way in holy fuck I'd vote for him over Hillary or Barack, or any Democrat, for that matter. Nonetheless, his foreign policy comment in the debate was refreshing as hell. And from a Republican! Who would have thought?)
He discussed the exchange with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and the segment is up on YouTube. CNN took a very short sampling of his remark during the debate, much less than I would have liked to see preserved on YouTube, but you'll kind of get the idea. The only thing you really need to keep in mind was that Iraq actually wasn't the only example of our dalliances in the Middle East that he brought up.
Another really interesting part was that Fox News (who, naturally, was running and broadcasting the Republican Presidential Debate) had a poll - one of those "text-message your vote to this number" polls - wherein viewers could vote for the candidate who, in their opinion, had "won" the debate. Fox News spent the entire pregame, and most of the debate, talking up the poll and encouraging viewers to weigh in via text.
To my knowledge, they never showed the final results.
However, word did get out regarding exactly what those results were.
Ron Paul won. Beating out McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Brownback, and, well, everyone else.
An MSNBC online poll with ~70,000 respondents shows Ron Paul leading by a considerable margin in every single positive category.
While I think this says more about the demographics of the people who texted in and voted online than about the actual impact Ron Paul had on the Republican voting base, it does say something nonetheless, specifically regarding his wildly inflammatory (or so it appeared) statement on foreign policy.
(It also says something about Fox News's journalistic integrity. But, I mean, duh.)
So you can pretty much tell from the tone I took in writing this where I stand on this issue, but I want to open it up to discussion, because I almost never hear it being talked about. As America contemplates its present status as a 3,000-mile-wide bull's eye, how much should we look to our foreign policy over the past half-century as a possible cause?
I'm hoping this can manage not to devolve into a partisan squabble; my girlfriend (who's in France, where the debate wasn't televised) described Ron Paul's comment as "heartening, because frankly, criticism of U.S. foreign policy shouldn't be a partisan issue. Then again, neither should a lot of things."
I'll stick around, and keep up as well as I can.
I'm also, of course, hoping to hear from people who are far better versed in the ins and outs of U. S. foreign policy's track record than I am.
He actually suggested that America's foreign policy might be partially to blame for the 9/11 attacks.
What a novel fucking idea.
Here's the full transcript of the debate; relevant segment starts about 2/3 of the way through.To summarize clumsily, he basically said that perhaps part of why we were attacked had to do with the fact that we've been fucking about in the Arab world for decades, parking our warships off their coasts as "displays of force," stationing our troops on their soil, backing totalitarian regimes, overthrowing rulers, and generally imposing our will, that such actions are bound to engender some animosity, and that we failed to anticipate the kind of backlash our actions were going to bring about.
Now, anyone acquainted with the work of Noam Chomsky (or of the 9/11 Commission) is already familiar with that position. Ron Paul's articulation of it wasn't quite as strident as mine would have been, but nonetheless, it was really impressive. Some people clapped, which was also impressive.
What happened next was the wild part, though.
Giuliani took the mic and loudly denounced him, saying that of all the absurd explanations he had ever heard for 9/11, the claim that America invited the attacks [straw man, much?] really took the cake. As the mayor of New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he said, he was personally offended, and called for Paul to retract his statement immediately. This was followed by thunderous applause.
(Giuliani's a dick.)
Momentary chaos ensued, there was a brief shouting match (!) before the moderators calmed things down and changed the subject abruptly and awkwardly, leaving lots of tension hanging in the air.
(Aside: Now IMO Ron Paul has sort of established himself as a crazy fucker in many areas. Fiscally, he's a total libertarian, as far as I can tell, and he basically wants to straight-up abolish affirmative action and welfare. In short, there's no way in holy fuck I'd vote for him over Hillary or Barack, or any Democrat, for that matter. Nonetheless, his foreign policy comment in the debate was refreshing as hell. And from a Republican! Who would have thought?)
He discussed the exchange with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and the segment is up on YouTube. CNN took a very short sampling of his remark during the debate, much less than I would have liked to see preserved on YouTube, but you'll kind of get the idea. The only thing you really need to keep in mind was that Iraq actually wasn't the only example of our dalliances in the Middle East that he brought up.
Another really interesting part was that Fox News (who, naturally, was running and broadcasting the Republican Presidential Debate) had a poll - one of those "text-message your vote to this number" polls - wherein viewers could vote for the candidate who, in their opinion, had "won" the debate. Fox News spent the entire pregame, and most of the debate, talking up the poll and encouraging viewers to weigh in via text.
To my knowledge, they never showed the final results.
However, word did get out regarding exactly what those results were.
Ron Paul won. Beating out McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Brownback, and, well, everyone else.
An MSNBC online poll with ~70,000 respondents shows Ron Paul leading by a considerable margin in every single positive category.
While I think this says more about the demographics of the people who texted in and voted online than about the actual impact Ron Paul had on the Republican voting base, it does say something nonetheless, specifically regarding his wildly inflammatory (or so it appeared) statement on foreign policy.
(It also says something about Fox News's journalistic integrity. But, I mean, duh.)
So you can pretty much tell from the tone I took in writing this where I stand on this issue, but I want to open it up to discussion, because I almost never hear it being talked about. As America contemplates its present status as a 3,000-mile-wide bull's eye, how much should we look to our foreign policy over the past half-century as a possible cause?
I'm hoping this can manage not to devolve into a partisan squabble; my girlfriend (who's in France, where the debate wasn't televised) described Ron Paul's comment as "heartening, because frankly, criticism of U.S. foreign policy shouldn't be a partisan issue. Then again, neither should a lot of things."
I'll stick around, and keep up as well as I can.
I'm also, of course, hoping to hear from people who are far better versed in the ins and outs of U. S. foreign policy's track record than I am.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Sirius on
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Like.........wow. What a spectacular display of foreign policy intelligence from the pubby front-runner.:x
But what scares me is that saying they just hate our freedoms or something means you really don't understand them very well. And how can you fight what you don't understand? It's stupid.
I don't think America did anything to prevent it from a social point of view.
It's not a matter of deserving attacks or not. It's recognizing that there are consequences for our policies abroad. It's the refusal to recognize this simple truth that terrifies me.
And you're entirely right, Shinto. Bush doesn't seem to recognize the root causes for terrorism and neither do most of the Republican nominees for president.
I'm not even really sure what that means.
I suspect that Bush recognizes the root causes and just doesn't care.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If that's true, then we're even more fucked than I thought.
The root causes of terrorism is that the Middle East simply doesn't like a lot of what we have done in the past, for a lot of reasons. And we don't really bother to address that.
Maybe I'm not cynical enough, but I think a large number of our elected officials honestly believe that They Hate Us for our Freedom, or are just jealous of our prosperity, or, alternately, because the Koran tells them to.
While religion is definitely serving as a very effective galvanizing tool in this case, effectively providing an excuse to kill us for those who want to find one, there's really a lot more to it than that. I believe one of the reasons Bin Laden cited just after 9/11 was the fact that the U. S. continued to support Israel basically unconditionally, never mind the fact that after WWII the U. S. and Britain up and declared that they were requisitioning a bunch of Palestinian land for the purpose of making a new country, exhibiting a callous sort of "What do they care? They're just Arabs; fuck 'em" mentality.
We haven't done much better since.
I suspect that conservatives equate a causal connection with justification. I think they are mainly eager to hold to the clean lines of moral clarity.
It seems to pretty much crush any public expression of understanding terrorism though. But they don't really want to understand it. They just want to crush it.
I suspect that the united states will flail around doing various things for the next couple decades until the middle east becomes as disillusioned with Takfiri movements as they are with Arab Nationalism. Then we'll claim victory, although we really did very little to address or defeat the phenomenon.
Because we can pretty much outlast anything. Our basic political and economic system is stable and resilient.
In general I don't like Republicans very much, but this Ron Paul dude earned my respect. At least for the moment; I mean, this is politics we're talking about. Changing stances on critical issues, especially in the face of pressure, isn't exactly unheard of.
Spoken like a true American.
Blah blah.
No nation deserves terrorist attacks on it's civilians.
Even the populations of Germany and Japan didn't morally deserve it.
...sorry about Dresden...
And the shit about the Shah of Iran? All fucking part of the Cold War that is over!
Wasn't it WWII that changed the face of warfare? Both sides began to target civilians because of the recognition that the true engine of war in the industrial era was a nation's economy (and thus, civilian population that fuels it).
So the justification was that there was little difference between civilian and soldier. If you helped make a tank, you were just as much a part of the military as the person driving the tank.
The extension of that seems to lead to the kind of resistance we see today by certain extremist groups.
"It's over" doesn't expunge it from our record. The U. S. has a long history of funding/arming oppressive regimes, turning a blind eye to their abhorrent human rights practices if they promise to treat us right.
Edit: for a topical example, does "Taliban" ring a bell?
Shit lives in people's memories. Especially when it's that recent. Hell, we haven't exactly left that kind of practice behind.
You see what I'm saying guys? Conservatives feel that any causal connect drawn carries a moral responsibility, which is intolerable.
By the way London, no this thread is not a wet dream for Chompsky. If you think that you either haven't really understood the posters here, or Chompsky, or both.
Yes, that is their logic.
You're either deliberately missing the point or just a bad reader/listener.
Saying that our actions have reactions DOES NOT JUSTIFY TERRORISM AGAINST CIVILIANS. All it says is that if we, say, bomb other countries on a consistent basis, place carrier groups near certain nations, put up sanctions that result in the deaths of thousands, etc etc, THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES OF SOME KIND.
Our actions in other countries has bred a huge amount of resentment and anger toward us and our government. These are the results. Ignoring the causal relationship is stupid and dangerous because you refuse to learn this basic lesson.
Spoken like a true American. I mean, the type of sheer arrogance you display here, with that "blah blah", is pretty typical.
Well, think about how much your country's foreign policies have fucked over the civilian populations of foreign nations, and reconsider that statement.
Yeah, I read some Fanon back in the day and other radical philosophers. Pretty scary stuff imho but we're seeing how powerful ideologies of violence can be in marginalized communities.
Things is, Ege, a lot of us disagree with those policies and would similarly argue that those civilian populations did not deserve their treatment either.
It's not arrogance, it's simply recognizing the difference between a civilian and a soldier.
It's not what it could be, but we've got a lot of long term staying power.
And I am saying that US foreign policies have not distinguished between civilian and soldier. So why would the terrorists make the distinction?
I think this is a pretty universal trait. "You could have prevented X" is often confused for "You had X comin' to ya."
Our president belongs to a fundamentalist eschatological Christian sect that believes that unrest in the Middle East, particularly unrest surrounding the state of Israel, is not only tolerable, but desirable in that it is a portent for a mythological end of the world scenario that they believe will morally vindicate their own actions and the resulting loss of human life. These people are absolutely fucking insane.
As far as I'm concerned, the only hope for the US (and the world, pretty much) is to get eschatological Evangelicals as far away from the White House and Capitol Hill as conceivably possible.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Don't be a dick, ege. It's not like decrying all terrorism as immoral is a uniquely American trait.
So how does attacking the civilian population of America redress this injustice?
Parenthetically, there's a certain song I feel I should direct you to. Called "Paper Tigers" by Thrice. It makes a distinction between the innocent civilians of our country that suffered directly from the 9/11 attacks and the government whose actions (to whatever degree you want to infer) provoked it:
We paid the price,
we paid for their crimes with our blood.
(Have I been praying for an excuse to cite Thrice? Have I? Quite possibly.)
It's like slapping someone, and decrying it as terrorism when they slap you back.
I don't think the aim of the terrorists was to redress the injustice. It was simple revenge.
So you mean we CAN punish those involved by proxy as a way to manipulate the actual power that we can't directly fight? Well, shit, it's open season on every nation's populace then, since every nation is/has been/will be a bastard.
When you are right, reality has your back and examples tend to crop up. Also, London is an alt of mine.
I really disagree with that statement. There have been incidents but by and large, the US population disagrees with that stance and government has openly punished those responsible (like the crazy fuckers in Vietnam). We actually have court-martials of soldiers in Iraq who commit violent acts against civilians (there's a fairly public one going on now). We have progressed beyond the philosophies that allowed for atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or Dresden or some parts of Vietnam).
Civilians are almost never the explicit targets of violent action by the US military nor are civilian deaths the driving force behind certain political actions either. When civilians are targeted, we punish those responsible (sometimes not harshly or quickly enough, but we are doing it right now). This is distinctly different than the current philosophies driving violent extremism. They often exclusively target civilians. Civilians are not collateral damage, they are the targets.
Oh good, ege02 takes another problematic moral position.
Do tell.
More fairly, targeting him for the actions of the Turkish government.
But can we? Can we PLEASE?
So why do we target all Muslims because of relatively few crazies?
Stupid analogy. Fine, I'll take your stupid analogy and raise you 50.
Actually, it's more like slapping him repeatedly, and then getting indignant when he kicks you in the nuts. Did you deserve it? No, not exactly. Should you have expected that something like that might happen? Yep.
Regarding your second paragraph, last summer when the Israel/Lebanon conflict was going on, we had this argument.
My stance was that there is not much difference between deliberately targetting civilians, and taking civilian deaths caused by collateral damage as granted, in a "meh, shit happens" sort of way.
If you know the missile you are launching will kill 10 terrorists and 1 civilian and you launch the missile, that civilian is not collateral damage. She is being murdered. Hell, we had another argument on this as well: if you know your actions will cause consequence Y, if you commit those actions did you intend Y? Most people would say yes.
The difference between deliberately targetting civilians and not giving a shit about collateral casualties is minimal at best. Certainly not large enough to warrant a claim like yours: "we have progressed beyond the philosophies that allowed for atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki." You haven't progressed beyond anything. The atrocities are still there; you just have a different excuse (i.e. collateral damage) for committing them.
edit: got class now. be back later.