Maggie's Farm

I'm voting for Hillary. I like the idea of having Bill back in the White House.

I can see why RP appeals to purists and p'o'd small-gov't libertarians. I'm highly sympathetic to his domestic policies.

Problem is his foreign policy. It reminds me of the pre-WWII period, whene we thought we were disengaged from the world's woes, until we realized we weren't.

And then had to fight WWII from a standing start, which made for a first two years that could easily have defeated us, and/or sent us to a negotiated armistice that would've left the fascisms, rather than kaput, in control of future war & peace.

The vast, horrific world war that might have been smothered in the crib had we played the 30s differently--had we not had a Ron Paul-like foreign policy in the 30s.

Well, for starters, he studiously ignores the entirety of the US and western case for OIF, preferring instead to ridicule the effort in the know-nothing Dennis Kuchinich style as more or less just America likes to bomb people.

Paul, did you watch the debates? The man's delivery?

If he isn't a zealot with pure angry contempt for countervailing views, then what is?

Not only that, but he's ''smalling'' the US Constitution, turning it into a populist applause line. The most offensive thing about the raft of 80s televangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert was just exactly the same sort of thumping, only they used the bible and RP uses the Constitution.

having said all that, his positions on domestic fiscal & monetary affairs are having some deserved success. We do need to keep the dollar respectable. But root-canal fiscal conservatism can leave an awful lot of stuff unbuilt. Even if some small amount of the debt-financed stuff turns out, when the business cycle turns, to have been better unbuilt, an awful lot of it SHOULD have been built, since doing so creates growth, expansion, wealth, assets, and jobs where there may have been none otherwise.

Those against US economic policy have great slogans with the inevitable bubbles that free movement of capital creates--but they will never talk about the two billion people across the globe who this decade are now--because of the US model, and US armed force guaranteeing freedom of the seas and open auction allocation of scarce resources-- finally for the first time in human history are living without the wolf at the door.

And we Americans ain't doing so bad--even with the subprime bubble--our big gloom right now is over falling from 4 or 5% back to 1 or 2 or 3% annual GDP growth--for a quarter or two.

Not much of a disaster, in the scheme of disasters.

GDP is up (Q3 revised = 4.9%) jobs are up, wages up, household net worth up, growth and productivity are up, and interest rates stable and low, and consumers--according to the latest numbers released today, are confidant and out there creating supply and demand, and making markets hum here at home and worldwide too.

RP knows all this--he knows better than his stump speech--he's an intelligent man who knows that ledgers have two sides for the reason that one side alone is always in essence a lie.

So to me that leads to the conclusion that his message--the gestalt message--is of a motive, an intent, similar to a too-familiar type of pol, often called rabble-rouser, or populist firebrand. The Huey P. Long and William Jennings Bryan types are charismatic and flamboyant, but their meaning is based at least partially on the less-than-highest human ideals, and as a result, to such leaders history has not often been kind.

''Middle-of-the-road quick-fix crap has been disastrous''

...compared to *what*?

I agree, AVI.

CC, your dating of the fall of Mossadegh as the beginning of mideast disaster ignores the larger history that the USSR was rampant, exploiting our weakness wherever possible (to become acute crises from central Asia to Africa to south and central america during the Carter retreat in the late 70s).

Mossadegh was a soviet sympathizer, the Rus leaders have always wanted a warm water port (and would later take a large step via the invasion of Afghanistan). Critique Dulles all you want for his minor role in toppling Mossedegh, but you can't today look back and see that an Iranian client state, via giving it the naysay over OPEC, saved the USSR from eventual dissolution--or worse, allowed it to win the inevitability game, and perhaps folding the world (which now has an all time high number of prosperous, free, democratic, and peaceful nations) into a permanent secret-police planet.

Paul, good post and persuasive, but the same o-i-l error imho applies to RP. I wish you guys would, in your constructs of alternate history, allow for the real, actual strategic meaning of mideast oil.

Not only would losing the open global auction allocation system (or even losing access or paying extortionate prices for it) drastically weaken the USA (in all ways), but it would simultaneously strengthen global adversaries (in all ways) who may on the basis of favorable conditions, and before we realize it, come to dominate the world.

Or should we assume that any supplanting superpower will decide to be benevolent, and respectful of our (and our allies) interests?

Pearl Harbor was a shock, as was 911--both cases USA had pulled out certain geostrategic contests and had ceded the field to other powers which kept the contest going anyway.

Surprise, we were in it after all, whether we liked it or not.

So, as i asked when CC spoke of ''our disaster in the mideast''--

Compared to what?

CC's previous answer "strategic common sense" is no answer at all, as precisely what we HAVE done could also be defendably called 'strategic common sense'.

After all, as it stands today we have a big say in the mideast (and a major bloc of alliances that to a greater or lesser degree flows from that), and you guys cannot make even a weak rhetorical case that we would not be well and truly screwed without it.

''What case for OIF? It's unconstituational and waste of money and lives. Period''

Paul, it does sound fine & lofty to say that no war should be fought for economic reasons, but the sad fact is that wars start over economic issues far more often that they do over any other consideration.

You could answer, 'yes but we anti-war types should have a say', and i would answer, you do, every two years and a big say every four.

And, while USA may have initiated the operation known as OIF, the conditions which led to that initiation were created not by USA but by active, declared, enemies of the USA.

Our choice was to fight or surrender. You can't extract OIF from the history leading up to it. Not with anything approaching credibility.

Yes, it's true, fighting back creates blowback.

WWII's familiarity makes for a ready example, what with the Axis having really poured on the coals (recruiting, building new divisions, war-emergency armament production), in the war's second half, after they had come to understand the allies' ''unconditional surrender'' war policy.

See the casualty records--the final year was the "killing year"--the "blowback" year--*after* everyone knew the Axis had lost the war.

If "avoiding blowback" had been our WWII policy, well, Tojo and Hitler would've been pleased as punch, no doubt able to parley with the whip hand sometime in 1942 or 1943.

Yes, blowback is everywhere, whether one acts or whether one does not act.

For another example, the blowback from our 1975-1980 foreign policy, that is, between the fall of Saigon and the election of Ronald Reagan, the five long years of a foreign policy much like that now being championed, as far as i can decipher, by Ron Paul:

After the peace accords had been signed in Paris, after USA had quit fighting, after USA combat units had been sent home, after congress had cut off aid & ammo to our desperately-fighting allies the South Vietnamese, in the five years following the free world teetered on the edge of war against a relentless USSR emboldened by USA's "Vietnam Syndrome"--which was an attitude of blowback-avoidance at nearky any cost.

During that time, while our cities were being swamped by vast armies of terrified peaceniks and commie-sympathizers in the unilateral-disarmament "Ban the (western) Bomb" movement resonating with our new non-interventionist peace policy, aggressive new commie insurgencies broke out into hot & bloody shooting-wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Colombia, and a dozen other small, vulnerable, free-world-aligned nations.

Blowback was what an isolated and withdrawn USA (led by president peanut and his notoriously anti-military and anti-intelligence congress) almost supinely endured as the Shah fell, the Soviets invaded the Persian Gulf approaches through Afghanistan, and a new terrorist jihad began attacking our embassies, blowing us up in our airplanes, and making hostages of our diplomats and servicemen all over the region.

And what did our anti-blowback policy have us do in response? Well, we pulled a boycott pout on the Moscow Olympics--an act which I can tell you from personal experience made us objects of comic derision where I was working at the time--in Venezuela, Brazil, & Mexico.

Anyhoo, everything that ever happens is ''blowback'' from everything that ever happened. And that blowback itself then creates more blowback.

"Blowback" (AKA "cause-and-effect") is a great rally-cry insofar as it triggers an emotional reaction, but as a concept it's pretty sterile, in that it clarifies no past nor guides any future. In fact it confuses and misleads on both counts.

Furthermore, the "blowback" claim-- "fighting terrorists simply creates more terrorists" --is not only extremely convenient for critics of the war effort, but is also conveniently extremely difficult to disprove with data, even tho the claim itself is far from data-derived, obviously intuitive rather than empirical, and as likely as not to be the very opposite of the actual truth. In fact it's flabbergasting that such a pointless tautology has been so blindly embraced as the core of a 'realist' anti-OIF critique.

Sheesh--playground rules--attackers attack and defenders defend, and no attacking creates no defending. IOW, the jihad is what keeps us there--so if the jihad's aim is to get us out of there, then why is it using precisely the wrong method to meet its goal? Is it really simply our presence in Araby (rather than our presence on planet Earth) that is creating jihad?

Anyway, while there's no doubt some fraction of the terrorist soldiery which would have been peaceful civilians if only we weren't there where they are, that fraction would have to be very large indeed to responsibly allow it to shield the rest, who as history has proven will when and if they are able, attack us wherever they can, and wherever we are, in the mideast or at home here in the USA.

Again just remember the D-Day & Okinawa effects, where allied invasions caused enemy armed-force emergency buildups, and ask yourself, exactly what IS the remedy for such an elemental stimulus-reponse natural mechanism? The answer to that is an either/or, the choice being either to try for victory or to accept defeat.

Last thought: RP's "blowback" is an over-simplified political club trying to beat the cost of OIF victory into an argument for something else besides OIF victory. While this of course isn't ipso facto illegitimate--history is full of phyrric victories--his campaign presentation is flat ignoring the reciprocal, that is, the likely cost of an American defeat in Iraq. This one-sided ledger--which appears so frequently in his economic and foreign policy presentations--is a contradiction of his own message of integrity and honest government, and it gives me a distinct lack of confidence in his potential presidential effectiveness.

Great discussion youse guys. I agree with many of the points, but want to especiaaly agree with CC's above:

''The problem with RonPaul’s “just walk away” from the game is that it simply gives up control to the other players.''

Who will then use oil to expropriate great gobs of western wealth, while simultaneously fueling their own growth with free oil, costs--like the rope in Lenin's notorious aphorism--paid for by the west.

Saudi oil is so light and cheap to lift, it can practically be pumped straight into Russian and Chinese battle tanks.

No, giving up our mideast oil-vote, the one which flows only from our strong military presence in the region, is the certain end of the west as we know it.

It's not a question of this happening or not--it already IS happening. But because we still have a position on the board, we are able to absorb some of the pressure from the Caspian Axis.

What is needed to keep from losing this deadly serious geopolitical oil game is a US gov't making clear in no uncertain terms that it intends to maintain a long-term alliance with Iraq.

The stakes re the Iraq and the USA's relationship with it could not be * higher.

Politicians demagoguing the war are guilty of lying to the voters on a massive scale. The "pull out, completely, right now" faction is almost unbelievably dangerously ignorant of the reality of the situation.