by Ron Paul
Interestingly enough, George W. Bush sounded some of these themes when he ran for president in the year 2000. By that time, many Republicans had grown weary of Bill Clinton's military interventions and forays into nation building and wanted to put a stop to it. Sensibly enough, Bush spoke of a humble foreign policy, no nation building, and no policing the world. In 1999, then Governor Bush declared: "Let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness."
In a debate with Vice President Al Gore the following year, Bush said: "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.' . . . I think one way for us to end up being viewed as 'the ugly American' is for us to go around the world saying, 'We do it this way; so should you.'"
Bush also rejected nation building. "Somalia started off as a humanitarian mission and changed into a nation-building mission," he said. "And that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called 'nation building.'" He added, "I think what we need to do is to convince the people who live in the lands [themselves] to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here--we're going to have kind of a 'nation-building corps' from America?"
Finally, when discussing other countries' perception of the United States, Bush said: "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble." We should be "proud and confident [in] our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course."
In other words, President Bush ran and won on a very different foreign policy from the one we are told all Republicans must support. We know what came later, of course. And by the 2008 Republican primaries, one of the front-runners had strayed so far from President Bush's original platform that he was even saying that in the future, nation building should become one of the standard functions of the American military.
Some Americans may be familiar with the admonition of John Quincy Adams that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But his sentiments extended well beyond this oft-cited maxim. First, Adams considered what could be said in America's defense if anyone were ever to wonder what she had done for the world:
[I]f the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world . . . should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless, and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights; she has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own; she has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Adams then described the foreign policy of the American republic:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . .
This wasn't "isolationism." It was a beautiful and elegant statement of common sense, and of principles that at one time were taken for granted by nearly everyone.
In the same way, Henry Clay was merely repeating George Washington's wise sentiments, rather than giving voice to isolationism, when he urged this piece of advice upon his countrymen: "By the policy to which we have adhered since the days of Washington . . . we have done more for the cause of liberty than arms could effect; we have shown to other nations the way to greatness and happiness. . . . Far better is it for ourselves . . . and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our pacific system and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen and falling republics in Europe." Thus we should strive to lead by example rather than force, and provide a model for the world that other peoples will wish to follow. We do no one any good by bankrupting ourselves.
Richard Cobden was a nineteenth-century British statesman who opposed all of his government's foreign interventions. In those days, though, people understood the philosophy of nonintervention much better than they do today, and no one was silly enough to brand Cobden an isolationist. He was known instead, appropriately enough, as the International Man.
There are those who condemn noninterventionists for being insufficiently ambitious, for their unwillingness to embrace "national greatness"--as if a nation's greatness could be measured according to any calculus other than the virtues of its people and the excellence of its institutions. These critics should have the honesty to condemn the Founding Fathers for the same defect. They wouldn't dare. But it would be refreshing to hear it stated in so many words: our current political class is blessed with historic genius, and Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were contemptible fools.
What the Founding Fathers have to teach us about foreign policy became all the more important, and yet all the more ignored, in the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the weeks that followed that fateful day, most Americans' focus was on identifying the sponsors of the attacks and punishing them. That was sensible enough. I myself voted to track down al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But people were bound to start wondering, eventually, why we were attacked--not because they sought to excuse the attackers, of course, but out of a natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for the motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.
Seven years later, though, our political class still refuses to deal with the issue in anything but sound bites and propaganda. The rest of the world is astonished at this refusal to speak frankly about the reality of our situation. And yet our safety and security may depend on it.
One person to consult if we want to understand those who wish us harm is Michael Scheuer, who was chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late 1990s. Scheuer is a conservative and a pro-life voter who has never voted for a Democrat. And he refuses to buy the usual line that the attacks on America have nothing to do with what our government does in the Islamic world. "In fact," he says, those attacks have "everything to do with what we do."
Some people simply will not listen to this kind of argument, or will pretend to misunderstand it, trivializing this profoundly significant issue by alleging that Scheuer is "blaming America" for the attacks. To the contrary, Scheuer could not be any clearer in his writing that the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on Americans should be pursued mercilessly for their acts of barbarism. His poi
nt is very simple: it is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them. That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback--the unintended consequences of military intervention.
Obviously the onus of blame rests with those who perpetrate acts of terror, regardless of their motivation. The question Scheuer and I are asking is not who is morally responsible for terrorism--only a fool would place the moral responsibility for terrorism on anyone other than the terrorists themselves. The question we are asking is less doltish and more serious: given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to this kind of blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? Is it really worth it to us? The main focus of our criticism, in other words, is that our government's foreign policy has put the American people in greater danger and made us more vulnerable to attack than we would otherwise have been. This is the issue that we and others want to raise before the American people.
The interventionist policies that have given rise to blowback have been bipartisan in their implementation. For instance, it was Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said on 60 Minutes that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the 1990s were "worth it." Who could be so utopian, so detached from reality, as to think a remark like that--which was broadcast all over the Arab world, you can be sure--and policies like these would not provoke a response? If Americans lost that many of their family members, friends, and fellow citizens, would they not seek to hunt down the perpetrators and be unsatisfied until they were apprehended? The question answers itself. So why wouldn't we expect people to try to take revenge for these policies? I have never received an answer to this simple and obvious question.
This does not mean Americans are bad people, or that they are to blame for terrorism--straw-man arguments that supporters of intervention raise in order to cloud the issue and demonize their opponents. It means only that actions cause reactions, and that Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world. In the year 2000, I wrote: "The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties." I stand by every word of that.
To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheuer points out that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. Bin Laden's message, on the other hand, has been so attractive to so many people because it is fundamentally defensive. Bin Laden, says Scheuer, has "spurned the Ayatollah's wholesale condemnation of Western society," focusing instead on "specific, bread-and-butter issues on which there is widespread agreement among Muslims."
What bin Laden's sympathizers object to, as they have said again and again, is our government's propping up of unpopular regimes in the Middle East, the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the American government's support for the activities of governments (like Russia) that are hostile to their Muslim populations, and what they believe to be an American bias toward Israel. The point is not that we need to agree with these arguments, but that we need to be aware of them if we want to understand what is motivating so many people to rally to bin Laden's banner. Few people are moved to leave behind their worldly possessions and their families to carry out violence on behalf of a disembodied ideology; it is practical grievances, perhaps combined with an underlying ideology, that motivate large numbers to action.
At a press conference I held at the National Press Club in May 2007, Scheuer told reporters: "About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy. . . . They all agree they hate U.S. foreign policy. To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems." That's not what a lot of our talking heads tell us on television every day, but few people are in a better position to understand bin Laden's message than Scheuer, one of our country's foremost experts on the man.
Philip Giraldi, another conservative and former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, adds that "anybody who knows anything about what's been going on for the last ten years would realize that cause and effect are operating here--that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that 'we're over there.'" The simple fact is that "there [are] consequences for our presence in the Middle East, and if we seriously want to address the terrorism problem we have to be serious about that issue."
Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recognized that foreign intervention could have unintended consequences and that the American presence in the Middle East had bred hostility against our country. On May 29, 2003, Reuters reported: "Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion [of Iraq] had been 'almost unnoticed but huge'--namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance." In short, according to Wolfowitz one of the motivations of the 9/11 attackers was resentment over the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Again, neither Wolfowitz nor I have ever said or believed that Americans had it coming on 9/11, or that the attacks were justified, or any of this other nonsense. The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet's nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people. That's just common sense. But hardly anyone in our government dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy.
Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioned domestic program can have. We can only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.
A classic example of blowback involves the overthrow of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. American and British intelligence collaborated on the overthrow of Mossadegh's popularly elected government, replacing him with the politically reliable but repressive shah. Years later, a revolutionary Iranian government took American citizens hostage for 444 days. There is a connection here--not because supporters of radical Islam would have had much use for the secular Mossadegh, but because on a human level people resent that kind of interference in their affairs.
When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic fundamentalism. Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. The world's expert on suicide terrorism convinced me to rethink this apparently plausible answer. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, for his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, collected a database of all 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we have believed. The world's leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or the Sudan.
The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland." Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the United States had troops stationed. While al Qaeda terrorists
are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed. Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the U.S., France, and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon, there were no more attacks. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire potential suicide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs.
Pape is convinced after his extensive research that the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim territories, the greater the chance of more 9/11-type attacks on the United States.
Although most Americans don't know it, for much of the early twentieth century our country had an excellent reputation in the Middle East, the part of the world we are now told will hate us no matter what we do. Right now, after decades of meddling, our government is hated in the Middle East and around the world to a degree I have never before seen in my lifetime. That does not make us safer.
To be sure, there will always be those who wish us ill regardless of the foreign policy we adopt. But those who would recruit large numbers of their coreligionists to carry out violence against Americans find their task very difficult when they cannot point to some tangible issue that will motivate people to do so. It is bin Laden's specific list of grievances that has rallied so many to his cause. Predictably enough, al Qaeda recruitment has exploded since the invasion of Iraq.
