by Ron Paul
The war in Iraq was one of the most ill-considered, poorly planned, and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history, and I opposed it from the beginning. But the beginning I am speaking of was not 2002 or 2003. As early as 1997 and 1998, shortly after my return to Congress after a dozen years back in my medical practice, I spoke out against the actions of the Clinton administration, which I believed was moving us once again toward war with Iraq. I believe the genesis of our later policy was being set at that time. Many of the same voices who then demanded that the Clinton administration attack Iraq later demanded that the Bush administration attack Iraq, exploiting the tragedy of September 11 to bring about their long-standing desire to see an American invasion of that country. Any rationale would do: "weapons of mass destruction," the wickedness of Saddam (an issue that did not seem to keep many of these policymakers up at night in the 1980s, when they were supporting him), a Saddam-al Qaeda link, whatever. As long as their Middle Eastern ambitions could be satisfied, it did not matter how the people were brought along.
By any standard--constitutional, financial, national defense--I could not see the merits of the proposed invasion of Iraq. Any serious Middle East observer could have told us, if we were listening, that Iraq had essentially no connection to terrorism. (At the time of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Osama bin Laden actually offered to lead an army to defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam if necessary.) Iraq had not attacked us, and figures in our own government, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had said that Saddam was effectively contained and no threat to anyone. Saddam's was not even an Islamic regime; it was a secular one--although, thanks to the war, that is now changing.
Some war apologists to this day still try to argue that the weapons were really there or that Saddam really was linked to al Qaeda, but I'm not sure why they bother. The administration long ago gave up on these claims.
In the midst of all this, it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war, and the lengths to which Christian and later secular thinkers have gone over the centuries to limit and restrict the waging of war. For well over a thousand years there has been a doctrine and Christian definition of what constitutes a just war. This just-war tradition developed in the fourth century with Ambrose and Augustine but grew to maturity with Thomas Aquinas and such Late Scholastics as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez. The requirements for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject shared some basic principles. The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them.
First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged. But there was no act of aggression against the United States. We are 6,000 miles from Iraq. The phony stories we were told about unmanned drones coming to get us were, to say the least, not especially plausible.
Second, diplomatic solutions had not been exhausted. They had hardly been tried.
Traditional just-war criteria also demand that the initiation of war be undertaken by the proper authority. Under the U.S. Constitution, the proper authority is neither the president nor the United Nations. It is Congress--but Congress unconstitutionally delegated its decision-making power over war to the president.
I heard it argued that Saddam had indeed committed an act of aggression against the United States: he had shot at our airplanes. Those American planes were monitoring the "no-fly zones" over Iraq. Authority for such zones was said to come from U.N. Resolution 688, which instructs nations to contribute to humanitarian relief in the Kurdish and Shiite areas. The resolution actually says nothing about no-fly zones, and nothing about bombing missions over Iraq.
That Saddam Hussein missed every single airplane for 12 years as tens of thousands of sorties were being flown indicates the utter weakness of our enemy: an impoverished Third World nation that lacked an air force, antiaircraft weapons, and a navy. This was supposed to be the great threat, requiring urgent action. Such nonsense insults the intelligence of the American people and makes the rest of the world wonder about our sanity.
And yet the propaganda continues even today. In one of the Republican presidential debates, after being called an isolationist--honestly, is the distinction between isolationism and noninterventionism really so difficult to grasp?--I was solemnly informed that the course I recommended in Iraq amounted to the same kind of thinking that had led to Hitler! Now, all of us are used to hearing political propaganda, especially in presidential debates, but this really took the cake: were the American people expected to believe that unless they supported the invasion and occupation of a completely paralyzed Third World country, they were the sort of people who would have given aid and comfort to Hitler? Did this candidate really have such a low estimate of the intelligence of the American people?
How, after all, had Hitler been able to rise to power in the first place? Hitler made a name for himself by denouncing the Treaty of Versailles, which established the peace terms with Germany at the end of World War I. Many observers at the time and since have described the treaty as severe and one-sided. (And no, that is not how all postwar treaties are: after the Napoleonic Wars, the last continent-wide conflict until World War I, the Congress of Vienna imposed reasonable terms on defeated France and fully welcomed her back into the community of nations within only a few years.) Hitler appealed directly to this sense of grievance on the part of the German people: how long, he asked, are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like a third-class nation?
Now let us recall President Woodrow Wilson's decision to involve the United States in World War I. (The level of popular support for Wilson's decision may perhaps be gauged by the massive propaganda campaign, without precedent in American history, that the government undertook to win over public opinion.) The war in Europe had been a stalemate prior to Wilson's intervention. Thanks to that intervention, not only did the Allies win, but they were also now in a position to impose the punitive Versailles Treaty on a defeated Germany. It is not at all a stretch to say, as many historians have indeed said, that Wilson's decision to intervene gave inadvertent impetus to Hitler's politics of extreme nationalism, since the treaty it made possible helped catapult him into the limelight. Hitler might otherwise have remained a nobody. German president Paul von Hindenburg was said to have sized him up as potentially a good postmaster general.
Did Wilson intend this outcome? Did he intend to hand Hitler and his party a perfect strategy for their political advancement? Of course not. But here we are, faced once again with the unpredictability of foreign intervention, and the strong possibility that by removing a bad government we may wind up not with a better one, but a far worse one.
Ever since then, no libertarian or traditional conservative I am aware of has had anything but contempt for the utopian Wilson. The mainstream Left of his day was largely disillusioned by the outcome, having hoped for a more just peace, and genuine progressives like Robert La Follette, Randolph Bourne, and Jane Addams had opposed the war from the beginning. That essentially leaves a smattering of neoconservatives today as Wilson's remaining defenders. But here was a historical lesson to learn if there ever was one.
The Iraq war is sometimes portrayed as a conservative/liberal issue. It isn't. Supporters of war and empire come from both political parties and can be found among both liberals and conservatives. The "liberal media" supported the Iraq war with enthusiasm, and in their eagerness to parrot the official line abandoned whatever critical faculties they possessed. The American media were so derelict in their duty during the Iraq war that one watchdog group actually offered a $1,000 reward for any reporter who would ask the administration a challenging question about prewar intelligence. Hillary Clinton was a strong supporter of the war. Following the off-year election in 2006, congressional Democrats, for the most part, revealed themselves once again to be a sorry excuse for an opposition party, continuing to fund the war and refusing to take any bold action.
For much of 2006 and 2007, it
looked as if we were in for a repeat performance: propaganda and slogans, parroted by the media, threatened to take us to war yet again.
Then things changed. In December 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate compiled by sixteen agencies of the American intelligence apparatus concluded that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and had not resumed it. Up until the very moment that report was issued, the so-called liberal media had been serving once again as uncritical mouthpieces of administration war propaganda, providing cover for yet another costly and avoidable conflict. This would never happen again, reporters and editorial writers assured us after the Iraq fiasco. Ten minutes later, they were back to their usual collusion with the political establishment.
I had said all along that Iran posed no imminent nuclear threat to us or to her neighbors, and now the intelligence community had confirmed that view--a view anyone who read newspapers outside the United States would have been informed enough to take for granted. The administration's rhetoric, on the other hand, gave the impression that nothing had changed. And from the administration's perspective nothing had changed, since it had apparently possessed this intelligence report for months, only making it known to the public in early December.
The administration's awkward efforts to cope with this new information tied it up in logical and rhetorical knots. First, administration officials tried to discredit the report, even though it was one of the most comprehensive intelligence reports on the subject, complete with over a thousand source notes. They then claimed that Iran's 2003 abandonment of its weapons program--a fact they drew from the supposedly faulty report--showed that American pressure must have worked, since Iran backed off from developing nuclear weapons just as the United States was invading Iraq. Our government must therefore keep up the pressure by means of yet another round of sanctions. Russia and China did not buy this analysis, and once again our isolationists in Washington placed America on a lonely and tenuous platform on the world stage.
As with Iraq, Iran has been asked to perform the logically impossible feat of proving a negative. Iran is presumed guilty until proven innocent because there is no evidence with which to indict. There is still no evidence that Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has ever violated the treaty's terms--terms which state that Iran is allowed to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian energy needs. The United States cannot unilaterally change the terms of that treaty, and it is unfair and unwise diplomatically to impose sanctions for no legitimate reason.
Iran, incidentally, may have noticed a pattern: if countries do have a nuclear weapon, they tend to be left alone, or possibly even given a subsidy. If they do not gain such a weapon they find themselves threatened with war. With that kind of foreign policy, what country wouldn't want to pursue a nuclear weapon? But in fact there is no evidence Iran actually has one, or could have one anytime soon, even if it immediately resumed a weapons program.
Still, when individuals want a war, any pretext will do, so the NIE report does not guarantee that our government will keep its hands off Iran. In the late summer of 2007, with the administration aware that the evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program was on the verge of collapse, President Bush signed an executive order designating Iran's elite 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "terrorist" group, thereby establishing a new pretext for an attack on Iran. Fewer Americans are likely to accept that as a rationale for war than an Iranian nuclear weapon. The National Intelligence Estimate, if not ruling out the possibility of war, will at least make it more difficult to sell.
Neoconservatives, the false conservatives who got us into the Iraq mess and pushed hard for war with Iran, continue to hold their positions of prominence. Why that is so is quite beyond me. Every last prediction they made about the Iraq debacle--e.g., it would be a cakewalk, the cost would be paid by oil revenues, the prospect of sectarian fighting was slim--has been resolutely falsified by events, and yet they continue to grace the pages of major American newspapers and appear regularly on cable television talk shows. Instead of being disgraced, as common sense might lead us to expect, they continue to be exalted for a wisdom they obviously do not possess. I am reminded of George Orwell's reference to "the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets."
Meanwhile, where is the exposure for those who favor a noninterventionist foreign policy? These individuals would have avoided the Iraq fiasco altogether. America would be trillions richer over the long term, Iraqi society would not be in shambles, and countless Americans and Iraqis alike would still be alive. Noninterventionists have been entirely vindicated. And yet they do not enjoy the places of prominence that the establishment has bestowed on those who have been consistently wrong, and responsible for carnage and destruction that have destroyed our good name around the world and isolated us more than ever in our history. In fact, they are scarcely to be found at all.
Although you'd never know it by reading the print media or watching television talk shows, we who support the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers hold an honored place in the history of the Republican Party and of the conservative and libertarian movements. The so-called old Right, or original Right, opposed Big Government at home and abroad and considered foreign interventionism to be the other side of the same statist coin as interventionism at home. They recognized that Big Government was no more honest or competent in foreign policy than it was in domestic policy. In both cases it was the same institution, with the same people, operating under the same incentives.
A recent article in Modern Age, the conservative journal founded by Russell Kirk, illustrated this point. Felix Morley, for example, was one of the founders of Human Events, the oldest conservative weekly in America. In 1957 he wrote an essay called "American Republic or American Empire." There Morley warned, "We are trying to make a federal republic do an imperial job, without honestly confronting the fact that our traditional institutions are specifically designed to prevent centralization of power. . . . At some time and at some point, however, this fundamental conflict between our institutions and our policies will have to be resolved."
In Freedom and Federalism, Morley quoted Adolf Hitler as saying that "a powerful national government may encroach considerably upon the liberty of individuals as well as of the different States, and assume the responsibility for it, without weakening the Empire Idea, if only every citizen recognizes such measures as means for making his nation greater." Morley then elaborated on what Hitler meant:
In other words, the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatsoever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort.
The phenomenon Morley describes could not be further removed from the ideas of republican government, which have grown foreign to us after decades of military overstretch.
Russell Kirk was one of the chief founders of American conservatism, and his book The Conservative Mind has been one of its most influential texts. And he, too, was suspicious of militarism: he was a critic of high military spending and opposed the Vietnam War, albeit privately. By the 1990s he was an outspoken opponent of his government's military interventions and was concerned that they were making his country unnecessary enemies. "Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world," Kirk said in 1991 at the Heritage Foundation. "Now George [H. W.] Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. . . . In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs."
As for wars for "democracy," Kirk--being the traditi
onal conservative he was--could hardly take the idea seriously. "Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy?" Kirk wondered. "And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?"
In his book The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, which he wrote with James McClellan, Kirk noted his subject's aversion to war. (Taft was the great exemplar of the old Right in the Senate in the 1940s and 1950s.) "War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. . . . Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal govenrment in debt, break in upon private and public morality." He went on:
Taft's prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions--and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, an intolerant "democratism" imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America's domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the "garrison state," a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.
