02/18/09 – Rep. Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, chaosradioaustin.org, also streaming from antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm Skyler Horton, and introducing our guest today, Dr. Ron Paul.
He represents District 14 on the Gulf Coast of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Of course, he writes for us at antiwar.com.
His archives are antiwar.com slash Paul, including his new one that we ran yesterday, Just Say No to the Draft, and of course, ran for president last year and did a great job teaching people all about peace and liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Thanks, Skyler.
I'm doing fine, thank you.
That's great.
Thanks for joining us again.
I guess the first thing I want to ask you about is the news that Barack Obama has approved the sending of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
You did originally vote for the resolution for the attack on Afghanistan, isn't that right?
Well, the resolution never said, I don't believe it had the word Afghanistan in it, and it was authority to go after those individuals who were responsible for 9-11.
So it was rather specific on who the target should be, but it was never for taking over...
The resolution that dealt with Iraq was much more specific, the one that he could use authority to go into Iraq.
This one was generalized to go after those who were responsible for 9-11, but never once was it an implication, oh yeah, this is the authority you need to occupy Afghanistan and go into nation building and protect oil lines, all that kind of stuff.
That wasn't there, but that is right.
I did vote for the authority to go after al Qaeda.
So at this point, is it clearly the legal case that Barack Obama does not really have the authority to expand this war without some sort of new resolution by the Congress?
Well, that's right.
I mean, he never had the authority to take over this country, invade it, and occupy it, but indirectly he gets the authority because Congress keeps voting the money, you know, and that's...
Some of the legal people say, well, no, it's not new authority, but Congress gives him the money, so it's an implied authority.
That's why we should have all been much more cautious over the years.
The Congresses should have been dealing with any type of war.
There should never be war unless there's a declaration of war, then it's very, very clear.
But presidents do it, and the Congress goes along with it, and they don't assume responsibility that they should be doing, and then we end up with this.
So they don't even come back.
It's true.
I mean, technically, Obama should be asking, you know, am I allowed to expand the war?
It's not declared, but how many troops are we allowed to put in there?
Well, it looks like whatever the president says.
And that, to me, is a tragic way to run foreign policy.
What, if any, do you think is still the mission in Afghanistan?
Well, I think it still has a lot to do with natural resources and pipelines and, you know, strategic areas of the world like that.
Others would argue with me and say, oh, no, that's not it, it's just this neo-con philosophy that we have to spread our goodness around the world.
I don't think they can describe their precise goals themselves.
They're not saying, well, if we go in there and we achieve this in 24 months, then it's going to be all over.
I think, from what I can tell what they're doing, it's a permanent presence, just like in Iraq.
They're not going to be leaving Iraq.
There's no way they'll be leaving Iraq in 16 months.
And Obama has been pretty honest about Afghanistan all along in the campaign.
He said he would put more troops in Afghanistan, and the people voted for him, so it's one of those things where people aren't even on our wavelength on what type of military activity we should be engaged in around the world, and I'm just hoping that we can get some new people involved and another generation that'll wake up and say enough is enough.
But also on our side of that argument will be the fact that these kind of interventionist policies overseas, they come to an end when countries go broke, and we're on the verge of that.
So who knows, Scott, we may have our way before we know it.
Yeah, well, there's the easy way and the hard way, it seems like.
Maybe we're already, have already chosen the latter there.
Well, so let me ask you, if you'd been the president, if you'd been elected and you were the president, would you have any mission remaining in Afghanistan, Pakistan?
Of course, it kind of goes without saying that as long as Osama bin Laden has not been brought to justice, that the mission there is open-ended, nation-building aside, or oil pipelines aside.
No, I said many times in the campaign, just come home.
We just marched into these countries, we can just march out.
I'd come home from the whole Middle East, I'd come home from Europe, I'd come home from Korea, I'd come home from Japan, save a lot of money.
But you say, well, what about this target?
What if the evidence is really there, like they claim that Al-Qaeda and bin Laden are responsible?
Now, should we totally ignore it?
Although, obviously, our foreign policy was a precipitating factor.
It's pretty hard to say, well, he just killed 3,000 Americans, we don't care about him, let him go.
But we should at least make an attempt to do it within the law, which means that if we knew he was in Pakistan, maybe we could ask the Pakistani government, can we go in?
But we don't need to go in with these armed forces.
I'm sure you recall my proposal back then was not to send the army in, but to revive the old idea of the letter of mark and reprisal.
If we have an enemy of 25 people, do we declare war against the Muslim world?
It makes no sense.
Why don't we go after the ringleaders and target those individuals?
And to me, I think that's why the founders were rather wise in giving us that option where you don't have to declare war against an entire country if you're dealing with a bunch of thugs.
And of course, that didn't get anywhere.
Instead, everyone opted for the authorization, which I guess, as you said, the language you thought at the time was specific enough that it was about the individuals not overthrowing Afghanistan's pseudo government and replacing it with another pseudo government.
But it was narrow enough to satisfy you then.
Do you regret that they've taken such advantage of something that you did before?
I don't like it at all, and I didn't even like it then, and that's why I immediately followed up trying to get people interested in saying, well, yes, I can't totally say...
It's sort of like Pearl Harbor, what do you do?
Our policies had a lot to do with antagonizing the Japanese.
I mean, when you put an embargo on a country, in a way, it's an act of war.
But you say, oh, they bombed Pearl Harbor, it was our fault, but we don't do anything.
You still have to, by that time, you have to sort of defend yourself against innocent people getting killed.
But that was the reason I introduced the bill to emphasize letter of mark and reprisal, that they wouldn't do that, that they could still target the enemy, but in a very, very narrow sense.
And I think the evidence to show that they weren't really all that interested in getting Ben Laden was the fact that militarily, they probably had him about captured and they walked away at Tora Bora, so maybe they liked the idea of having him out there in the wilderness someplace because they could always use him as the enemy that we have to fear and the reason why we have to be over there.
And even though they're claiming we're over there to go after him, they're really over there to deal with gas and oil pipelines and the whole Middle East situation.
Well, and now let me ask you about gas and oil pipelines from the point of view of X make-believe oil company.
It makes a lot of sense to me, I guess, economically speaking, to invest money in lobbying and influencing the Congress to help secure your pipeline route through some central Asian country nobody's ever heard of in order to protect it.
But I know you're an economist and you're a Texas Republican and you know about how oil markets work.
I guess, you know, a lot of those oil companies have, you know, Texas City, right, is all full of oil.
That's part of your congressional district.
Can you address the issue of whether that's necessary, that America, because I think a lot of people would say, yeah, you know, they say it's for democracy, but really we need that oil.
We need more Marines over there to secure those oil pipeline routes or else, you know, something bad will happen.
Well, I don't believe it.
If that were the case, Japan would be awfully concerned and have a huge Navy and a military and say, hey, look, we don't have any oil in Japan.
The only way we can have oil is we have to invade and occupy and steal the oil from somebody.
They just go to Amsterdam and buy it, you know, and they get all the oil that they need.
And what would these people do with their oil if we weren't there trying to control their governments?
What if we didn't have a puppet government in Saudi Arabia?
Somebody would have the oil and it wouldn't be any good to them unless they sold it.
So the motivation would be to sell it to us.
But by the time you add up all the cost of the military operations and the cost in American lives in order to pursue this policy, it makes our oil very, very expensive.
Well, let's say none of that worked and still we didn't have easy access to a lot of Middle East oil.
I mean, if you believed in freedom, you still wouldn't worry about it.
You'd say, oh, well, I guess we need an alternative source.
If the market were permitted to work, they'd come up with an alternative source.
Maybe we'd have electric cars, maybe we'd have more nuclear power, you know, something along those lines.
But instead, depending on the markets, here we have a new president saying, oh, what we have to do is we have to invest money in alternative fuels just in case the price gets too high.
They have no confidence and no faith in freedom.
They do not understand how markets work.
They don't want them to work.
And then that's the reason they're willing to invest all this money in lives.
Just think of the lives that have been lost, not only on the lives of Americans.
We lost nearly 3,000 on 9-11, but since then, we've lost over 5,000 in the Middle East, plus tens of thousands who have been wounded and made sick.
At the same time, millions of displaced Arabs and hundreds of thousands killed.
And holy man, it just goes on and on.
Then we wonder, people still wonder, oh, no, they don't like it because we're free and prosperous.
So maybe when we're not so free and not so prosperous, maybe nobody, everybody will love us again or something.
I don't know what their theory is.
Well, yeah.
Once we get rid of the Bill of Rights and completely destroy our economy, they'll leave us alone.
I guess the real worry then is what happens when the terrorist attacks continue because the foreign policy continues.
They don't forget.
You know, Americans have still not even learned that we overthrew the government back in 53 or the government of our own.
And they're still annoyed with us.
So when we're over there meddling in that area, that brings back memories.
I mean, hardly a small percentage of Americans realize that they have been justified in turning against us when we're always meddling in their affairs.
So one thing, though, Scott, that I've been encouraged by in this last year or two in talking about this and this foreign policy has been to talk on college campuses how many young people, you know, are starting to realize it.
And we did get a lot of responses.
And today I had a lot of good responses on the article against the draft.
These young people, they know they're not going to get anything out of Social Security and they see a financial mess.
They can't get jobs.
And here they're being threatened, possibly with a draft or a National Youth Service.
And I think a lot of these young people are waking up.
Well, you know, I spoke with William Astori, who's a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force and a professor.
And he was talking about Commander David Petraeus, the head of CENTCOM, and what he likes to talk about, the long war, and the implication being that it seems like Afghanistan may really only be the beginning, that really any country with a stand on the end of it is likely to be occupied by American troops in the coming decades on some kind of permanent basis.
You know, I wonder if you can address that and perhaps include in your answer something about the draft and whether you think that, you know, that's the kind of consequence of having foreign policy so expansive, even from this point on.
You know, I've heard there's talk about the long war, and I think they're anticipating, but the limitation won't be from just changing party leadership, Republican and Democrat, because the policies are the same, so they're going to continue.
What might limit it, like I said before, might be the ability to finance it, just as it became difficult, if not impossible, you know, for the Soviets to do it, and that helped bring them down.
But let's say the financial crisis lingers a while longer where the dollar isn't totally destroyed and we are able to pursue this policy for another 10 or 15 years, yes, I think the likelihood of a draft is going to continue to grow.
Obama and Rahm Emanuel, who's an important figure in the presidency in the White House, they believe in the draft, they believe in national youth service.
And besides, another thing I'm sure you've heard recently is this talk about when you have a difficult economic situation, sometimes war gets you out of these, and it's taught to so often that, you know, the Depression never ended until World War II, almost like, oh, we finally got a war going, and that ended it, which is a complete fallacy.
It seems like we'd all be stinking rich right now, and we've been at war nonstop for quite a few years here.
And of course, it's the war that has, you know, helped bring us to our knees, and that whole argument, one can show it, and I can argue the case even from memory, is that World War II was not much fun.
I was born in 35, so I did have a memory of the war, and boy, there was rationing, and I was in a family of five boys, and things weren't all that robust.
There were no new cars on the road.
People were driving junk cars, and they had a difficult time.
And the Depression actually ended when the debt was finally liquidated at the end of the war, and there was a lot of consumer demand, and a lot of people came home.
So, the war didn't end the Depression.
It was ending the war that ended the Depression.
Mm-hmm.
Well, and that's something that we've talked about on this show a lot, but you're right that it really does seem to be a defining myth, particularly for these economic times.
The New York Times wrote just the other day that, and Dr. Paul, pardon me, but really they did with a straight face, that while World War II, one of the things that it was really good at was it brought down the unemployment rate.
What a way.
Well, and again, with the draft, with conscription.
Yeah, and I think I'd rather live in poor conditions than putting on a uniform and getting shot at, especially for some war, it made no sense.
Well, and what is your moral case against the draft?
You're a patriotic guy, and you're all about the Declaration of Independence and all America's founding traditions and all those things.
You don't think people should have to serve their country?
Well, I don't think you can serve your country if you succumb to slavery.
You could say, well, we need you to be a slave and work in this plant to manufacture products we need.
Obviously, slavery doesn't enhance your country, and it can't be patriotic, and that's the same way it was with the draft.
I start with the basic principle that our lives come to us in a natural or God-given way, and we have a right to our life and to our liberty, and the government should be very limited to protect that life and liberty.
And the responsibility on how this life is being used is yours alone, as long as you don't hurt other people.
So it's a moral principle, and secondarily to that, I think it's so impractical.
It causes people to go to war when they shouldn't go to war.
It's economically a disaster, so there's all these other ones.
But the basic argument is each and every one of us have a right to our life, and we should not be controlled by our government and told what we can do or can't do.
But I would use that same argument to the right of your income, too.
I think it's a moral principle that your income is an extension of your life, your blood, your sweat, and your energy, therefore the government doesn't have a right to your income, either, because that is, in a way, a form of slavery, too.
Now, I'd like to ask you about Iraq.
Various reports have it, at least, that President Obama's means to stick by his plan to get the combat forces, although the definition of that seems a bit flexible, out of Iraq in 16 months.
I'm not sure if you've been keeping up with Gareth Porter's work at IPS, but certainly the Washington Post and other places have covered General Odierno's and General Petraeus's pretty obvious attempt to try to spin this, that they've warned us that if we don't stay for at least 23 months, then things will go bad and it will be kind of the Vietnam stab in the back all over again, and it seems to be bordering on outright insubordination on behalf of General Petraeus there.
I wonder if you can comment, sir.
Well, as a matter of fact, Gareth Porter was in my office this weekend.
We did talk about this.
I don't think there's any chance in the world that the troops will be out of Iraq in one, two, or even three years.
You implied that they might change the name, you know, the active personnel versus somebody just sitting there.
But they're not going to close that embassy down and then that's an affront to the people.
What about those 12 or 15 bases that they have there?
We're not going to leave those, and if there's more violence next week, I think more troops would be sent over there, and I think it's a whole farce to think that all of a sudden we're going to leave after all this investment in time of energy to protect these oil companies' interests over there.
And you think that really is the root of the policy in Iraq is basically the same as Afghanistan is mostly about controlling that oil?
Yeah, probably more so in Iraq, you know, Afghanistan was more geography there of transportation.
Yeah, I think definitely Iraq was involved, and I think you can't argue that Israel doesn't have something to say about this as well.
I mean, there's very, very loyal dedication to whatever Israel wants in the Congress, and many members of Congress, even though they know it might be the right thing to do, wouldn't take a certain vote if they thought this was construed as being anti-Israel.
I think in terms of what's pro-American, you know, what's best for America, and when people say, well, your position doesn't sound like it's pro-Israel, I say, well, I'd take all the funds away from all those Arab nations, too, and I wouldn't be sending weapons over there to Arab nations.
I wouldn't be propping up enemies of Israel either.
So I just think the non-interventionist foreign policy serves our interests best, but it serves the interests of all our friends and all our potential enemies as well, and I think the world would all be much more peaceful for it.
Are you concerned at all about the seeming insubordination and the dispute between the generals and the president, or do you buy that there even really is a legitimate dispute going on?
I think there is, and I think it's healthy, you know, I like that, that they're doing that.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out, but obviously, you know, there is a discrement in some of these militaries, and these military people who are arguing this from a strictly military point of view, they may be absolutely right.
They might be correct in saying, oh, if you leave in 15 months, there's going to be a mess here, a mess there, but, you know, the way I figure, yes, there could be, but it's not my fault.
The mess is because we went in there in the first place.
Yes, it's tough getting out of there, and there may be some repercussions, but I still think long-term, it would be better that the local people there solve these problems.
To say that if we walked out of there tomorrow and everybody would be hugging and kissing each other, I don't think I'd argue that, but it might be a lot better than we anticipate.
I mean, you know, right now, we walked out of Vietnam, and it's unified, there's more you can say for Korea, Vietnam is unified, and they're not exactly hostile toward us.
We have American investors over there, and we have good, much better rapport with Vietnam now that we're not fighting with them, so it could be better if we just walked away than some people realize, but I wouldn't laugh at what the military people say and say, yeah, you know, it could be rough and tumble, but that's the fault of the people who voted and put our troops over there and stirred up all the fuss.
Well, and it seems like General Petraeus wants to have it both ways, where he's created peace and prosperity for Iraqis, and his strategy is so much better than General Pace and Sanchez and his other predecessors in the surge and buying off the Sunnis rather than fighting them and all that, but at the same time, he's saying that he's basically admitting that he hasn't really solved anything at all, because if the U.S. military isn't there to stand in between the groups that he says they'll all start fighting again.
Right.
Of course, my conclusion would be they haven't solved anything and we've spent too much.
So admit the truth and get out.
So it just, I guess, boils down to what they think our role should be in the world.
And I don't think we should be the policemen of the world.
We shouldn't be a nation builder.
We should be minding our own business and providing for the defense of this country, which we can do very adequately.
Nobody's going to invade this country or bomb us or attack us.
And we're more likely to be hit by a few nuts, you know, with homemade bombs or razor blades by us being over there.
So I see all that we do over there as a great danger to us rather than helping us in any way whatsoever.
All right.
Now, I'd like to ask you about probably the most controversial topic of the show today.
Wartime's prosecution, war crimes prosecutions or potential criminal investigations into the principles they call them, the leadership of the last administration and perhaps their lawyers who helped them construct the legal arguments for them to torture people and violate the FISA felony statute, which forbids them to tap our phones without a judicial check.
Are you in favor of criminal investigations or any of these truth commissions or things that people are talking about?
Yeah, I mean, I'm in favor of it, but I don't expect anything to happen because, you know, the policymakers who stand behind either a McCain or an Obama are exactly the same.
And of course, Obama's already backed off.
You got to protect the state's secrets.
You know, you can't interfere with the importance of the state.
The state has an interest in this.
So they're they're not going to pursue it.
But they they should.
People commit crimes.
They they should be investigated.
I mean, the whole process, the whole idea of how many how many lies were told to us and how much were deliberate.
I think there should be an investigation.
But I'm very pessimistic.
I don't like what happened.
I once had a friend who joked that the whole Monica Lewinsky investigation was simply a conspiracy to get rid of the independent counsel statute.
I guess I guess that's possible.
It seems like they sure are better off without it.
Remember, during that time, it was also used as an excuse to others, drop a couple bombs on a few people to distract, distract us from Monica Lewinsky.
Right.
Right.
Operation Desert Fox got to get those weapons.
Boy, now that that to me, even though Clinton dropped a lot less bombs than Bush did, it was pretty abhorrent to think that bombs could be dropped on people and innocent people killed, you know, with the flimsy excuse that we had there.
That's pretty that's pretty bad.
And it seems kind of strange to name it Desert Fox, but maybe that's just me.
Wasn't he a Nazi?
Anyway, so one last issue here before I let you go, Dr.
Paul, it's OK.
I'd like to ask you about the regime change and back again in Somalia that's taken place over the last two years, if you can just tell us what you know, what you think about that.
Well, I try to keep up on that and I have a real good staffer.
It's good on these issues.
I keep telling them that this is something we need to watch because there's not much attention given to it.
And I consider it very, very important, you know, because of the geographic location as well as other oil reserves in that in that region.
And of course, Bush was a lot smarter than than Clinton was in his early years by sending troops over there and getting trapped.
But then we went and used a proxy army, used the Ethiopians to go in.
But now they've had to be pushed off.
So, no, I think it's chaotic there.
I don't know the minutiae about that, but I don't expect anything good to come from it.
But I don't expect us to walk away from that either.
I think that we're either going to use proxy armies or we ourselves will be involved once again in that area.
Yeah, it seems like the the news reports are saying that basically the very same people who were overthrown two years ago with the American backed Ethiopian invasion are the same people who've taken back over now.
And so right now it's a failure, a failed policy.
But I'm not sure they won't have enough determination to come back with a plan B.
And if I'm correct, if policies don't change, Obama will be very much involved there as well.
Well, you know, I'm interested in the aspect of it, one of the aspects of it that you mentioned there, that it goes with such little coverage, America's intervention in Somalia.
Do you think the average member of Congress even knows that America had a proxy war in Somalia?
I wouldn't think 10 percent.
But, you know, the other place that they don't watch and it stays quiet and that's in Colombia.
We spend a lot of money down there.
And earlier on, I think you implied maybe our military serves the interests of our companies.
Well, that's why we're down there in Colombia.
We're protecting oil interests as well.
And there's a lot of money involved down there.
But just because and I think some Americans have been killed and some held hostage, but that's kept very, very quiet.
You hear very little about that.
And and now but that's all in the name of protecting us from the cocaine supply.
That's right.
I mean, we got to teach the kids on what to do and how to run their lives.
So and it's it's it's the fault of the growers.
It's never the fault of the people here or the fault of the stupid drug laws.
They're not about to think about that.
When and I guess you're arguing that that's basically an excuse that that's just cover for, again, protecting oil interests.
Sure.
And that's why when we had the early votes, when we did have a little bit of debate early on, it was construed as if you voted against this, you were voting for drugs.
It was a it was indicating you were weak on drugs and no politician they claim can exist if you appear to be weak on drugs.
But of course, you know, I've taken this position for a long, long time and it was used against me a whole lot.
And I just think the people are a little more sophisticated than we give them credit for.
You know, I take a lot of stands that are controversial.
And up until now, I don't know what the future will bring.
But up until now, I've been able to, you know, convince my district, you know, what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
Even if I do take a position that the drug war is a total failure, we shouldn't be wasting any money.
So I'd like to encourage the others to do the same thing.
Well, and that really has proven true in terms of the war, like in Iraq, for example.
I mean, they scheduled the vote in the Congress right before the midterm elections of 2002.
And so many Democrats were intimidated into voting for a war that they opposed.
And you're a Republican from Texas who opposed the president, who nominally is also from Texas, from the same party, opposed his war in your district and walked right back into your House seat because they respect the fact that you don't sell out, that you stand by what you say and explain what you mean very well.
That is required.
I've had people come up to me after I've taken some tough votes.
I say, you know, I agree with you, but I can't go home and explain that to my people.
Well, they might be just not energetic enough to do it, but that's my job, you know, is to explain exactly what I'm doing, if I'm representing them so that they understand it.
Of course, it's in my interest for them to understand it, too, so that they don't just yell and scream at me.
And now, though, after a few years, people expect and understand what I'm doing.
And they're not surprised at all when I have to stand alone.
All right, Dr. Paul, I've already kept you over time.
I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
OK, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Dr. Ron Paul, represents District 14 in South Texas in the U.S.
House.
The books are A Foreign Policy of Freedom and The Revolution, A Manifesto, along with The Minority Report from the Gold Commission and a lot of other great books.
You can find his Antiwar.com archives at Antiwar.com.
Slash Paul.
And we'll be right back.