All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org.
And if you want to hear the archives of any of these interviews, you can go to Antiwar.com slash radio, and you can hear all the archives of my interviews and those of the great antiwar libertarian radio host out of Phoenix, Arizona, Charles Goyette from 1100 AM KFNX.
So yeah, that's Antiwar.com slash radio.
Check it out.
All right.
Our first guest today is Mary Rouart.
She is running for the Libertarian Party nomination to run for president of the United States this fall.
And she's the author of Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression and Short Answers to the Tough Questions.
Well, we'll see about that.
Welcome to the show, Mary.
Well, thank you.
I'm glad to be here.
Well, I'm very glad to have you on here.
This is something I don't know about that guy, Wayne Root.
I'm not too interested in what he has to say.
But the rest of you Libertarian Party nominee types, I want to give a chance to discuss foreign policy on this show.
I think he already went out.
So you've got this really great article, actually.
We ran it yesterday at Antiwar.com, When Will We Ever Learn?
And it begins with you recalling for us the refrain that 9-11 changed everything and how that's become an excuse for so many changes in the way our government operates in the past few years.
I guess why don't you start there?
Okay.
Well, you know, the attack on 9-11, of course, was devastating.
There's no doubt about that.
That really was something that Americans were not expecting.
But on the other hand, it wasn't so different from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
There were several things that we did prior to World War II that encouraged Japan to attack.
One is that we had an embargo on it.
Very important.
An embargo is considered a declaration of war almost in international law.
And then we also invaded their territorial waters, which they didn't like very much, as you might imagine.
We also gave aid to their enemy, China.
Now what's important about these three things is that they're exactly the same thing that Osama bin Laden complained about in 1998 when he officially declared war on the United States.
He was complaining about the embargo on Iraq, which he felt had cost millions of lives, up to maybe a half a million children among them.
And he also was concerned that we were having naval bases, I should say military, not naval, military bases in Saudi Arabia and other countries there in the Middle East.
And that we also were giving aid to the enemy of Islam, Israel.
Of course, we gave aid to other Middle Eastern countries as well that were Islamic, but that didn't seem to count.
Now, he may be, of course, just milking it, if you know what I'm saying.
He may be complaining about things that weren't all that meaningful.
But the thing is, those are things that he was able to use to rally people around him to a large extent.
Well, that's an important point, that here, this guy's a mass murderer.
We don't care what he thinks, really.
It's just a matter of what's actually successful in terms of arguments that he puts forward for recruiting new people to his cause.
That's right.
That's right.
And so what ended up happening on 9-11 was very, very devastating.
But when we think about this, you know, we have encouraged people like Osama bin Laden by funding them in the past.
We funded him, we funded Saddam Hussein, and even Manuel Noriega.
And we do this because we want to pit one bad guy against the other.
But the problem with building up a bad guy is that one day they're going to turn on us, and they all have.
And we shouldn't be surprised about that, because if you're hiring somebody who's a thug, somebody else can hire them away, or they can just decide they don't like working for you anymore and turn on you.
So I don't think we ever should have built up these people, because if we hadn't, we might not have had a problem on 9-11.
Okay, well, tell me this.
If you had been president on 9-11, or say, I don't know, Harry Brown had been elected in 2000, and you were his vice president or something like that, what would you have advised Harry Brown to do?
It's, well, sorry, Clinton did the damage, and they hate us, and they attacked us anyway.
Harry Brown being president for nine months didn't dissuade them.
They attacked us anyway on 9-11.
How should the American government have responded to that?
Well, I think they should have responded strongly, certainly, because we were attacked.
The terrorists are responsible for what they've done, and we need to go after them.
It's just a matter of how we go after them.
And I think what we did is we chose to use our military might to take out the Afghani government and then the Iraqi government, when I think what was needed was a more focused, targeted approach.
And Harry Brown actually talked about this by basically putting a bounty on the head of the terrorists, for one.
And that's worked before.
The Rewards for Justice program has been very successful in bringing in terrorists in the past, notably the World Trade Center bombers from 1993.
They caught a major player in that by simply offering a reward.
Yeah, Ramsey Yousef, the guy who, he's the one who really came up with the 9-11 plot in the Philippines back in the 90s.
That's right.
So, you know, it's really interesting that bounties can work, and we had a bunch of American CEOs that were very willing to put up large amounts of money to have that bounty.
So the taxpayers wouldn't have even had to pay for it.
You know, it was actually donated, and I'm sure a lot of Americans, had they heard about the program, would have been very excited about that and donated as well.
Well, now, isn't there a bounty on Bin Laden's head right now?
Yes, there is.
But I think that we, by going in in force in Afghanistan and in Iraq, I think that the very people who could have turned him in have been turned off by us.
You know, what we did, we went in there, and we, certainly we didn't go in hoping to kill civilians, but that's what happened.
A lot of civilians died.
And people who lose their fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, whatever, certainly are not going to be as convinced that they should be cooperating with us and turning over someone like Osama Bin Laden.
In fact, they probably don't want to deal with us at all.
So I think we lost our best hope of capturing him when we did that.
Alright, well now, what you're talking about is a very limited response on, you know, directed at individuals, the individuals responsible for the attack.
That's right.
The War Party would argue, assuming, you know, okay, a willing dupe of the War Party, I guess, would argue that, well, our problem is bigger than that.
Our problem is international terrorism, possible access to weapons of mass destruction, and so forth.
And as George Bush says, the lesson of 9-11 is we can't just sit around waiting for people to attack us.
We have to preempt the dangers before they come and kill innocent Americans by the thousands, as like happened on September 11th.
Well, you know, if that actually worked, there might be some argument for it.
But actually, I think it backfires.
Because first of all, you know, we've got terrorists hiding in European countries.
So are we going to wipe out all of Europe in the hopes of eliminating the terrorists?
I don't think so.
It isn't really possible to wipe them all out.
What is possible by going into countries and killing a lot of civilians is to help them recruit.
Because then people get very angry.
You know, when people lose their loved ones, they get angry.
And when a terrorist organization comes to them and say, hey, would you like revenge?
We can help you provide it.
I don't think they do a reasoned analysis.
They're coming, you know, from a lot of fear and grief.
And they probably say, yes, my life doesn't mean anything to me anymore without my family.
I'm willing to be, you know, a suicide bomber if need be.
So I think we really need to rethink that strategy.
And it's exactly, you know, the same problem that the British had in the American Revolution.
They came in, in force, in this military style when the Americans, the colonists, were using guerrilla tactics against them, which were very effective.
And now it's kind of turned around.
You see the terrorists are using guerrilla tactics.
And we're trying to respond as if we had been hit with a military offensive.
And that's just not working for us.
We've got to broaden our arsenal here.
We can't just have a military attack where we go in and take over a country.
We have to have other means of dealing with these people if we truly want to either get rid of them or demotivate them or prevent them from recruiting.
Those are the things we need to do to deal with this crisis.
And we are playing right into their hands by going down and taking out governments of sovereign nations and using the excuses of terrorism.
We're actually helping them recruit by creating people who are very distraught and who want revenge.
All right.
Now, I assume that you oppose the war in Iraq from the beginning.
Yes.
But you know what the war party says.
We're there now and we can't just leave.
What do you say to that?
You know, I don't think there is any way.
Now that we've destabilized the country, there's no easy way out anymore.
We've eliminated that possibility.
It's sad for me to say, but I think that that's the truth.
Whenever we leave, the country is going to go into chaos once more because it's that destabilized.
The best we can do, I think, is to withdraw our troops and not lose any more of them, not lose any more of our brave young men and women who are there willing to lay down their lives for us.
All they ask is we don't waste their lives.
And I think we are.
We're basically in another Vietnam.
So I think the best thing we can do, not the perfect thing, there is no more perfect choices.
We've already destabilized the country enough that there isn't a perfect choice anymore.
The best we can do is take our people out and at least save their lives.
All right.
Well, now, you know, John McCain says that there's a giant Persian ambition that must be contained, that Mary Ruart gets her way and American forces are pulled right out of Iraq, that Iran's position in the Middle East, especially as compared to the Arab states and so forth, will be intolerably strong.
Well, if it is, it's partly because we've destabilized that region.
You know, if we hadn't been in there in the first place, Iran wouldn't be the dominant player it is right now.
I think one thing Saddam Hussein probably did is balance that out a little bit.
But again, having made the situation, we now have to think about what do we do about it.
And one of the most effective things that you can do is to establish trade relations with the country, heavy trade relations, not just, you know, a little bit here and there, and make our economic interests mutual.
So I think that that's one way that we can approach the Middle East.
Now, another thing that we need to recognize, I think, is that this whole problem is a lot like fire ants.
We have these fire ants in Texas that bite us and sting.
You know, they're actually stinging insects.
And you know, you want to eradicate them everywhere so they don't come into your yard, but truly that's impossible.
So the best you can do is make sure that you're protected in your own yard.
You treat for them and you wear protective shoes or some other something when you go out because you know you're not going to get them all.
Same with terrorists.
No matter how much we're out there, we're not going to get them all.
They're going to be people that hate us.
And what we need to do is be prepared so that they can't get in our country and they can't hurt us if they do get in.
And the ways to do that, of course, I believe, are to focus first of all on, you know, stop working so hard to keep peaceful people out of the country.
One of the reasons that we had 9-11 happen is one of the hijackers, Mohammed Adda, was free in the country taking flight lessons, violating visa restrictions, and the Immigration Service knew about that.
Now you would think, you would think that they would have picked him up, but no, they were too busy keeping peaceful Mexicans or Latinos out of the country who wanted to come and work as farm workers.
So what we need to do is focus on the bad guys to make sure they don't get in the country.
And the more focus we put on peaceful people trying to come and get jobs, the worse off we're going to be because our resources are diluted.
So we need to be focusing on keeping them out.
The second thing we need to be doing is making sure if they get in, we can deal with them.
One of the best ways to do that is to encourage people to arm themselves.
You know, we actually had a situation in 9-11 where our pilots were not allowed to carry, even though most of them are military personnel or ex-military personnel.
What we need to do is encourage our populace to be armed so that if there is a terrorist incident, there is someone with a concealed weapon that can stop them.
If there had been people with concealed weapons on those planes, the terrorists wouldn't have had a chance.
Even if just the pilots had been armed, there would have been a good chance that they would not have been successful and probably wouldn't have even tried because they would be fearful that they wouldn't be successful.
So that's the kind of strategy we need to think of, staying in our own yard, making sure that we've got the Eradication for Terrorists program implemented, and making sure that we have that extra dose of protection in the means of an armed populace so that if any of them get through, we can take care of them.
So go ahead and let just anybody carry a gun on the plane, we can just tear those security checkpoints down or maybe just leave them up to make sure everybody's got their gun, huh?
I know it sounds really strange and counterintuitive in some ways, but studies have shown that if you want to deter terrorists, if you want to deter schoolyard shootings, if you want to deter homicides and rapes, all you have to do is talk about the concept of victims being armed.
In Orlando, there was a program where they trained women to use firearms.
They publicized this a lot.
The rape rate went down 90 percent, and no woman ever had to fire her gun.
Guns are such a good deterrent.
90 percent, is that right?
That's right.
And, you know, if you look at John Locke's studies, he's done several books, More Guns, Less Crime, was his first big one.
And what he showed that when states passed concealed carry laws and made it easy for people to have concealed weapons, the rape rate went down, the homicide rate went down, the theft went down, and really interesting, all those rampage shootings that happen in the schoolyards, they went down, too.
You know, the gun-free zone schools we have are like an invitation for the bad guys to come in.
And if you don't believe it, think about this for a minute.
If you had a yard and you had to put up a sign, which one would you rather put up?
The one that says, this is a gun-free zone?
Or would you rather put up a sign that says, protected by Smith & Wesson?
Which one would you rather have in your yard?
I'm just going to encourage people to attack.
You know the answer.
I think that's pretty obvious.
And, you know, when it comes to the airlines, it would still be up to the airline, wouldn't it, whether they wanted to allow you to carry guns or not.
They could have their own armed guards on board and so forth.
Of course.
And actually, in Israel, you know, you don't hear about planes being hijacked anymore because they have, they make sure they have a couple undercover fire marshals, or I'm sorry, sky marshals with guns.
Now, we could even just have regular people, but obviously they've chosen to go the more official route, if you will.
And by the way, I'll just add this for a future talking point for you.
You can look it up, probably, online.
The Mythbusters on the Learning Channel already did the test and fired, I guess, 9mm and 45 rounds, I think, through the fuselage of airplanes to test to see whether the roof would fly off like in the Hollywood movies.
And of course, they didn't.
In fact, even if you shot a hole right through the window, it wouldn't even shatter the window.
It took, actually, an explosive up against the wall of the plane, like a Richard Reed shoe bomb type thing, in order to cause the massive decompression that people, because I know that's what people think, right?
You talk about a shootout on an airplane, everybody thinks the whole thing's going to decompress and fly apart from a couple bullet holes.
Well, that's right.
And there's special bullets you can use that don't even damage the airplane, but will definitely take down your terrorist.
And I think it would be exciting to have airlines even maybe issuing, you know, not blatantly openly, because you don't want the terrorist to be able to identify who you're doing this with, but to have, actually issue the proper ammo for whatever weapon is being carried on board, so that, you know, if there's a problem, it can be taken care of without any damage to the plane at all.
All right, now, let's talk about, well, you brought up Iran and open trade relations with Iran.
I'm glad you did.
Actually, I was reminded not too long ago about Dick Cheney's attempts in the 1990s to convince Bill Clinton to lift the sanctions on Iran so that Halliburton could do business with them.
In fact, there was an NBC report from 2005 where Halliburton had created offshore companies in order to skirt the sanctions so they could do business with Iran, at the same time that Cheney is the one pushing for all these sanctions.
So it made me think that, gee, maybe Iran doesn't even have to be an enemy state of America at all.
Maybe we can all just make money and trade and be friends.
Well, and, you know, Japan, of course, you know, who was our enemy in World War II, is a country we would never think of attacking today, and they wouldn't think of attacking us because our economies are so intertwined.
So when we trade freely and we trade a lot, we really have created a friend instead of an enemy because, you know, we just can't go to war.
It's too expensive.
It's expensive anyhow, but it's even more expensive when all your trade or a lot of your trade is with that other country.
So this is a very good strategy.
And along those lines, what do you see about the future of America's relationship with China?
There are, I guess, a lot of people who think that the status quo is going to remain for a long time, but there are others who tend to see China as some sort of emerging threat that America needs to deal with.
Well, again, I think the best way to keep it away from being a threat is to make sure our economies are interdependent, and trade is a great way to do it.
You know, China has lots of problems.
Nobody will deny that.
And the best way that we can convert them, if you want to use that word, to our way of life, if you want to think of it that way, is to trade with them because that really encourages interaction and sharing of cultures.
And as long as we're trying to pass along our culture through trade, there isn't the pressure of the force.
And you know, a lot of people really still look up to us.
I'm amazed, but they still look up to us and want to emulate us.
And using us as an example is really a better conversion tool than anything else, if you think about it.
The United States, when it was founded, was one of the first, if not the first, countries in modern times not to have a king or some other dictator-type ruler, and the monarchs in Europe started to fall.
We didn't go over there and push the monarchs out.
The people themselves, seeing what a good job we did in the U.S., wanted that change.
There was a lot of pressure for that change, and it happened peacefully.
No American lives were lost in doing that.
All right.
Now, Mary, in the next hour, I'll be talking with a professor who's written a book about the privatization of government services, and I think he's not referring to government getting out of certain sectors of the economy and just letting private people handle it.
I think he's referring more specifically toward government contracts for private companies and more and more, basically, entire sectors of the economy existing simply to perform government functions or what used to be government functions.
Is that a worry of yours, and what do you think is the right way to reverse it?
Well, I guess that's one way to do it, is to contract it out to the private sector, but there have been some problems with that.
The problems are that the government officials who are contracting this out often have incentive to bypass the process somewhat and give the job not necessarily to the best service provider but to the person who greases the right palm, so to speak.
There's always that concern.
I think the better way is to totally privatize the service in the sense that it's simply taken out of government hands.
I have some examples of this on my website, too, that your listeners might want to check out, which is VoteMary2008.com.
VoteMary2008.com.
They can actually go there and get a link to a free download of the 1992 version of Healing Our World, and that's a free download, or they, of course, can buy the more updated 2003 book, which contains literally hundreds of examples of how liberty works in the real world and how private provision of services works better than government services.
That's interesting.
With a title like that, Healing Our World, I think one almost expects it to be sort of a touchy-feely, left-wing, New Age kind of thing.
Is it deliberately marketed that way to try to show leftists how economics works?
Yes, to some extent, it is.
We've had a lot of writings in the libertarian arena, and many of them, I think, speak to the head, not the heart.
The problem with that is we have both, and we need to honor both, so I put that together and really tried to come from the heart in the sense that I show how the poor are benefited by liberty, how the environment's benefited by liberty, how everybody is benefited by liberty.
When you think of selling a product, and that's what we're doing here, we're selling the ideas of liberty, you want to talk about benefits, what's in it for them.
What I tried to do in Healing Our World is show them how liberty works for them.
For every person who's trying to manipulate government to get something their way, what they don't understand is that they usually have that backfire.
It's a much better way to let liberty on the market work, because everyone can get what they want.
Now, let's talk about the Bill of Rights.
In the past, well, I won't narrow it down to just the Bush years, but especially in the years of George W. Bush, we've seen major assaults on the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments, and I guess I just want to hear you say how much you really do love and care about the Fourth Amendment and need to protect it when you're the president instead of Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Well, we need to protect all of our rights.
We've been told that if we give up our rights, we can have security, but that is not the case.
Our security is our security, and if you think of it just in a national defense kind of way, you recognize that one of the reasons we were able to so quickly mobilize for World War II is because we were one of the most productive nations on earth.
You need that productivity.
The more government spends and the more it takes away your rights, the less productivity the country has.
So if we want a good national defense, if we want to be strong, if we want to be able to mobilize ourself in time of crisis, we need to be a productive economy, and the more we compromise our rights, the more we spend, government spends, I'm saying, not just the individual, the more government spends, the weaker we become, the less able we are to defend ourselves.
So there is no tradeoff of liberty for security.
When we trade our liberty, we end up being less secure.
Well, but what about when the FBI is tracking a high-level al-Qaeda guy and they just don't have time to stop by the judge's place before they start tapping his phone?
I think there's often, often, almost always, time to do that, especially if we aren't cluttering it up with needless searches, and we have a lot of needless searches.
We have our government tracking people who are simply politically incorrect, and that takes up a lot of resources that could be used to track bad guys.
So you don't think there's any need to compromise on any of the first ten amendments, then?
I would not do so.
And what about the unitary executive theory?
I have to admit, Mary, I'm sort of torn about this one.
Bush basically has decided that he can pick and choose which parts of the law he wants to enforce and which ones he doesn't, and to justify doing so, he says, these parts of the law are unconstitutional.
I'm not going to enforce those.
It just so happens that all those parts of the law that he points out as unconstitutional that he won't enforce are things that are attempts to bind his power.
In the overall principle, do you believe in the unitary executive?
Do you, Mary Rouart, the President of the United States, have the authority to pick and choose which parts of the law you want to faithfully execute?
Not at all.
If you're raising your hand on the Bible and saying you're going to swear to uphold the Constitution, you better not be lying about it.
Because if you do that, then you really don't have the integrity for that office.
So I don't think you can pick and choose.
And the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all those are designed to limit the power of government because the more power government has, the less power the individual has.
The individual is supposed to be sovereign in this nation.
That's what made us great.
And we have this encroachment on government saying, you know, we need this encroachment to protect you.
And that simply is not true.
All right, now, well, let's see, what else did I want to ask you about here?
More foreign policy stuff.
Well, let's get back to the immigration.
You brought up the idea of security on the border, I guess, to check IDs.
But basically, as long as people aren't working for Osama bin Laden, we ought to go ahead and let them all in.
Is that right?
Well, I think there are some problems with that.
I want to be real up front with you.
You know, obviously, a lot of Americans are concerned, rightly, I think, with the concern that we'll have people coming in just to pick up welfare, or we'll have people coming in and taking jobs away from Americans, or, you know, we'll have the security issue, which we just talked about, and the way to deal with that.
So let's go back to the other two.
The problem is we have an entitlement society, and people will want to come in and get those entitlements.
Obviously, we offer them candy.
They're going to want it.
Of course, the solution for that is not to keep them out.
The solution is to do away with the welfare entitlement system so that people aren't attracted to this country for the wrong reasons.
Now, as far as coming and taking American jobs, the reason that that's happening is because we have, through government, limited the number of jobs in this country.
Every regulator destroys about 150 jobs per year in the private sector.
That's a lot of jobs.
So if we get rid of all these excess regulations, and most of them are excess, then we actually will have a situation where we'll be creating so many jobs, we'll want people to come in, and that's also true for government spending.
This is a tried and true formula.
Many countries have done this.
When they want to get out of the doldrums economically, they slash government spending, slash taxes, and open their markets for free trade.
When they do these things, they become an economic miracle overnight.
And to give you some examples, Britain had a period in the 80s when they did that.
New Zealand did that in the 90s, and Ireland did that, I think, between the 80s and 90s.
So they became economic miracles and were hailed, and it was very interesting to watch this.
So we can have this economic miracle, too, by cutting government spending, slashing it.
That's what I intend to do if I'm elected, and I will campaign and explain why this works so that if whoever is elected wants to take that up and help our economy, they have that valuable information.
Once we do that, and let me just summarize it, once we do that, then letting peaceful people in is not the problem it is today.
Well, you know, welfare aside, I've seen a bunch of articles just in the past few weeks about a lot of Mexicans going home because of the housing bust.
The demand for their supply has dried up, and a lot of them are turning around and going back.
Yes, and another thing, you know, before we tightened up our immigration laws, they tended to do that.
They'd come up for the summer, and then they'd go back, and they'd leave their families in Mexico.
Well, now the problem is it's so hard to get across the border.
We've made it so difficult with the clampdown on immigration officials there at the border and closing certain roads to immigrants is that now they realize that they only have one chance to get in.
So once they get in, they don't leave.
And many of them bring their families along, too, because they don't want to obviously leave them in Mexico if they can't go back and forth.
So we've actually, in a way, made the problem worse, I think, by tightening the borders.
And because it's harder to get through the public thoroughfares, we have Mexicans and others coming across the border on private property and really doing damage to the people on the property as they do so and violating property rights.
So that's all been a result of the way we've clamped down on immigration.
Say, if we had an easy and legitimate way to get in the country, then we wouldn't have all this problem with people trying to cross on private property.
All right, well, I have as a little pet project of mine, not that I can really do anything about it, but I try, and that is the new realignment, the taking of the best of the left and the best of the right, and hopefully with us plumbline libertarians in the center, bringing together a new movement, I guess that could be loosely defined as Jeffersonian, in opposition to the statist philosophies of modern liberalism and conservatism.
I wonder if you think that you can really reach out to the best of the left and the right to form common ground on the basic issues of life and liberty and peace.
Well, I really think I can.
I've been doing it, actually.
I've been involved in the Ron Paul movement, for example, and those people are now coming to me.
They're going to come to Denver and help me with my nominating process.
They're young people.
They're full of energy.
So I've appealed to that side, which is generally considered maybe more on the right, since the Republican Ron Paul, who's really a libertarian, he ran on our 88 ticket, but he's now affiliated with Republicans to try to get major party help there.
And so we've got those people coming in from the right, but every convention I go to, somebody comes up to me and says, I wasn't able to become a libertarian until I read your book.
And usually there's family members around there saying, yes, we worked for years on her, but she had to read your book.
She had to see how it works for a liberal.
She had to see the love and compassion.
So I know that I reach those people.
I just can't even avoid running into people who have come in through Healing Our World.
And again, I'd like to remind your listeners that they can get a free copy of Healing, a free download, by going to my website, VoteMary2008.com.
You know, I'll tell you too, my friend Anthony Gregory tells me, and I haven't read the book, I admit, but Anthony tells me that he was so impressed with your retelling of history and how you knew all about the New York bankrolling, the Bolshevik Revolution, well, really all sides during the Russian Revolution, and all these kinds of things.
He said that reading your book was like reading Antiwar.com.
Well, there's probably a lot of overlap.
Yeah, okay, now, and speaking of the humanitarian, pardon me, the liberal and conservative outreach, a lot of liberals demand humanitarian intervention for the right reasons, never mind the aggressive warmongering policies of Bush types, but there are probably a lot of people who oppose the Bush policy who might support, I don't know, a Barack Obama adventure in Sudan to help the people there.
And you know, it's a pretty tragic situation after all.
How are you going to be able to resist that pressure to use America's power to do good in the world?
Well, I think that intervening in other countries should be an individual decision.
For example, if you see a country and the dictator's terrible and you really think something needs to be done, then you as an individual can contribute to that effort and should contribute to it if you feel that that's a matter of conscience.
And you can contribute to it in different ways.
You can provide money, you can provide labor.
Certainly there's a lot of ways to help, education, whatever.
Whatever you feel is justified.
And the nice thing about doing that is that all Americans are not tied and feathered with the same brush.
In other words, if somebody goes and supports an effort that turns out to actually be more barbaric than the one they're trying to get rid of, the entire nation doesn't have to accept responsibility for that.
It's the people who actually went out there.
The other side of the coin is the people who actually go out there and do good can be lauded and honored and should be.
And yet, it isn't the entire nation that is taking the risk, if you understand what I'm saying.
When we go to Iraq, the people there think that anything our soldiers do, any harm that comes from that war is the responsibility of the entire American populace.
And they're right to some extent since our taxes are taken from us and used that way.
So what we need to do is keep that money that would normally be taxed, you know, the taxes that would normally go to create a government foreign policy that can be very aggressive.
And stay in the hands of the individuals who then make the decision where they want their support to go.
And I believe the American people, I have so much faith in the American people, I think that they will choose which dictators are proper to bring down and which are not.
And that when they do it, they'll do it in a way that doesn't cause innocent people to die, at least as few as possible.
Because that's always the problem when we go to war the way we are.
We kill a lot of civilians and the price of that murder, if you will, may be so high that it would wipe out any benefit that we might have by getting rid of a bad guy.
Well that seems like it might bring up problems in terms of, you know, a group of Americans on the West Coast want to back this faction, a group of Americans on the East Coast want to back that faction, and they all go hiring mercenaries and having proxy wars and selling guns and crazy things in other people's countries.
It seems like, well I know in Washington D.C. they would probably want to insist that they have a monopoly on foreign policy, that Americans aren't allowed to have their own foreign policy and shouldn't be.
Yes, and that's exactly what we have today.
Washington insists that they establish foreign policy and that we take the rap for it.
But you know what's interesting?
You see it's competition again.
The West Coast and East Coast each back two different factions in a country, well you know what's going to happen.
It's going to be a stalemate, or they're going to fight it out and there'll be a lot of casualties on both sides, which is very sad.
But we essentially do that today, except we do it a little differently.
What we do is we, Washington D.C., chooses who they're going to arm and who they're not going to arm.
And so we are the kingmakers, if you will, of the world.
And we make some pretty bad choices because, frankly, in a lot of countries, especially the countries that we're targeting, there's dictators and there's dictators, I mean that's your choice.
You're not choosing between the good guy and the bad guy.
You're choosing between one bad guy over the other.
And so what we do is we actually encourage a bad guy of some sort, give him power, and then when he turns on us or turns on other innocents, we are responsible for that to a large extent.
All right, folks, that's Mary Ruart.
She's running for President as a Libertarian, running for the nomination.
And she is the author of Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression and Short Answers to the Tough Questions.
And her last article, she wrote an article for Antiwar.com that we ran yesterday, and you can find it if you just click the More Viewpoints link there on the front page.
And very interesting.
Really appreciate your time today, and I hope to hear more from you again in the future, Mary.
Well, I'd like that very much.
And again, let me remind your listeners, if they want more information about me, they can go to VoteMary2008.com.
I hope they will.
I hope that if they like what they see, they'll give my campaign some advice, maybe an endorsement, and of course, we can always use donations, because Denver is going to be an expensive convention for us.
Yeah, it's going to be a spectacle, I'll tell you that.
All right, thank you very much.
