Ron Paul is here.
It's true, you know.
Ron Paul is here.
First guest today on Anti-War Radio, Dr. Ron Paul.
He's a former Air Force flight surgeon and an obstetrician by trade.
He's a ten-term congressman from District 14 on the Gulf Coast.
He's the author of the books Gold, Peace, and Prosperity, The Case for Gold, Mises and Austrian Economics, Freedom Under Siege, A Republic If You Can Keep It.
And A Foreign Policy of Freedom.
He's currently running for President of the United States of America.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Paul.
Thank you, Scott.
Nice to be with you.
Oh, it's so good to have you back on the show.
And I have to tell you, we're all very excited about all the hype, I guess.
I don't know what else to call it.
All the thousands and thousands, maybe millions of people who are being turned on to the message of liberty due to your recent efforts.
I guess my real question is in terms of your presidential campaign.
So far, are you having fun?
It is.
It's really rewarding to know that there's so many people interested.
I'd like to take all the credit for it, but to tell you the truth, I think there have been a lot of seeds planted over the last decade or two to get so many people interested.
But now that we're getting some attention for this message, it's very, very pleasing to find so many new people willing to come in.
And sometimes it's young people bringing in their parents and vice versa.
So it's really exciting.
It is a tedious job, but we've been at this before, and it's always been at a much lower key since I've been doing this for 30 years.
We've never quite seen the interest expressed by so many people, and I think the internet has a lot to do with that.
And of course, talk shows, radios helping out a whole lot.
Maybe one day we will get the mainstream media talking about freedom and the Constitution.
Well, as far as spokesmen for individualism and liberty and limited government in this country, you are the best of them, and you shouldn't sell yourself short.
It has a lot to do with the messenger, and people can tell that you mean what you say, you're consistent, you follow the principles that you preach, and people can tell that you really mean it.
That's why they take you so seriously.
Well, thank you.
Now, let's talk foreign policy.
The last time we spoke, you mentioned repeatedly that the costs of the wars were going to come back and haunt us.
Is that what's beginning to happen now?
Yeah, I think so.
Those of us who remember very clearly the 60s and the 70s, of course, I was in the Air Force during the 60s, and back then, Johnson reassured the public, and he said that it doesn't matter, you can have guns and you can have butter.
In other words, you can run a huge military operation in a welfare state and expand it, and don't worry about it.
Well, he was completely wrong because the 70s were very, very hectic, and we had a lot of inflation, and we had a very weak economy, and the dollar was on the ropes and was rescued at the end of that decade, barely, but all the metals and commodity prices were soaring.
And then things have settled down, but once again, in the last 10 years, we've been back at it again.
I mean, conservatives have been elected to cut back on the size of the government, and government keeps expanding, the entitlement system is exploding, and now we have this ongoing war in several places, like both Afghanistan and in Iraq, with the threat that it made spread to Iran.
And the markets now are starting to react, because we have paid for it temporarily by borrowing money and by inflating.
That is, literally, we have permitted our Federal Reserve to create money to buy Treasury bills in order to pay these bills.
But that doesn't work, that's just a delay in payment.
The eventual payment comes when the dollar gets weak and prices go up and markets get shaky, and we're starting to see the beginning of a real, real serious shakeout with the nervousness that we're seeing on Wall Street today.
Do you remember in 2002, the Deputy Secretary of Defense testifying that the oil sales from Iraqi Oil will pay for the war, the new neutral war?
Yeah, I remember Larry Lindsey predicted how much money it might be, and his was a modest prediction, and of course, he got fired, you know, from the administration, and the General, I think it was Shinseki, that said that we'd need a lot more troops if we really want to win, and of course, he got set aside.
So anybody who tells the truth about the real cost of this war, whether it has to do with money or the number of troops or the quagmire that has occurred, you know, you're not received very well.
People don't want to hear the truth if you're trying to do something that the American people actually don't understand or really don't want.
So I think that it turned out like many had predicted, it wasn't like nobody was, you know, concerned and made predictions that this would be very costly, and that's what's coming about.
I mean, the oil's not paying for it, and we're still there, and the billions of dollars that we appropriate are still being spent.
There's no end in sight, and they talk about 3,600 men and women killed over there, but another 1,000 of contractors have been killed, and the wounded are, you know, it's unknown how many wounded and sick we have.
They claim maybe 30,000, but there could be twice that many when you look at all the illnesses and the post-traumatic stress syndrome and brain injuries that aren't yet recorded.
So it is unbelievable what this cost is going to be, and it's endless, and yet there seems to be no serious attempt by anybody in Washington to change policy.
I'm so glad you mentioned the wounded soldiers.
We've seen so many stories about guys with post-traumatic stress disorder told to drink a beer and chin up and be a man and quit complaining.
We've seen articles about soldiers who are literally physically wounded who are being told that they have some sort of personality disorder that disqualifies them from medical care.
And I know you're an opponent of socialized medicine, but these are American soldiers who've done their duty and are wounded, and it seems like the Bush administration is just turning their back on them.
Yeah, and this is a high responsibility of ours to take care of those men, so I don't put that in the category of socialized medicine.
That's a responsibility because our policies have caused these problems to occur, and if something doesn't happen where these numbers are going to continue to grow, and we just saw this week the statistics on suicides on military higher than ever, and this is something which I don't think is surprising.
I'm surprised it's not worse, and it's not just being wimpish.
It's the fact governments ask their young people to do things that aren't normal.
If you take a normal individual that's a teenager or just a past teenage and ask them to turn them into an individual that shoots and kills strangers that he never knew of and has never done any damage or threatened us, it contradicts everything that I think is natural to our psyche, and yet we tell them that we do this in the name of patriotism and saving our Constitution and protecting our liberties, and it's a schizophrenic type of operation, so this produces a lot of stress.
In one sense the government is saying, you're a noble hero to go over and kill people, but in the same sense they don't have it in them to do this, and because of that conflict it leads to depression, which is not abnormal.
It to me seems to be a normal reaction for decent people to become depressed over this conflict of interest.
Right, and then the government doesn't want to really acknowledge how bad the problem is with the post-traumatic stress and so forth, because then they have to admit that this is the results of their policy.
You know, they want to hide it just like they hid the problems of the Agent Orange problems that came out of Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War syndrome was hidden for a long time, and veterans couldn't get treatment, and now of course there's a lot of depleted uranium floating around and laying around over in Iraq, and people are going to get sick from that.
It might not be immediate, but maybe in five or ten years, and it'll be hard to measure, and the symptoms will be different for each one, and there will be cancers caused by this, and our government will stay in denial, and yet we have these hundreds of thousands of people who will be suffering.
Which also brings up the question of our responsibility to the people of Iraq.
It's our government that's covered their country.
You know, our guys eventually, hopefully, will leave that place, but their country is going to be covered in depleted uranium dust for how long to come?
The indefinite future.
It's morally reprehensible, but it poses a difficult solution.
You know, do you further tax the American people that had nothing to do with the decision-making to pay for this and help these people that we've literally harmed?
It would be nice if the justice could be levied against those who promoted the war.
You know, if you were a warmonger and you promoted this policy that has led us to such a disaster, it would be nice if we could require that they personally assume some responsibility, but that, of course, is an impractical proposal.
Sounds nice, though.
Sure does.
All right, well, you've said before we just marched in, we can just march out, and you know the war party's talking point number one is that, no, Dr. Paul, we cannot do that because things will get worse.
Do you think that that's right, that things will get worse?
Are you saying that, well, we're not going to be able to make it better anyway, so if things get worse now, they'll still get worse if we leave ten years from now?
Are you saying that there's a chance things will get better if we leave?
Well, I don't think anybody knows exactly what will happen.
Let's say we take the next six or eight months and we just leave because you can't lock down one day, you know, just physically you can't.
Let's say we're out of there in eight months.
We do not know exactly what would happen the year following that.
One thing we do know is no more Americans would die and that we would save a lot of money, and maybe there would be an incentive for the various factions in Iraq to come together and talk to each other.
So people say, don't we have a moral responsibility to stay there forever because we've messed it up, now we have to protect these people from what we're doing.
I think our presence there is the incitement for al Qaeda, the incitement for the civil war and everything else.
I think my bet would be that things would get better, even though I wouldn't know exactly when that would happen.
But I recall in the sixties all the predictions about we can't possibly leave Vietnam because there would be the domino effect where the communists would take over and China would rule the whole southeast.
And yet the only thing that's happened in that area is that they have become more capitalistic.
Not only Vietnam, you know, trade with us and we visit with them and we invest in Vietnam, but the Chinese look like they're learning capitalism pretty well.
They're our banker, so I guess they know something about buying and selling and lending.
So it never turned out like they predicted.
And those who have these dire predictions of what will happen in Iraq are the ones that said it would be a cakewalk and it wouldn't cost us anything.
So why should their predictions be listened to?
Why don't they go to those experts that claim that this would not go well?
The generals that advised against it, there were some people in the State Department, there were some people in the CIA, and there were some people in the administration, in the finance area, that all said it was a dangerous thing to do.
We should ask them what they think will happen if we leave instead of just listening to those who proposed the war.
It seems also that the current policy is to arm the factions that are fighting in the civil war, the Iranian parties, and now arming the Sunni insurgency, rather than backing the nationalists who are trying to work things out.
Yeah, I think the weapons are multiplying, they're coming from all areas, and we want to be in the arms trade.
We're promising more and more weapons over there, not only to all the Arabs, but to Israel as well.
And you wonder about this whole idea, could it be that the military industrial complex has a voice in this?
And obviously I think they do, because whether we're in there fighting, or repairing the weapons that we leave, or arming more and more countries, there's only one group that's really making a lot of profits, and that's the war industry.
You mentioned earlier the possibility of war with Iran in terms of further economic consequences.
It does seem that the accusations against that country are getting more and more serious.
Is there some kind of congressional grapevine where you kind of get the background chatter, whether they really mean it this time?
We've been kind of really worried about impending strikes against Iran at a few different times over the past few years.
Is this really it?
Well, we don't know.
The people I've listened to that I consider experts claim that it would be very difficult for them to believe it won't happen before Bush leaves.
He may wait a little while longer toward the end, but he just does not believe.
I guess he has a conviction about this.
He does not think he should leave unless he destroys these sites that he has conjured in his mind where they're going to build nuclear weapons.
I don't have any inside information from the administration, but I just think from observing what they do and what they say and their beliefs that it still worries me a whole lot that something will happen.
But I can't say that it's imminent.
I think that something has to galvanize the American people in the support of it, and maybe they're waiting for some type of a major incident that they could blame on the Iranians.
Every day you read stories about why the Iranians did this and the Iranians sent the weapons in, the Iranians that are teaching this, and they have actually some people, and the Americans call them, well, they're foreigners coming into Iraq like they have a dozen or so.
Yeah, I think they are interested in their neighbors.
It's sort of like, what would we be doing if Russia was in Mexico?
Do you think we'd have a legitimate interest in what Mexico, what was happening there?
It seems to me like some of this would be very legitimate.
But anyway, I think it's going to be twisted.
I think eventually it will be turned around and there will be an excuse.
And tragically, I think the American people will see this as a reason to rally behind the president and even impose the draft because there sure have been a lot more talk in Washington about the draft.
Wow.
Well, so you mentioned before economic consequences.
I wonder if I can get you to elaborate on what you think the economic consequences of war with Iran might be and then I guess further consequences for our liberties here at home, including conscription.
Well, always when there's a war going on, it's the excuse to undermine our liberties here and just look at what's happened since 9-11.
The war on terrorism, the war on Iraq has been the excuse to really practically destroy our Fourth Amendment and our total privacy.
A war with Iran is going to just keep that going and continue to undermine our freedoms here at home.
But I think financially it's going to be devastating.
It will cost a lot more money.
I don't think anybody thinks they can invade Iran.
We don't have the troops and they'd have to draft another million people to do it.
They're running out of money.
They'll run out of credit pretty soon.
But I think the most significant event would be if we attack Iran, they're capable, according to some of my friends in the military and in the CIA, they're capable of literally blocking the escape route for 160, if not 260, if you add the contractors, out of Iraq.
They can't fly all of them out very quickly and they can't come out.
They could be boxed in in the Persian Gulf.
And then you're going to see oil not being $70.
You know, we went over there to secure oil.
And, of course, oil is more than two times the price it was when we went in.
So I think if that would happen, I think overnight you'd see oil not only in 100, but probably not too long.
It could go easily to $200 a barrel, which finally would catch the attention of the American people what's happening.
I just hope and pray they come to the conclusion that a bad foreign policy has led us down this path and that if we just wise up, we could change it all.
Well, so in terms of securing Middle Eastern oil, if we had a completely non-interventionist foreign policy and the U.S. Navy was not in the Persian Gulf, quote-unquote, securing those shipments, if our government was not giving all these billions of dollars of weapons to the Saudis and so forth, well, would the price of oil be much higher?
Do we need to have our government secure these oil flows for us?
I don't think so.
I think the oil would come down prices because, you know, even if the Iranians ended up with more control, I mean, their main goal would be to sell their oil.
So all of a sudden Iraqi oil and Iranian oil would come onto the market in a much more plentiful state than it is today.
So I think oil prices would come down if we walked away from there.
Maybe not the first week or month, but I think that's the way to get the oil prices down is for us to get out of there.
This whole idea that we have to secure our natural resources is sort of like a mercantilistic approach to economics that you have to have the natural resources because they'll never be bought on the market.
But, you know, I don't think Japan sits around every single day and wonders where they're going to buy oil the next day.
There's still a market out there.
They probably go to Amsterdam and buy their oil from there.
I mean, the oil gets up there.
So the market would handle this.
And no matter how powerful they are, the market is even more powerful.
Remember in the 1980s, oil had gone up to 40, and then under Reagan there was some freeing up of the market, and people thought oil was going 80.
Well, it went down to $10, and OPEC used to meet every couple weeks trying to drive the price up.
But they couldn't do it.
So even these cartels can't do it if the market is allowed to operate.
And that's what would happen if we got out of there, the market would be much more operational.
And I believe the oil prices would come down.
Now, this is kind of a legal question here back to Iran specifically.
The State Department has reclassified Iran's Revolutionary Guards as an international terrorist group.
Could that possibly be used to put an attack against Iran under the original authorization to use force against bin Laden and the international terrorists after September 11th?
I think they wouldn't hesitate to do that, and they would use it.
I think it would be, you know, very, very deceptive and immoral, illegal, still unconstitutional, and every member of Congress would be outraged for that stretch to decide that would be the reason they could win and claim they have justification for it.
But, you know, there was one bill, it was a supplemental bill a few months ago, that we had it in there that Bush could not do anything against Iranians without explicit permission of the Congress.
And yet that was removed by the Democrats in the conference report, so even the Democrats did not want to leave that in there.
So that's why we haven't seen any significant change in policy even after this last election.
Yeah, it's really too bad.
I think a lot of people had their hopes up.
They were voting for change, but they didn't get it.
What's your assessment of the situation in Israel and Palestine?
Can there be peace there in our lifetime?
Oh, I think there could be.
You know, the Palestinians and the Jews and other Arabs have a history of living next to each other and getting along.
It seems like when outsiders come in and stir things up and send in weapons and pick sides and, you know, intimidate and take over their policies, I think our taking over our Israeli policies is detrimental to Israel, and certainly does, and to the Palestinians.
I think if we weren't there, Israel would have a real incentive to get along with their neighbors.
And, you know, they've had overtures towards Syria.
They had, like, a peace treaty with Syria.
And I think things would work out.
But we get in the way.
We say, oh, no, you're not allowed to do that, and you're not allowed to do this with your borders.
And so Israel has sold out their sovereignty to us, but they also are inhibited from doing the things in their self-interest.
I think they would work with the Arab League.
They talk to them even now, but I think they would have, you know, an incentive for them to deal with their Arab neighbors.
I mean, there's so many more Arabs.
There's a self-interest in them.
But once we get over there and start passing out weapons to both sides, it just distorts everything.
So you think if America stopped intervening rather than unleashing them against the Palestinians, making it okay or basically giving them a blind eye, permission to expel the Palestinians from the West Bank or what have you, you think it would go completely the other way, that they would realize that, well, now that America is not there to protect them, now they have all the incentive to really try to make peace?
Yes.
You know, there's a lot of Israelis that would talk like we do about foreign policy, and that's the liberal party.
I mean, if you say that here or if the Jewish community here talks like that, they're called an American and anti-Israel, anti-Semitic.
Yet there's a large number of Israelis who would like to have peace.
As a matter of fact, some of their soldiers are refusing to fight.
And they're tired of it all, and they're being drafted, and they're sat down there to try to settle these disputes between the settlements and the Palestinians, and they just know it's a real mess.
So I think that would be a great incentive.
And we would probably hear more from those who do not support the militant approach, and we'd hear more from the liberal party in Israel on what they would like to have done.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Dr. Ron Paul.
He's a Republican candidate for President of the United States.
Dr. Paul, it seems like the promise of a new friendship with Russia at the end of the Cold War is fading away.
What's happening?
Well, it seems like some people didn't want to really have peace and friendship with Russia.
I mean, our whole policy, once again, of going right up to their borders and putting anti-ballistic missiles up there and claiming that we're protecting Europe and the United States from Iran, I mean, nobody believes that.
I mean, we're provoking problems with Russia.
I mean, there are no angels, but we aren't especially angelic either.
But I think this whole principle of non-intervention means that we shouldn't provoke people.
We don't need anti-ballistic missiles on the borders of Russia.
If the Europeans think it's worthwhile, let them do it.
But they're a lot less worried about it than we are, and I would think that they would not want us there because if we provoke the Russians, they're in between us.
So I have no idea what they think is a good reason to be antagonistic to the Russians and if you're totally cynical, some people like cold wars and sometimes hot wars because they keep the weapons industry flowing.
Well, let's hope they don't make a war with Russia a hot one.
They still have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, right?
Right, and they do.
We essentially won the Cold War without a military confrontation.
That's why I think it's so silly that some people think that we have to militarily confront people because they're a danger to us and they don't even have a weapon.
You know, they use this as a reason to go into Iraq.
It was just obscene what they were trying to make us believe, and they're doing the same thing with the Iranians.
Well, in the news this week, Russia and China are doing joint war games.
You feel like American foreign policy is pushing them together, healing that old Sino-Soviet split?
I think so, and I wouldn't be surprised if India and some other countries, and of course Southeast Asia too, the Kazakh state and the other states in that region won't be joining there as well.
So once a giant gets on the ropes, you know, our influence can dwindle quickly, and that will affect the value of the dollar.
The dollar is artificially held up because we're the economic and military power.
But as we weaken, as our economy weakens and as our military weakens because of these protracted wars, I think you'll see more of the alignment with Russia and China and other countries getting together so you know we're sick and tired of America telling everybody what to do.
And I think the whole process will be reversed because I think we get some free benefits because we have that position that we are the only superpower.
But after a while, people sort of get tired of that, and that would be very detrimental to us and even more injurious to our freedoms here at home.
Well, we already have a proxy war in Somalia, and there's some who want to intervene in Sudan.
And I've seen in interviews where you've pointed out before, it's funny how those are two African countries that have oil resources there.
And of course, some have written that that's the real goal there, is to try to keep those resources out of the hands of the Chinese.
But I guess what you're saying is it's much more expensive to do all this intervention than to just let the Chinese produce it and sell it to us.
Yeah, that would be it.
You can sit back.
They would have tremendous incentive to do so.
But people have no understanding or confidence that markets work and that you don't have to resort to this idea that you have to militarily control natural resources.
It doesn't mean everything will be perfect and others will try to intrude and take over.
But eventually, people have to sell products.
Switzerland, I don't think, sits around worried about where they're going to get their stuff to live.
And yet, although they're mountainous, they're really in the heart of Europe and they've been able to avoid all these wars going on.
I think it's fantastic and a great example of what another country could do.
So it's sort of sad that we embark on these programs of sanctions and embargoes and wars and bombing and threats.
It's just so needless.
Well, what about humanitarian crises like what's happening in Darfur with the nomads versus the farmers and hundreds of thousands of people apparently have died so far?
Is there any room for American intervention to stop a genocide or mass scale slaughter like that?
You know, a lot of liberals and Democrats are very sympathetic to what I'm saying on foreign policy, but then they always assume, well, you will go into Darfur.
And my answer is no.
I wouldn't do that either.
I don't have the authority.
I don't have moral authority.
I don't have legal authority.
I don't have authority under the Constitution.
And in a practical way, it doesn't really work.
There isn't food and aid over there.
The military takes it over.
They're in the middle of a civil war.
So it sometimes does exactly the opposite instead of ever getting to the people who are starving and gets in the hands of one faction over another.
So I can say that it's not in our best interest.
It shouldn't be that we don't care.
I think ultimately what they need is an understanding of how freedom works and how the marketplace works.
We certainly should never inhibit people who want to go and help and send goods and products that truly aid in food.
I mean, we have a willing country here, and if we were a lot wealthier than we are today, literally billions of dollars would be used to help people like that.
So I do not advocate taxing people or using the military force to even do these humanitarian adventures because sometimes what they do in the name of humanitarianism doesn't end up helping people very much.
Well, I sure appreciate your time today.
Everybody, Dr. Ron Paul.
He is a Congressman representing District 14 on the Texas Gulf Coast, and he's a Republican candidate for President of the United States.
His website is RonPaul2008.com.
Thank you again very much for your time today.
Thank you, Scott.
