For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing our first guest today, it's Dr. Ron Paul.
He's a congressman representing District 14 on Texas Gulf Coast in the House of Representatives.
Of course, you all know he ran for president last time.
And also, he's the author of the excellent libertarian primer, The Revolution, a manifesto, which I highly recommend you go out and get and share with everybody you care about.
Welcome back to the show, Ron.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Good.
Thank you.
It's very good to have you here on the show today.
Let's talk about warfare.
What's going on in Afghanistan?
It looks like they went from – I forget how many troops were there in the first place.
They said they were going to add 17,000 more, and then they made that 20, and then I think they added another 10 on top of that.
Is America kind of starting that war all over again?
And how long do you think we're going to stay in Afghanistan?
Well, it's a continuation.
I guess there's nothing brand new.
The expansion of the war into Pakistan has already started with the last administration.
There's no point that foreign policy stays the same.
Interestingly enough, I just recently within the last hour or two came from a foreign affairs committee where Hillary Clinton was testifying about foreign policy.
And I got my five minutes in and brought up the subject and actually told her that I was pleased.
I heard that the rhetoric and the tone of foreign policy was changing and that they were reaching out a little bit.
Words are one thing, but actions are even more important.
And so I tried to get her to tell me where have we seen any significant change.
Have you brought any troops home?
Have you done anything?
And emphasize the fact that Obama immediately increased the military budget by 9% and expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan.
And I said, is there any place where you can give me a little encouragement that we've actually had a change in policy?
And the only thing that she could offer was not that they brought troops home or they've cut back in any way because they haven't.
She was saying, yes, we will be out of Iraq.
But I think that's a pipe dream, quite frankly.
I think there's chaos there and I think it's stirring.
And I think if it gets a little worse, there's no way they're going to walk away from Iraq and the troops will stay there.
And, of course, they're expanding in Afghanistan.
And she testified of the importance of not dealing with Pakistan because it was a rogue nation and they had nuclear power.
And I mentioned that in my statement to her.
I said, you know, the Soviets had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And we talked to Khrushchev.
We talked to the Chinese.
And we didn't have to fight the Russians and the Soviets.
And so I urge her to maybe be a little cautious.
You don't have to get too excited about the fact that the Pakistanis have this.
It's serious.
But, you know, there might be other ways of handling this rather than saying that we have to go back in there and nation building.
But I'm afraid, as you are well aware, foreign policy doesn't seem to change no matter what they tell us.
Well, it even seems from the point of view of a pragmatic imperialist that messing around in Pakistan is really dangerous because they have nuclear weapons.
Here's a country that it's basically a country because they have one military.
But other than that, it's sort of a pseudo state drawn by the British.
And here we are messing around bombing in there.
And this is how the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia.
We disrupted the society so much by bombing the previous country during the previous government.
I think that's a good point because they don't have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They are not a threat to the United States per se.
But, you know, locally, if we have large bases or troops marching in or getting involved inside of Pakistan, more than just drones, they might just want to test one of their weapons and cause chaos there.
So you're right.
The disruption is the most important problem.
And just think of how things finally got settled in Vietnam once the French and the Americans left.
Well, now, Dr. Paul, I think some people might be surprised to hear you say that you don't think anything really is going to change in Iraq, even though they're escalating in Afghanistan.
They have promised that by the end of 2011 they're going to have all the combat forces.
In fact, I think they even say all forces out as per the status of forces agreement.
What indications do you see that leads you to believe that that's so much smoke and mirrors?
Well, because they never said they would close down the bases.
They never said they would back away from a billion-dollar embassy.
And they never have changed their policy of maintaining stability.
They're just hoping that they can do it without American troops.
They wanted to rename them.
They won't be combat troops, but they would keep them there.
They're expecting the puppet government and the local forces that we have trained.
The tragedy is the instability exists, and we've trained both sides.
We've trained Sunnis and Shiites.
And I don't think all of a sudden the Sunnis, who have been kicked out of power, all of a sudden love the Shiites, who are more likely to be allied with the Iranians.
So I think it's unstable.
And therefore, with the weapons that we have provided, that violence is going to break out.
And if we do back away, let's say they bring half of the troops home and are sincere in what they tell us, and by the time they remove 50 percent, what if the violence is multiplied three times?
No way.
There's no way they're going to leave.
And then there's the possibility then that one of our bases would be hit.
And what I fear most is something like that, some big weapon getting in, and some problem comes up, some bomb goes off that literally kills hundreds of Americans, as it did in Beirut when the Marines were killed.
Fortunately, I think for us and our country, although Reagan made a mistake by putting those troops there, he at least said, I'm coming out of there.
He realized how dangerous and how irrational these people were.
So he laughed and admitted he made a mistake by going in.
That's not going to happen today.
If a ship is sunk or an American plane goes down and they want to blame Pakistanis or the Iranians or something, I'm afraid that the American people would overwhelmingly support massive escalation and even make it a bigger deal than the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or going into Iraq.
That's what we have to really worry about.
Yeah.
In fact, looking back on that, it's almost like only Nixon can go to China.
It sort of took somebody with Ronald Reagan's Cold War-year stature to be tough enough to withdraw troops and still stand up tall and then, I guess, go take it out on the people of Grenada or whatever later.
But if it had been Jimmy Carter or something, he would not have been able to get the troops out of there.
The pressure would have been much tougher on him to stay longer, don't you think?
Oh, yeah.
I think so.
It seems like when a Democrat gets in power, they have to prove that they're appealing to conservative militants.
So they go overboard in trying to emulate Republicans.
But what do the Republicans do when they get in?
They want to neutralize Democrat big spenders on welfare.
So we, as Republicans, then come in like the Bush administration did and expand with the welfare domestic spending.
And then since both sides are supported, that's why in the midst of a financial crisis, the deficits explode.
The significance figure that I've looked at just recently is that 12 months ago, our national debt was $2 trillion less than it is now.
It went up $2 trillion in 12 months.
That's the rate of indebtedness that we're incurring.
So that's very dangerous.
And I even pointed out to Hillary today that great nations end not because they get defeated militarily.
We didn't have to defeat the Soviets.
They end for economic reasons.
And I think that's what's going to happen here.
And I even brought up the subject of the American empire.
But she, of course, she was very, very friendly.
And as a matter of fact, she even made some very positive comments about the Ron Paul supporters, which really was a shock.
And it was very pleasant.
She said, well, you really have some.
She did.
She went out of her way to be friendly toward us, you know, and complimented our supporters on how energetic they were and how determined they were.
Well, I'm trying to find reasons to like her better than Condoleezza Rice, but I haven't come up with any yet.
I'll let you know if I find some.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's true.
It's hard to make those choices.
Well, now, on the Iraq thing, basically what you're saying, I think, if I can boil it down, the difference between Barack Obama's Iraq withdrawal policy and the policy that you would have had had you been the president is that he's accepted basically the Bush premise that we have to win.
We can't leave if there's a problem behind.
We have to be able to say the surge worked all the way up until the last troop leaves from Kuwait, and maybe for a few months after that, whereas your position is we're leaving.
And if the Sunnis and the Shiites go back to war, we need to recognize that as a consequence of our invasion in the first place, and we just got to go.
But I guess you're saying under the way it is in the Obama administration, as long as there's violence there, we're never leaving.
Yeah, and I think his definition of leaving is different than my definition.
My definition is leaving, and that is not having military personnel there and turning the bases over to whatever government is there.
As a matter of fact, I would even, because symbolically it's so bad, I would not get involved in that embassy because I think that is a real affront.
We could have a small office over there.
That ought to be a turn over the Red Cross or something like that.
But I would start leaving.
I don't know why physically you couldn't accomplish that in six months.
And who knows?
Maybe it could be very violent, and that wouldn't surprise anybody.
But who knows?
It might be a lot less violence than we've seen in the last five years.
A lot of people have been killed and a lot of people displaced.
But I think there would be a struggle for the balance of power.
But maybe there would be a continuation of the northern part for Kurdistan where that would be maintained, and who knows what would happen in the south.
But all I know is that this is not going to last.
There's just too many reasons for these people to get fighting and killing each other again.
And on the larger issue of the cost of empire, as you were discussing with Hillary Clinton, and, of course, I'm madly refreshing Lou Rockwell's blog here looking for the YouTube.
But as far as the cost of all that, you mentioned the kind of outrage over the so-called or I don't know if you mentioned outrage.
You mentioned the increase in the budget.
I'm going to mention the outrage when they called this a cut, when they increased the defense budget by 9%, they said, a few weeks ago.
And on the right wing, this was denounced as a cut as apparently they're shuffling some budget items around inside the Pentagon.
But I guess I'd just like to give you an opportunity to really drive home to people the cost of maintaining a world empire, and maybe where on the balance sheet are we in the sense of how much money we make off of empire, and how much better off we might be without one.
Yeah, the special interests are still in charge, whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
And the bottom line is the increase in the amount.
And then, of course, he severely criticized going back with these supplementals.
Now, he did put 130 in the budget, which is different.
That's for next year.
But this year, he's continuing the policy, although his argument there is, well, this year is still Bush's year, so we have to continue the maintenance.
But even though he won the votes of those who wanted to end the vote and bring troops home and have a different foreign policy, out of fairness to Obama, he was pretty truthful about Afghanistan.
Remember during the campaign, he actually came across sometimes more hawkish than even McCain did.
McCain had to say, yeah, me too.
I'm for that.
But Obama was the first one to start talking about expanding the war in Afghanistan, which makes no sense whatsoever.
But no, they shift things around.
They'll cut one program and save a couple million dollars, but then they'll give billions more to something else.
So I'll bet you most of the people in this country believe he has cut military spending, which is not true.
And this is one advantage I have on the committee as being a Republican, is that I can criticize the administration for a foreign policy where they haven't done what they said.
But even the Democrats don't want to criticize her for a couple reasons.
First, Israel, and the second reason is they don't want to offend their president.
They want to be unified, just like so many Republicans didn't want to offend Bush.
They figure, well, you know, he used to be conservative, but we don't want to take him on.
We don't want to fight him.
So they went and voted with him all the time.
The Democrats are doing a bit of that, too.
Well, and now as they spend us into bankruptcy, it seems like everybody forgets all the stimulus and all the war spending from the last eight years.
And now stimulus and war spending apparently is the solution to our crisis.
And honestly, well, as I guess you know, I spend most of my time paying attention to all this foreign policy stuff, and I can't really keep up with you Austrian economics about all the developments in the financial crisis.
But at least a few times in reading and watching the coverage of the financial crisis on TV, I'm reminded of Garrett Garrett's book, The People's Potage, where he talked about the 1930s and what he called the revolution within the form, where they didn't really throw the Constitution out.
They still kept it there in the window or what have you.
But basically they changed the entire nature of the way the federal government interacts with this society.
You know, the revolutionaries weren't on the outside of the gates, he said.
They were on the inside.
And I just wonder whether you think that really compares to what's happening now with the power grabs by the Treasury Department, the executive branch.
It's almost like after 9-11, it seems like, where they just sort of get carte blanche.
And I wonder whether you think that to call what's happening now something akin to a revolution within the form is going too far, or if that is what you think is going on.
Can you kind of give us the basic outlines of what are the major changes that we're dealing with here that are going to bear consequences for us in the future?
Well, I think it is a continuation of that revolution that Garrett talked about.
And even though it wasn't a steady progress, you know, what they were doing in the 30s, they backed off a little bit, especially after the war.
But they never changed total policy.
It just meant that they slowed it up a little bit.
But right now, I think we're much further along.
I think what he talked about is absolutely coming to bear in the form of fascism.
And there's less respect than ever for the law.
There's no hint that they're ever going to return to sound money unless we do have some philosophic revolution to offer our solutions to the problem.
So hopefully we can do this.
But I think their side is still winning.
Like you say, you know, we got into this mess by spending and borrowing and printing money.
And they think we can get out of this problem by just doing more of the same thing.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
What changes have really happened?
I mean, we already had a Federal Reserve and a SEC and a Treasury and Commerce Departments and all these things.
What's really changed other than the raw numbers of dollars that they've taken from us for all their various bailouts and so forth?
Is the structure of the government really different now?
Yeah, I think there's been some major changes because they're getting much closer to control.
You know, there's ownership in banks and insurance companies.
They own stock.
It's much closer to a fascist system where there was a lot of benefits to big business and there was a military-industrial complex and all these things.
Now it's much, much closer.
They're deeply embedded together.
So I think we've made a big step moving in the wrong direction.
But I also think it's unstable and it will come.
And the big question is what we're going to replace it with.
I know you're aware of the Red Cross report, the Office of Legal Counsel memos, and now this new report from the Armed Services Committee about the torture regime that ruled during the Bush-Cheney years.
And I wonder if you're calling for or have you called for an independent investigation, a special prosecutor or congressional hearings or anything along those lines.
What do you think should be done, sir?
Well, I haven't been that specific, and I may well get that far because it's just been the last couple days where I've been asked about this and whether or not I would support further investigation and prosecution of those who are guilty of those crimes.
And I say absolutely yes.
We impeached the president not too long ago for infractions that were less serious than some of these charges that have been levied against our leaders of the last administration.
So I think Obama is very much involved in protecting state power and state secrecy.
And his first announcement sounded pretty bland that he wasn't going to pursue it.
Now he's saying at least he's going to look at those people who wrote up the legal documents.
But the people who participated ought to be looked at.
I mean, if you were an honest American trying to do your job in the CIA and you were asked to waterboard somebody a couple hundred times, well, maybe this is torture.
Maybe we shouldn't be doing this.
So I think everybody has responsibility, and I think they should be investigated and prosecuted if the evidence is there.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Ron Paul, Congressman representing District 14 on Texas' Gulf Coast, author of a great many books, including The Revolution, A Manifesto.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, sir.
Thank you very much.
