10/16/04 – Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

I am honored to welcome to the show the man Anthony Gregory says makes James Madison look like Alexander Hamilton.
He is the most honest and most modest member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
As a congressman representing District 14 in South Texas, his votes are always favorable to individual liberty, free markets, peace, national sovereignty, and the U.S. Constitution.
Listen up, my friends.
It's Dr. Ron Paul.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Good to be with you.
It's great to have you on, sir.
Thanks.
Dr. Paul, two of this year's presidential campaign issues are whether America should fight unilaterally or multilaterally overseas.
And also, at what point does a threat or humanitarian crisis demand American intervention?
Your thoughts?
Over, overseas is going to be very, very rare.
I think the national security of this country has to be either directly threatened or very eminent, and it has to be beyond doubt.
It has to be, unless we have been attacked, it has to be with permission of the Congress.
You know, in the Cold War, the Soviets were known to have unleashed some missiles.
It's very obvious from the very start that the president does have authority to respond and protect this country.
But I think you're alluding to getting involved in fights and skirmishes and civil wars and disputes and, you know, nation-building overseas.
I think it's pretty safe to say that it's almost never necessary or proper for us to do that.
What about the issue of multilateralism and whether, when we do go to war, whether we have allies involved or not?
I think that's interesting because when you hear the president talk, sometimes he says things that sound a little bit like what we might say in that, you know, we don't take our marching orders from the U.N., we shouldn't, you know, get direction and resolution that we have to enforce.
But he was talking out of both sides of his mouth on that because at one time he says that he wanted the authority to go to war in Iraq because he had to enforce these resolutions to make and keep the U.N. strong.
At the same time, he wants it both ways and he says, well, I am not – then he found out the U.N. didn't want us to go.
He says, I don't take my orders from the U.N. and therefore he wants to be a unilateralist.
I think what I talk about and I always talk about on a more peaceful foreign policy is not unilateralism as much as independence, a strategic independence where we take care of ourselves, we mind our own business, we don't depend on anybody else, but this arrogant unilateralism isn't what we want because it would be better for the world if we intermingled with the world and not antagonize them and call them names and put on sanctions.
What we want to do is be friends with the world.
If anybody wants to be friends, trade with them.
The more we trade with them and communicate with them and travel with them, the less likely we are to fight with them.
So the United States should be unilaterally at peace?
I think that's it.
That is our position that we should never be the aggressor and I'm afraid in these last several decades it's become rather clear after Kosovo that was a token effort even though there were other governments involved and NATO was involved.
It sort of set the stage for this more latent preemptive war saying, well, for our benefit we have to start this war and we think there are some problems over there and now it turns out that the problems didn't exist.
Everybody, it's the weekend interview show on the Republic Broadcasting Network.
I'm Scott Horton and the guest is Dr. Ron Paul, the Congressman representing District 14 in South Texas.
Congressman, we have a problem with terrorists now, whether past interventions created the problem or not.
There's a band of pirates who want to kill us and there are different arguments about exactly how that should be handled.
Most of them obviously take place within a pretty narrow spectrum of argument, but you do believe that Al Qaeda must be dealt with in some fashion, don't you?
I do and if you look back even at all my votes after 9-11, although essentially I rejected the direction that we went in, immediately after I voted for the immediate authority for the President to respond to those individuals that attacked us.
So in that case I did endorse the notion that our government had the authority to go after the Al Qaeda.
I didn't interpret that nor should anybody have interpreted that means that we should do nation building and taking over a government in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
So yes I do, I think we should have and still could have, but there's a lot of different ways of doing it than perpetuating the problem that we have.
Ultimately I don't think we can become more secure until we back away from our aggressive antagonistic interventionist foreign policy because that's the source of the hatred and the frustration.
And yet I also understand the argument, well what does that mean?
You just pack up the troops and be home in two days and say you're a terrorist, you've won and we're not going to do a thing?
I don't think you can do that, but you could start backing off as quickly as possible and you could target only those individuals that have committed the crimes.
For all the $200 billion we've been spending over there in Iraq, first bonding it to smithereens and then rebuilding it, I would say that money could have been spent much better in targeting the Al Qaeda as well as having better security here in this country and better border patrol, which I think is legitimate so that we know more about the people who are coming in.
But that also has to be done cautiously.
I believe you really can do that without the sacrifice of personal liberty.
I just really believe, and I think some of our problems on 9-11 were the lack of liberty rather than too much liberty.
For instance, if the freer a country is, the more the individual and the business corporations are responsible for what they do.
So the airlines, instead of assuming more responsibility for the protection of their passengers, they have less than ever.
So if we would have had a greater emphasis on the Second Amendment before 9-11 and the airlines knew that by golly they better protect these passengers at all costs, but instead here we had an interventionist government here at home that said, well, if you are ever hijacked, never fight them, and also you cannot have guns on the airplane to protect yourself.
Absolutely bizarre.
I think if we had had an announcement on 9-12-01 by a president that just sort of invoked the Second Amendment and said the federal government should have no restrictions on companies protecting themselves with their own weapons.
That's very interesting.
Back to the so-called global war on terrorism for a moment, sir.
The President of the United States in his debate, I think in the second debate with John Kerry, said that Kerry's mistaken understanding of the war on terrorism was that we have to just go after Al Qaeda.
And what Bush understands, which makes him such an invaluable leader to us, is that it's not just stopping Al Qaeda, but it's stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that people like Al Qaeda could someday eventually get their hands on and that that proliferation must be stopped at all costs.
How does that square with simply hunting individuals in Al Qaeda and withdrawing the rest of the way?
Well, I think it's over expansive.
I don't think you can declare war against the potentiality of building weapons.
And besides, it's almost like the argument about the pro-Second Amendment people domestically, it's not the guns that commit the crime, it's the criminals that commit the crime.
So if tomorrow Canada all of a sudden had 30 nuclear weapons, who would care?
We get along with them.
So the relationship between the two countries are much more important.
And this whole idea that it's only the weapons you deal with doesn't make a whole lot of sense since we went through a period of time, and certainly in my lifetime, where weapons were rather prevalent around the world through the Cold War.
But we never felt like we had to get rid of a single nuclear weapon that the Soviets had, or the Chinese had, or the Indians had, or the Pakistanis had, or the Israelis had.
I mean, they have weapons.
So the relationship is much more important.
I don't think the notion that you go after the potential building of a weapon as being the enemy, rather than the individual who has attacked it, should be the target.
So George W. Bush is kind of on an international gun control crusade.
You know, in that way, and he's assuming that it is United States responsibility.
And I give leeway to this, even in the Middle East.
And I am absolutely neutral there, and see that that's part of our problem, that when we give weapons and money and guns and munitions to Israel, that doesn't help us, that makes us less secure.
But in the same sense, if Israel were to be an independent nation, not dependent on us, I would not complain a whole lot about it if they had decided to bomb the nuclear reactor in Iraq, like they did in the early 80s, saying, well, you know, we're doing this for national security.
That to me is somewhat similar to our responsibility.
And I thought Kennedy had the absolute right to confront the Soviets when they were 90 miles off our shores.
You know, that's getting a little bit close.
Actually, I think that was resolved rather correctly.
And I was called up to military duty during that time.
Not only did he confront them and say, don't mess around or you're going to have trouble, he immediately agreed to take missiles at the borders of the Soviets.
And we took our missiles out of Turkey.
So in some way, even at the time of 9-11, I had made the suggestion that we should book to Kennedy how he resolved that crisis rather than declaring war on everybody.
When and how should the U.S. military leave Iraq?
Well, you know, there's no easy way there.
Even some of the people who opposed going in now saying, you know, it's so bad and it'll be so chaotic if we stay and therefore we have to stay in.
And too many who opposed the war were the international human types, which I'm not.
And it is easy.
But the difficulty in getting out isn't my fault.
The question is, is it correct to get out if it were wrong to get in?
It's wrong and wrong to stay.
I would literally, you know, get out as soon as I could.
And, you know, just see what happens.
There's so much chaos there now.
And they say, well, you want to go back to Saddam Hussein?
This idea that he was, you know, the most evil person in the world, morally he may have been, but the conditions that existed didn't happen to be the most evil.
Right now, today, we heard four or five Christian churches being bombed.
Christians can't even live in Iraq.
Yet under Saddam Hussein, they were able to.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I thought we were going out to break there.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Heard a little music in my ear.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, so the question is, if we leave and Iraq splits into three and they have a giant civil war and all that, you don't think there's a way that maybe we could set it up so that that doesn't happen before we go?
No, well, they're having a civil war now.
I mean, we have created a civil war.
It's the U.S. troops versus the troops we have hired against the insurgents.
And there's a civil war going on.
So the civil war would probably continue.
Yes, I think you could leave by saying, you know, this is what we're suggesting.
And even draw a line and say the Kurds, you know, the traditional line where the Kurds live, say this is Kurdish territory.
This is where the Sudanese live and this is where the Shiites live in the south.
But there's so much involved, there's no way our government or the U.N. or Kerry or anybody else would concede to that because they really are giving up the loot.
You know, they're giving up this oil loot and control of that region.
So they're not about to do that because they immediately say, well, there's going to be war up in the northern part with the Kurds.
They're going to have a battle with the Turks.
The Shiites in the south might align themselves with the Iranians.
And you know, to tell you the truth, that's always possible.
But I'm still not to the point where those difficulties would say that it's a good idea for me to send my kids over there and have their lives taken for this fight.
Just think of how those kids just yesterday felt when they decided they didn't want to take that tank truck on a convoy where they thought they were going to get their hides blown up.
You know, yes, they didn't obey the law.
They didn't obey a command and they're supposed to and they're in the military.
But can you imagine how many members of Congress or the administration or any administration would send their kids on that trip?
That's the litmus test.
What would those neo-cons send their kids on that trip up there hauling that fuel?
Yeah.
Congressman, the National Intelligence Director bill is now in conference committee.
How far do the different versions go in altering the relationship between the national government and the individual?
Are you talking about H.R.
10?
Yeah, the 9-11 Commission regulations bill.
Yeah, well, I have to confess, I don't know exactly what's going to happen in that commission.
I didn't support the bill.
I don't think either one is going in the right direction.
And I'm critical of the whole system that existed before.
And I think once again they're going in the wrong direction, just as they did after 9-11.
Instead of going away from government dependency, they, you know, went toward more government dependency.
And I think on this gathering of intelligence, they're doing the same thing.
They're making it bigger and more bureaucratic.
And some of the differences aren't as critical to me as the idea that both sides seem to be going in the wrong direction.
Well, the Washington Post and the Toronto Star reported that the White House had actually intervened to make sure that there was something in the House version legalizing the export of Americans to foreign countries to be tortured.
There have been reports of U.S. military and CIA ghost prisons on Navy ships in the Indian Ocean, bases in Central Asia, and as Haaretz reported last week in Jordan.
And these prisoners are in a situation that's often described as a legal black hole.
Yeah.
Now, I wouldn't be surprised that some of that is coming.
So much of this can come even with executive orders.
Just look at Abu Ghraib or what happened there.
And also in Guantanamo, these things happen.
And yet they're pretty blatant about the national ID card in this.
They're institutionalizing that.
So we can all expect that our driver's license will be a national ID card from now on.
Isn't it Congress' responsibility to rein in the power of the executive branch?
Yeah, but for some reason, for 50 years, the U.S. Congress has been derelict in their duties.
And there have been some of those individuals in the universities and elsewhere who say that there's only been one problem in our last 20 or 30 years, and that is that there has been too much power left in the hands of the U.S. Congress, which is exactly opposite of my belief, because I want very little power in the hands of the executive.
And it used to get out of hand, and Congress only wakes up when a lot of harm has been done, and then finally they realize they do have the control of the purse.
But I think they've just been derelict in their duty, they are reflecting a philosophy that's been docked to them by a public school system as well as our universities and the prevailing wisdom, the so-called wisdom of our government and media.
They just pump this out that we need a strong president, we need this.
Just think of all the presidents they hold up as our great heroes are always the ones who want to undermine the representation in the Congress and build the power of the executive.
Yeah, and have a war somewhere overseas.
Right.
Well, after the House defeat of Charlie Rangel's conscription bill last week, do you think that there's much chance of it being revived?
Yeah, that was all a charade, and Rangel really was...
I don't think he, deep down in his heart, he was just making that as one of those racial statements, and he was anti-war, and whether there had been a draft or no draft, he would have just taken the opposite position and said, you know, there's racial strife in this country, and that's the basic problem.
But I think there's going to be a draft, because they're not going to change the foreign policy whether we have Kerry or Bush.
I think there's less likelihood to have a draft if Kerry wins.
But neither side are against the draft, or if they had been against the draft, if they did not endorse the principle of draft, they would have passed my bill to do away with Selective Service registration.
And some of those individuals who were called that vote up and voted, you know, who were on that bill for the draft, actually support my bill to get rid of registration.
Alright, hang tight for one second, Dr. Paul.
We'll be right back on the Weekend Interview Show.
Alright, everybody, welcome back to the Weekend Interview Show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and my guest is my favorite politician in American history.
His name is Dr. Ron Paul.
He represents District 14 in South Texas.
And, sir, I'm sorry, when we went out to the break, I had to interrupt you at the end there, and you were saying that you think that conscription probably can't be avoided as long as the American foreign policy doesn't change.
Yes, that's my belief, and in time, that doesn't mean that there's going to be conscription in January or February or March, but we just don't have enough troops to maintain the foreign policy that both parties have endorsed.
There's hope I'm wrong on this, because maybe they'll come to their senses and decide that they don't need to take on Syria and Iran, which I'm afraid that they're getting ready to do right now, and they just don't have the troops.
Then if you have some type of a skirmish or something break out in Korea, we just know they're not going to back away.
The presidents would think that they would be seen as just surrendering, and therefore, they're going to call up a lot of troops.
That's why it's so important to try to rally the troops in this country, and that means the American people, to the position that non-intervention, a more peaceful foreign policy, and following the traditions of this country and the founders and the Constitution is the only outforest to keep us from getting involved in so much more fighting and killing.
If the people's minds don't change, is there any chance that the American empire can run out of gas before it drives off a cliff?
Yeah, but we don't know when, and we don't know how much killing is going to happen before that occurs.
The ultimate limitation will be the debt that we build up, and it's growing rather rapidly.
Then the currency collapses, so with both parties fully endorsing the entitlement system and the interventionist policy overseas, this is going to take us rapidly to a financial crisis.
Then we run out of money, and other empires have done that before.
They have to quit because they can't afford to pay for it.
They've been paying for money for a long time, and as long as the world accepts our dollar, we're going to continue to do it.
They're still taking our dollars, but not as readily as they were a year or two ago.
That's, of course, the reason why you've seen the gold price go up and the dollar go down and oil prices going up.
This is all related to our foreign policy as well as our financial situation.
On your website, house.gov slash paul, right there on the front page is a video of a speech that you gave called, Can the Constitution Be Saved?
It's a speech that you gave on the House floor, and he said something in that speech that I don't think many people often get a chance to hear, particularly that liberty works.
Is that your view, that from a strictly utilitarian point of view, principle aside, that individual liberty is really the best way to accomplish public goals?
I think that's what America has proven.
You know, we've been a great country.
We still are.
We still have a lot more freedoms than most.
We're still very prosperous.
What we have done, though, is undermine those basic liberties, and we have spent beyond our means.
So if we look to our history and look to the principles that the country was founded on, we'll realize that freedom does work.
The freedom that we've had in the past was imperfect, and there's no reason why it can't become better.
And instead of giving up on it, it didn't work.
People got poor and didn't get medical care, and we've got to solve the problems of the world.
You know, instead of saying that and saying, you know, maybe they were on the right track, we should concentrate on freedom not only because it's morally correct that government shouldn't be telling us how to live our lives and we don't have a right to tell the country how to live, but for the very practical reasons that if you want peace and prosperity, you have to vote for liberty.
Our big problem today is if you ask President Bush and John Kerry if they're for liberty, or if you ask any member of Congress, how many of them would say, oh, no, we're not interested in that anymore.
We are the champions of individual liberty.
We are the champions of the Constitution and peace, and we just want to get rid of all the bad guys.
So their concept is quite different than the concept that I think the founders had, and so many of us now who have been trying to revive these ideas.
So the last time we spoke, I asked you if there was any reason to have hope since you are the only libertarian in the House of Representatives.
I loved your answer, and so I hoped you'd answer that question again for us today.
Is there reason to have hope for American liberty in the near future?
Well, my answer has always been, and hopefully it will be close to what I said before, I tend to be an optimist in that there is hope, otherwise I wouldn't be in politics and I wouldn't be running for Congress.
And when I go around the country and talk on talk shows, and the people that you even reach, this is so much different than it was in the 1970s.
So we see the Internet, the Internet is just great, the antiwar.coms and the rockwell.coms and the various organizations, they're just great.
So there's a large number of people, the remnant, those individuals who were the true believers, I think the remnant is getting very, very big, and yet it is not reflected yet in Washington.
So you can't judge what's happening in the country by what's happening in Washington.
Matter of fact, usually the opposite is happening.
I think the country is way ahead of Washington, and there will be a crisis, it will be a financial crisis, but that's when we will be tested if we have reached enough of the people where the majority of the American people say, yes, what we want to do is have more liberty, not more dependency and government security, and that will be the test.
Have you noticed people in Congress coming around to your point of view at all, people who were already there?
I think every day, at least behind the scenes, I get encouragement.
You know, I have a little committee called the Liberty Committee, and I have 23 members, and they at least want to identify with what I do.
They don't hide from it.
They don't vote with me all the time, but they do identify with me.
And there's more and more people voting correctly, so it's slow, but sure.
All right, everybody, Dr. Ron Paul, Congressman from District 14.
His website is house.gov.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today, sir.