No wonder frustrated Americans have begun referring to our two parties as the Republicrats. There are no matters of substance. In late , a number of friends and colleagues urged me to consider running for president.
I was a reluctant candidate, not at all convinced that a sizable enough national constituency existed for a campaign based on liberty and the Constitution rather than on special-interest pandering and the distribution of loot. Was I ever wrong. In the fourth quarter of , we raised more than twice as much money as any other Republican candidate. Not only is the freedom message popular, but if fund-raising ability is any indication, it is more intensely popular than any other political message.
By the end of , more than twice as many Meetup groups had been formed in support of our campaign than for all the rest of the candidates in both major parties combined. I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers--all were not only involved, but enthusiastically so.
And despite their philosophical differences in some areas, these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other. The mainstream media had no idea what to make of it, since we were breaking all the rules and yet still attracting such a varied and passionate following.
I began making this a central point of my public speeches: the reason all these different groups are rallying to the same banner, I said, is that freedom has a unique power to unite us.
In case that sounds like a cliche, it isn't. It's common sense. When we agree not to treat each other merely as means to our own selfish ends, but to respect one another as individuals with rights and goals of our own, cooperation and goodwill suddenly become possible for the first time.
My message is one of freedom and individual rights. I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should be used only defensively. That, and not a desire for "economic efficiency," is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason.
People seem to think I am speaking of principles foreign to the Republican tradition. But listen to the words of Robert A.
Taft, who in the old days of the Republican Party was once its standard-bearer: When I say liberty I do not simply mean what is referred to as "free enterprise. As we'll see in a later chapter, Taft was also an opponent of needless wars and of unconstitutional presidential war-making. This is the Republican tradition to which I belong. Early on in my presidential campaign, people began describing my message and agenda as a "revolution.
In a country with a political debate as restricted as ours, it is revolutionary to ask whether we need troops in countries and whether the noninterventionist foreign policy recommended by our Founding Fathers might not be better. It is revolutionary to ask whether the accumulation of more and more power in Washington has been good for us.
It is revolutionary to ask fundamental questions about privacy, police-state measures, taxation, social policy, and countless other matters. This revolution, though, is not altogether new. It is a peaceful continuation of the American Revolution and the principles of our Founding Fathers: liberty, self- government, the Constitution, and a noninterventionist foreign policy. That is what they taught us, and that is what we now defend.
I was never interested in writing a campaign book, as they tend to have deservedly short shelf lives. This book is an opportunity to highlight and explain them in the kind of systematic fashion that campaign speeches and presidential debates simply do not allow.
The revolution my supporters refer to will persist long after my retirement from politics. Here is my effort to give them a long-term manifesto based on ideas, and perhaps some short-term marching orders. At the same time, I am also describing what the agenda of George W. Bush's successor should be if we want to move toward a free society once again. Our country is facing an unprecedented financial crisis precisely because the questions our political and media establishments allow us to ask are so narrow.
Whether or not politicians actually want to hear them, it has never been more important for us to begin posing significant and fundamental questions. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, called for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
Unfortunately, we have spent the past century spurning this sensible advice. If the Founders' advice is acknowledged at all, it is dismissed on the grounds that we no longer live in their times. The same hackneyed argument could be used against any of the other principles the Founders gave us. Should we give up the First Amendment because times have changed? How about the rest of the Bill of Rights?
The principles enshrined in the Constitution do not change. If anything, today's more complex world cries out for the moral clarity of a noninterventionist foreign policy. It is easy to dismiss the noninterventionist view as the quaint aspiration of men who lived in a less complicated world, but it's not so easy to demonstrate how our current policies serve any national interest at all. Perhaps an honest examination of the history of American interventionism in the twentieth century, from Korea to Vietnam to Kosovo to the Middle East, would reveal that the Founding Fathers foresaw more than we think.
Anyone who advocates the noninterventionist foreign policy of the Founding Fathers can expect to be derided as an isolationist. I myself have never been an isolationist.
I favor the very opposite of isolation: diplomacy, free trade, and freedom of travel. The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seeking change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example.
The real isolationists are those who isolate their country in the court of world opinion by pursuing needless belligerence and war that have nothing to do with legitimate national security concerns. Interestingly enough, George W. Bush sounded some of these themes when he ran for president in the year By that time, many Republicans had grown weary of Bill Clinton's military interventions and forays into nation building and wanted to put a stop to it.
Sensibly enough, Bush spoke of a humble foreign policy, no nation building, and no policing the world. In , then Governor Bush declared: "Let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character.
The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness. I think one way for us to end up being viewed as 'the ugly American' is for us to go around the world saying, 'We do it this way; so should you. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called 'nation building. Maybe I'm missing something here--we're going to have kind of a 'nation- building corps' from America? If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us.
Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble. We know what came later, of course. And by the Republican primaries, one of the front-runners had strayed so far from President Bush's original platform that he was even saying that in the future, nation building should become one of the standard functions of the American military. Some Americans may be familiar with the admonition of John Quincy Adams that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
But his sentiments extended well beyond this oft-cited maxim. First, Adams considered what could be said in America's defense if anyone were ever to wonder what she had done for the world: [I]f the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world. Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless, and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights; she has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own; she has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Adams then described the foreign policy of the American republic: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. This wasn't "isolationism. In the same way, Henry Clay was merely repeating George Washington's wise sentiments, rather than giving voice to isolationism, when he urged this piece of advice upon his countrymen: "By the policy to which we have adhered since the days of Washington.
Far better is it for ourselves. We do no one any good by bankrupting ourselves. Richard Cobden was a nineteenth-century British statesman who opposed all of his government's foreign interventions. In those days, though, people understood the philosophy of nonintervention much better than they do today, and no one was silly enough to brand Cobden an isolationist. He was known instead, appropriately enough, as the International Man.
There are those who condemn noninterventionists for being insufficiently ambitious, for their unwillingness to embrace "national greatness"--as if a nation's greatness could be measured according to any calculus other than the virtues of its people and the excellence of its institutions. These critics should have the honesty to condemn the Founding Fathers for the same defect. They wouldn't dare. But it would be refreshing to hear it stated in so many words: our current political class is blessed with historic genius, and Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were contemptible fools.
What the Founding Fathers have to teach us about foreign policy became all the more important, and yet all the more ignored, in the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, In the weeks that followed that fateful day, most Americans' focus was on identifying the sponsors of the attacks and punishing them.
That was sensible enough. I myself voted to track down al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But people were bound to start wondering, eventually, why we were attacked--not because they sought to excuse the attackers, of course, but out of a natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick.
Seven years later, though, our political class still refuses to deal with the issue in anything but sound bites and propaganda. The rest of the world is astonished at this refusal to speak frankly about the reality of our situation. And yet our safety and security may depend on it. One person to consult if we want to understand those who wish us harm is Michael Scheuer, who was chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late s. Scheuer is a conservative and a pro-life voter who has never voted for a Democrat.
And he refuses to buy the usual line that the attacks on America have nothing to do with what our government does in the Islamic world. To the contrary, Scheuer could not be any clearer in his writing that the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on Americans should be pursued mercilessly for their acts of barbarism.
His point is very simple: it is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them. That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback--the unintended consequences of military intervention. Obviously the onus of blame rests with those who perpetrate acts of terror, regardless of their motivation. The question Scheuer and I are asking is not who is morally responsible for terrorism--only a fool would place the moral responsibility for terrorism on anyone other than the terrorists themselves.
The question we are asking is less doltish and more serious: given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to this kind of blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? Is it really worth it to us? The main focus of our criticism, in other words, is that our government's foreign policy has put the American people in greater danger and made us more vulnerable to attack than we would otherwise have been. This is the issue that we and others want to raise before the American people.
The interventionist policies that have given rise to blowback have been bipartisan in their implementation. For instance, it was Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said on 60 Minutes that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the s were "worth it.
The question answers itself. So why wouldn't we expect people to try to take revenge for these policies? I have never received an answer to this simple and obvious question. This does not mean Americans are bad people, or that they are to blame for terrorism-- straw-man arguments that supporters of intervention raise in order to cloud the issue and demonize their opponents.
It means only that actions cause reactions, and that Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world. In the year , I wrote: "The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties.
To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheuer points out that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. Bin Laden's message, on the other hand, has been so attractive to so many people because it is fundamentally defensive. Bin Laden, says Scheuer, has "spurned the Ayatollah's wholesale condemnation of Western society," focusing instead on "specific, bread-and-butter issues on which there is widespread agreement among Muslims.
The point is not that we need to agree with these arguments, but that we need to be aware of them if we want to understand what is motivating so many people to rally to bin Laden's banner. Few people are moved to leave behind their worldly possessions and their families to carry out violence on behalf of a disembodied ideology; it is practical grievances, perhaps combined with an underlying ideology, that motivate large numbers to action.
At a press conference I held at the National Press Club in May , Scheuer told reporters: "About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U. They all agree they hate U. To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems.
Philip Giraldi, another conservative and former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, adds that "anybody who knows anything about what's been going on for the last ten years would realize that cause and effect are operating here--that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that 'we're over there. On May 29, , Reuters reported: "Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion [of Iraq] had been 'almost unnoticed but huge'-- namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance.
The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet's nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people.
That's just common sense. But hardly anyone in our government dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy. Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioned domestic program can have. We can only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.
A classic example of blowback involves the overthrow of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran in American and British intelligence collaborated on the overthrow of Mossadegh's popularly elected government, replacing him with the politically reliable but repressive shah.
Years later, a revolutionary Iranian government took American citizens hostage for days. There is a connection here--not because supporters of radical Islam would have had much use for the secular Mossadegh, but because on a human level people resent that kind of interference in their affairs. When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic fundamentalism.
Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we have believed. The world's leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or the Sudan.
The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.
While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist radical Islamic presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U. Until the U. Between and , there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon.
Once the U. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire potential suicide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs. Although most Americans don't know it, for much of the early twentieth century our country had an excellent reputation in the Middle East, the part of the world we are now told will hate us no matter what we do.
Right now, after decades of meddling, our government is hated in the Middle East and around the world to a degree I have never before seen in my lifetime. That does not make us safer. To be sure, there will always be those who wish us ill regardless of the foreign policy we adopt. But those who would recruit large numbers of their coreligionists to carry out violence against Americans find their task very difficult when they cannot point to some tangible issue that will motivate people to do so.
It is bin Laden's specific list of grievances that has rallied so many to his cause. Predictably enough, al Qaeda recruitment has exploded since the invasion of Iraq. The war in Iraq was one of the most ill-considered, poorly planned, and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history, and I opposed it from the beginning. But the beginning I am speaking of was not or I believe the genesis of our later policy was being set at that time. Many of the same voices who then demanded that the Clinton administration attack Iraq later demanded that the Bush administration attack Iraq, exploiting the tragedy of September 11 to bring about their long-standing desire to see an American invasion of that country.
Any rationale would do: "weapons of mass destruction," the wickedness of Saddam an issue that did not seem to keep many of these policymakers up at night in the s, when they were supporting him , a Saddam- al Qaeda link, whatever. As long as their Middle Eastern ambitions could be satisfied, it did not matter how the people were brought along.
By any standard--constitutional, financial, national defense--I could not see the merits of the proposed invasion of Iraq. Any serious Middle East observer could have told us, if we were listening, that Iraq had essentially no connection to terrorism. Iraq had not attacked us, and figures in our own government, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had said that Saddam was effectively contained and no threat to anyone.
Saddam's was not even an Islamic regime; it was a secular one--although, thanks to the war, that is now changing. Some war apologists to this day still try to argue that the weapons were really there or that Saddam really was linked to al Qaeda, but I'm not sure why they bother.
The administration long ago gave up on these claims. In the midst of all this, it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war, and the lengths to which Christian and later secular thinkers have gone over the centuries to limit and restrict the waging of war.
For well over a thousand years there has been a doctrine and Christian definition of what constitutes a just war. This just-war tradition developed in the fourth century with Ambrose and Augustine but grew to maturity with Thomas Aquinas and such Late Scholastics as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez. The requirements for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject shared some basic principles.
The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them. First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged. But there was no act of aggression against the United States. We are 6, miles from Iraq. Webster said that since the Constitution aims to promote freedom, no infringement of freedom could possibly be constitutional unless the document explicitly mandated it.
A free government with arbitrary means to administer it is a contradiction; a free government without adequate provisions for personal security is an absurdity; a free government, with an uncontrolled power of military conscription, is a solecism, at once the most ridiculous and abominable that ever entered into the head of man.
Webster's view, here adopted by Paul, closely resembles Lysander Spooner's method of constitutional analysis, by which he controversially attempted to show the unconstitutionality of slavery, long before the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Of course the most well known of Ron Paul's recent attempts to use the Constitution to check federal power involves the Iraq war. The Constitution vests in Congress, not the president, to right to declare war.
The Iraq war is then illegal, since Congress has not issued such a declaration. Supporters of the war cannot appeal to "authorization of force" resolutions.
Congress cannot constitutionally delegate its power to declare war to the president, leaving it for him to decide when force is to be used appropriately. Paul makes his criticism even stronger by connecting it to the just-war tradition.
It is an uncontroversial part of that tradition that a war cannot be just unless it is initiated by one holding authority to do so. In our system of government, it is Congress that possesses this power. Absent a Congressional declaration of war, then, the Iraq war is unjust. The point must not be misunderstood. It is not a requirement for any just war that it be authorized by legislative resolution: it is only that if a legal system vests the power to declare war in this way, it cannot be justly exercised otherwise.
In the American system, war without a Congressional declaration is unjust as well as illegal. Ron Paul also uses the Constitution as an instrument for sound monetary policy.
As everyone knows, he is an able and effective advocate of Austrian economics. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Sennholz" p. This careful student of Murray Rothbard realizes, much better than any other member of Congress, that sound finance demands the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the restoration of the gold standard.
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