In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Ron Paul took the occassion to blame America first yet again. No surprise there. He started off on Fox, as everyone should be aware of. He also went out of his way to do the same thing on MSNBC, where about 5 people saw it.
Start listening about 1 minute in, where he is specifically asked about it. At first he attempts to blame the Islamic extremists 100% and not America, but immediately flips on the Blame America Switch. (I use the colors around the video on purpose)
I’ll be honest, I would almost trust Hillary, Breck Girl, and Obama on foreign policy more then Paul.
Ron Paul is not blaming America or the American people.
He is saying we should understand how our foreign policy results in unintended consequences which come back and bite us and this is because we intervene in the internal affairs of other countries by either subsidising them, bombing them or invading and occupying their land. This almost always backfires on us and we suffer as a result: our nation is less safe, Americans are more likely to get killed and our soldiers get unnecessarily killed in these entangling alliances.
Benazir Bhutto herself echoed Ron Paul’s words in a November 2007 Parade magazine interview. She said, “I would say, ‘Your policy [i.e. US foreign policy] of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”
See: http://www.parade.com/benazir_bhutto_interview.html
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So consider our interventions in Pakistan:
Musharraf gets rid of the democratic government of Pakistan in a coup and becomes dictator with US support. We support the guy and give him 10 billion dollars in aid over 8 years because he’s now our partner in the War on Terror and he’ll get Osama bin Laden for us. But he allows bin Laden roam free in the border regions of Pakistan and actually allows him escape from Tora Bora when we had him surrounded and could have captured him.
So American taxpayers through U.S government foreign policy are subsidising a dictator who’s funding radical Islamic schools whose students make up the bulk of the Taleban who are now killing our soldiers in Afghanistan. Crazy or what!
Now we’re thinking of getting involved again because Bhutto has been assasinated — we should learn our lesson and stay out of their internal affairs.
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And what about Osama bin Laden:
We supported and funded Osama bin Laden in the war against the Soviets in the eighties and we also funded Islamic radicals in Pakistan who then metamorphosised into the Taleban. So bin Laden and the Taleban build up a radical following in Afghanistan, get rid of the Soviets with U.S weapons, and then turn their attention to the U.S because we have military bases in Islamic Holy Land in Saudi Arabia, we take sides in the Israeli/Palestine conflict and we’ve been applying sanctions against Iraq and bombing them for over 10 years resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million Iraqis, mostly children.
To compound the problem, we’ve gone into Iraq based on the lie that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and as a result, Al Qaeda has more supporters than ever and our boys are sitting ducks over there. We’re more threatened than we’ve ever been and the bitter irony is that bin Laden & pretty much all of the hijackers were Saudis but we support the Saudi regime because of oil and we continue to maintain bases in Saudi Arabia further fuelling the hatred against us. The Saudi regime itself is repressive, dictatorial, has a terrible human rights record and is funding radical muslims in other parts of the world. This is just plain crazy…
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And consider our interventions in Iran also:
The CIA organised a coup & overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 because among other things, he wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil and loosen the grip of British oil interests so that the Iran people could better benefit from their own oil.
So we remove the guy and he eventually gets killed, we install the Shah thereby creating a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in an Islamic country where democracy was on the verge of flourishing.
So they hate us for meddling in their internal affairs, but we don’t stop there. We support the dictatorial Saddam regime in Iraq against Iran in a 10-year war in order to protect oil interests by giving Iraq weapons (including chemical & biological agents) which kills millions of Iranian people and further entrenches the Islamic fundamentalists in power in Iran.
And we still haven’t learnt our lesson because neo-cons talk about pre-emptively attacking Iran using nuclear weapons because they MIGHT have a nuclear weapons programme (they don’t) and they MIGHT attack us with it sometime in the future. The democratic Presidential contenders don’t rule this out and the Republican contenders (except Dr Paul), are even worse because they actively push this crazy policy.
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Ron Paul makes sense:
Ron Paul’s supporters understand these issues and think he’s the only sane guy in the room. U.S foreign policy now and in the recent past has been radical, crazy, and full of unintended consequences (though my 10 year-old niece could probably have forseen the disasters that would follow).
Ron Paul is the only sensible guy in all of this and his non-interventionist approach where we trade & talk to people (even those we don’t like) would actually make the U.S and the world a safer place, safeguard American interests, make it less likely that radicals take over in unstable countries and it would do a better job of promoting democracy abroad. We don’t need troops in Germany, Japan or South Korea and we certainly don’t need our boys getting killed in the Middle East or potentially Pakistan. They should all come home.
We lost 68,000 men in Vietnam before we accepted defeat and came home. But now we talk and trade with Vietnam and while they’ve still got some problems (who hasn’t), they are well on the way to being a peaceful westernised country — by following a non-interventionist policy we achieved in peace what we couldn’t achieve in a pre-emptive war and the sacrifice of 68,000 young lives.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com
In other words, it is America’s fault. Thanks for the confirmation.
Well Bhutto’s death looks like it has removed one obstacle for a continued rule by a right wing militarist dictator. So I am sure that some on the right be be happy about that along with other social conservatives such as Osama. A woman as President ?? Poppycock !!!