Ron Paul is an old coot with outmoded ideas about abortions, guns, and probably some other stuff. He reads Ayn Rand and there is at least some past evidence he might be a racist. He speaks of the “Free Market” as if it’s an actual thing (Ha!). And as a few of my Facebook friends pointed out, he’s got two first names, which is another pretty big strike against him.
But he is strongly anti-war, and I believe that issue supersedes the other ones. The biggest contributor to world unrest is U.S. interference abroad. It’s always cast as promoting Democracy, which if you’re paying attention at all, you know is complete bullshit. Whenever the U.S. becomes involved in a foreign conflict, there is always a ridiculous amount of money to be made by multinational energy and infrastructure corporations. Every time. We like to think we are helping people under oppression, or performing world “police” duties, but again, I stress: bullshit. In the past 60 years, at least, we have never exerted serious military force on foreign soil just to help someone.
If you have starving people, or a genocidal maniac running your country into the ground, and want us to help, you’d damn sure better be sitting on some pimp oil deposits, or have some excuse for a massive Halliburton-level infrastructure project, or U.S. involvement won’t be anything more than symbolic. Another requirement: a brutal dictator waiting in the wings to take over. Someone to whom we can give a plausible “Democratic Makeover,” who will do what we want them to do for the next decade or so, and of course, someone whom we can trust with generous weapons shipments, poison gas technology, etc. Basically, we want someone who will allow us to milk your country’s resources for all they’re worth, even if we know your people will eventually wake up and see our involvement for what it is, and decide to react to U.S. oppression (channeled through the aforementioned fake-democratic leader/puppet) through the only means they have available (since, you know, the elections are totally rigged): violence.
The CIA invented a term for this: ‘Blowback.’ It’s something most of our leaders know will come eventually, even as they sow the seeds. But it’s all figured into the cost-benefit analysis. If there’s money to be made, somebody’s gonna get bombed, and if there’s a price to be paid down the road, it’s rarely going to be paid by the individuals who set the bombing in motion. The term was first used in relation to the 1953 coup in Iran, where the U.S. and Britain overthrew the government because the Iranians got all uppity and thought they should be able to maintain control of their own natural resources (Stephen Kinzer has a good book on the subject). That event has pretty much defined the relationship between oil-producing countries and the West ever since, though internal CIA documents describing it didn’t surface publicly until nearly 50 years later. So in 1979, perhaps ordinary Americans can be at least partially forgiven for thinking that the uprising against Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, the taking of American hostages, etc. was the wholly unprecedented result of a bunch of evil and crazy Muslims randomly deciding to be evil and crazy. Of course today, anyone who has bothered to read up a little on 20th century Middle East history knows better. That wouldn’t include Rick Santorum, who in addition to being just generally a colossal dumbass, doesn’t even bother to familiarize himself with the issues that might be important for a Senator or a Presidential candidate to have a grip on. For an in-depth look at blowback and how it’s related to U.S. foreign policy throughout history, see the Chalmers Johnson book by that title.
So. Why, if this post is supposed to be about Ron Paul, am I prattling on about “ancient” history….about blowback and the 1953 Iranian coup? Because Ron Paul actually talks about this stuff. He sees U.S. interventionist foreign policy for what it is, and he’s not afraid to say it. The page linked above under Santorum’s name recounts the recent Iowa debate, where Paul made Santorum look like a naive child, and includes a video of the exchange. Initially, I watched the video just to amuse myself by seeing Ricky-boy get schooled. But my jaw literally dropped when I heard Ron Paul use the word ‘blowback’ and start talking about the 1953 coup. I’ve never heard this talked about before by any candidate, despite its obvious relevance to our Middle-Eastern predicament. I just assumed it was sort of tacitly agreed, as it generally is in the mainstream media, that such open criticism of U.S. foreign intervention, no matter how long ago, was inappropriate. Thus, I decided this Ron Paul guy definitely deserved a closer look. Turns out he’s been talking about this for a long time. In particular, about halfway down the page, watch the video of his 2007 appearance on Bill Maher’s show. From that interview:
“Well, I think it’s been known for quite a few decades that our foreign policy has what the CIA calls “blowback”. It has unintended consequences. You can go back to 1953, when we put the Shah into power, us supporting Osama bin Laden and radicalizing Islamics to go after the Soviets, and that comes back as blowback, our support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980′s, and this comes back to haunt us, and that’s why I have been very [...] supportive of what I call a non-interventionist foreign policy—mind our own business, stay out of the internal affairs of other nations.”
And from Ron Paul’s book The Revolution: A Manifesto:
“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.”
And on intervention generally:
“There is always some militant-violent-jihadist looking to rally that faction, but they have to have incentives. The incentive is when we impose our will on them and we get involved in their internal politics. Besides, it contradicts everything the Founders theorized, and there’s no constitutional authority for us to march around the world undermining different governments.”
To my mind, this is huge. Our foreign policy, particularly with regard to intervention in other sovereign governments, is responsible for a major subset of our economic problems today. The United States has nearly 1000 overseas military bases in at least 120 countries, and there are now covert operations underway in more countries than that. Special Forces alone are now operating in at least 75 countries, according to the Washington Post. Seventy. Five. Fucking. Countries. WTF, American People??
The biggest concerns for our economy and our national security arise from imposing our presence where it isn’t wanted. The web of U.S. interference is so complex and tangled that it’s probably not even possible to calculate how much this is costing us monetarily. Estimating the future cost to our country in dollars and lives, arising strictly from ill-will toward America for our meddling, is another question altogether. An impossible task. Figuring out who benefits from our massive “defense” budget, on the other hand, is pretty easy. This is a vast problem, and it’s almost never addressed in honest terms by our leaders. Ron Paul is addressing it, and he seems to have his head screwed on right about it.
What about the other issues? Well, this piece is long enough already, and I don’t have time or energy to cover them at length. But I’ll make two simple points: first, most of these other issues pale by comparison to our dangerous and costly military interference abroad, and second, Ron Paul is happy, in most cases, to let the states handle this stuff, as our founding fathers intended. And besides, what if he is a serious racist (for example)? Let’s say he gets into office and decides he wants some legislation crafted that would take us back 50 years in the civil rights department? You think that could happen? That’s a rhetorical question. Finally, we’re not going to get a candidate who’s ideal on all fronts, and look where trying to do that has gotten us. Barack Obama, is tepid, malleable, ineffectual. Better than Shrubbo? Yeah? So what. It’s time we figure out what’s most important for the future of the United States, and the world, and let the small chips fall where they fall.
NOTE: Iran has a rich history of propagandizing through its postage stamps. Bonus points for reading up on the story behind the stamp that appears with this post. 
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