“I Agree With Ron Paul on Everything But Foreign Policy.”

It is unfortunate that many Americans, including the news media and pundits, dismiss Ron Paul and his message of freedom and peace as either “fringe” or “unelectable.” A lot of people have stated that they agree with Paul on everything but foreign policy. But that is mainly because their views are based on a heavy dose of government propaganda and misinformation, especially since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Americans are going to have to face the truth that none of the Bush-Obama post-9/11 wars and domestic police state programs will protect us from terrorism. As long as the U.S. government continues to trespass on foreign lands with invasions and occupations, constantly commit murders of innocents and destroy entire countries, which the U.S. government has been doing for a century and especially since 1990, the people who don’t like their lands trespassed upon and their family members murdered will continue to retaliate.

The latest thing I’ve heard, regarding the ineffectiveness of the government’s intrusions, has been that the new airport interrogation program will not prevent terrorism, according to Israeli security expert Rafi Sela, who was interviewed on NPR in Boston.

Congressman Ron Paul’s understanding of the moral principles upon which America was founded – and that they are absolute moral principles and cannot change over time – is being criticized as outdated. Unfortunately, too many people have succumbed to the moral relativists’ post-9/11 era of knee-jerk fear mongering. The ones who say that “times are different now,” and that the ideas of individual human rights, national sovereignty and property rights are irrelevant are the ones who practice moral relativism, and their policies of U.S. government expansionism, imperialism, hegemony, and perpetual wars are what have been ruining America, certainly not Ron Paul’s policies of peace and the rule of law.

Out of moral relativism and delusions of grandeur, the statist control freaks have been trying to “democratize” Middle Eastern countries, whether the countries want democracy or not. According to this article, the grandiose globalists had been planning their regime change schemes for Libya, Syria, and Iran for many years, just as with Iraq and Afghanistan.

One problem with the American psyche in general that has gone against America is this idea of “American exceptionalism.” As Laurence Vance recently noted in Christianity and War, for some reason, the moral ideas of “Do unto others what one would want others to do unto you,” and “Don’t do to others what one would not want others to do unto you,” have been forgotten. Too many Americans really believe that it’s okay for our government to place its military bases and other government apparatus on foreign territories, despite the objections of their people, but that it wouldn’t be okay for a foreign government, such as Saudi Arabia or China, to place its military bases in Texas or New Jersey. This is the moral relativism on which U.S. government foreign policy has been based for decades.

The moral relativists also believe that it’s a very bad thing for a group of people to crash planes into American buildings and murder 3,000 people here, but that it’s not so bad when Americans murder tens of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan and Yemen, and Somalia and Libya, and so on.

Now, there are some things about which many Americans are misinformed, particularly in regards to the notion that the U.S. government’s war in Afghanistan (2001- ) was a justified aggression as a means of capturing Osama bin Laden. But, according to Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger and other news organizations, when the Bush Administration in 2001 demanded that the Afghanistan Taliban rulers turn over bin Laden for extradition to the U.S., the Taliban responded by requiring that the Bush Administration present actual evidence of bin Laden’s guilt, and then the Taliban would send bin Laden to a neutral third country. The Bush Administration refused, and continued to demand unconditionally that bin Laden be extradited, without presenting evidence of his guilt.

It was not unreasonable of the Taliban to require evidence before handing over bin Laden. In the Administration’s refusal to present evidence, and with a hostile George W. Bush exhibiting his ignorance of due process by stating, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty,” one can conclude that the Bush Administration did not have evidence of bin Laden’s guilt.

Indeed, in 2001, bin Laden had claimed that he was not involved in the September 11th attacks. It is mind-boggling how the U.S. government had gone on to destroy Afghanistan (and Iraq), with hundreds of thousands of innocents murdered, and thousands of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded, all based on the assumption that Afghanistan or bin Laden had responsibility for 9/11. For those who believe the assumption as truth, please find a source for actual evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11. And many people actually believe the sham that the Navy SEALS actually killed bin Laden on May 1st, when there are many questions and doubts about that.

The truth is that 9/11 didn’t change anything, because the Bush Administration already had plans to start wars in the Middle East. And also, according to Bush family biographer Russ Baker, George W. Bush had already been planning to start wars, especially in Iraq where his father the elder President Bush left off, for political reasons. In Baker’s book, Family of Secrets, Baker quotes the younger Bush’s ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz:

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told me in our 2004 interview…”It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade . . . if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I’m going to have a successful presidency.'”

Many people actually have no idea that the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis prior to 9/11. This started with the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq in 1991. As with the second U.S. war against Iraq beginning in 2003, the first one was also one in which Iraq was of no threat to the U.S.

The U.S. government’s atrocities in Iraq throughout the 1990s were among the motivations of the 9/11 terrorists. The actual primary motivations for the 9/11 attacks, as stated by the terrorists and their cohorts, were political in nature, not religious. The terrorists were angry at the U.S. government’s invasive foreign policy, and at the hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocents in Iraq that started with the U.S. military’s 1991 bombing campaign that included its destruction of civilian electrical, water and sewage treatment centers. The U.S.-led UN sanctions throughout the ‘90s prevented those electrical, water and sewage treatment centers from being repaired or rebuilt, and that situation forced the Iraqis to use untreated water, which led to skyrocketing disease such as cholera and cancer rates.

The civilian electrical, water and sewage treatment centers were intentionally targeted by the U.S. military, according to then-Air Force Col. John Warden, III.

Do people know about all this pre-9/11 history?

Just as with the younger Bush in 2002 with the fabrications, lies and emotionalistic propaganda to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq, in 1990 President George H. W. Bush used emotionalistic propaganda to convince Americans to support his desire to commit the previous aggressions in Iraq. In 1990, the elder Bush and several members of Congress repeatedly cited the story, fabricated by “Nayirah,” the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., of Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and letting them die, as a means of stirring people’s emotions for their support for war.

And just as with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and other connected military contractors in the 2000s involved with the younger Bush’s post-9/11 wars, there were corporate connections to past and present U.S. government officials promoting this first 1991 U.S. war against Iraq, as well. They involved Henry Kissinger and his group Kissinger Associates, Gen. Brent Scrowcroft, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Lawrence Eagleburger, William Simon, and Bechtel, connections that were well fixed during the 1980s.

By the late 1990s, with continuing disease and following the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis from the 1991 war and subsequent sanctions, the terrorist organization al-Qaeda cited the U.S. government’s Middle Eastern occupations and Iraqi sanctions as motivations for al-Qaeda’s subsequent attacks in African U.S. embassies and the U.S.S. Cole, in al-Qaeda’s 1998 fatwa declaration.

This was all before 9/11. Those who refuse to understand that 9/11 was blowback for the U.S. government’s aggressions in the Middle East, and who continue to call for more U.S. government aggressions, do not seem to understand the idea of cause and effect. If you trespass on the property of the neighbors across the street, and provoke them by committing acts of violence against them and then block their access to medical care and food, then they might want to retaliate against you.

All this is not to say that we owe terrorists our “understanding” or sympathy for their terrorism. But it does mean that if we don’t want foreigners to attack us, then the way to prevent that is for our government to stop trespassing on their lands and murdering their people. U.S. government foreign interventionism and aggressions abroad have been going on for a century. Ron Paul believes, rightly, that it has to stop.

When our government officials tell us they want to start or enter a war against another country, we must hold their motivations in suspect. They are probably lying, as has been the case with every war of the past century. (More information on the government’s war lies here).

If we are led to believe that another country such as Iran is a threat to us, then, chances are that the government bureaucrats are lying or fabricating evidence or documentation, as with Iraq in 2002. There is some kind of psychological craving to commit aggression against others, a craving we see time and again amongst those who are given a monopoly on territorial “protection.” For over 200 years of the United States of America, that is one thing that hasn’t changed.

People need to be more informed of the truth about what our politicians have been up to, and, if they were more informed, they probably would agree with Ron Paul on foreign policy.

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and cartoonist. Please visit his website.