The Ron Paul Beacon

Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment in support of military actions against Iran. Democratic rival Mike Gravel immediately called her out on it in a nationally televised Presidential debate. Her response? Laughter (cackling, actually).

Frankly, I am baffled. Why aren’t Democrats outraged by this? Hillary has said that she wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War if she knew then what she knows now. Yet here she is, voting for war again. Are the Democrats’ attention spans really that short? I took her Iraq vote to mean that she didn’t have the balls to stand up to the President, but she just proved me wrong by virtually coming out of the closet as a Neocon.

And where are the anti-war Democrats? Ron Paul raised over $5 million in Q3, why can’t Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich or Chris Dodd do the same? Why are Democrats blindly goose-stepping behind their war-mongering front-runner, even after she revealed who she really was? I can’t believe for a second that Democrats are suddenly pro-war. So what gives?

Ron Paul got it right in last night’s MSNBC debates when he said that a nuclear Iran does not pose a threat to us. Think about it, China has nuclear plants and nukes. What makes Iran, a much smaller and weaker country than communist China (which happens to own us, by the way), more dangerous? Furthermore, what gives the US, “the greatest violator of the non-proliferation treaty,” (thank you Mike Gravel) the right to tell Iran what it can and can’t do? They have not declared war on us, nor have they threatened to.

There is only one possible way for the “same people who told us Iraq would be a cakewalk” (thank you Ron Paul) to sell their next war to us, and that’s to convince us that they are evil and dangerous “Islamofascists.” But what if they’re right? Can we risk another 9/11?

Lucky for us, they couldn’t be more wrong. Iran is simply pissed off, and with good reason.

First we overthrew the democratically-elected administration of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 because he wasn’t friendly to our oil companies. Then, thrity years later, we gave our buddy Saddam next door hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military equipment and billions of dollars in economic aid to support him during the Iran-Iraq war, conveniently looking the other way when he used chemical weapons against Iranian civilians and even his own people. Now we are harassing Iran about wanting to build nuclear reactors that they are legally allowed to build. Wouldn’t you be pissed off too?

Guess what? They also hate us for everything we have done in the rest of the Middle East, not the least of which are the Clinton-era sanctions and bombings which killed 500,000 Iraqi children (Madeleine Albright even went as far as to say in a 1996 CBS interview that it was worth it; how does that make us look?).

This is not just about the Bush Administration. Our foreign policy has been corrupt for longer than you can imagine. I am currently reading Blowback by Chalmers Johnson, about the history of our Imperialistic foreign policy. In the first chapter he asks why we still operate cold-war era military bases in places like Italy. Does anyone stop to think why we are behaving less and less like a Beacon of Liberty and more and more like an Empire?

So here’s the other thing about Hillary. She’s being advised by Richard Holbrooke, a slightly toned-down version of Norman Podhoretz, Giuliani’s neocon foreign policy advisor (the same guy who goes around ranting about how the Islamofacists are out to kill us). Is this who the Democrats want deciding their foreign policy?

You may be wondering why I would want to bring up Hillary on a Ron Paul blog three months before the primaries. Two reasons: first, I think that many open-minded, rational people who voted Democratic in the past (like me) would in fact support Ron Paul if they took an honest look at him and forgot for a second that he is (gasp!) a Republican. Maybe they’ll finally notice that Hillary is a neocon (quietly being advised by Bush) and realize that maybe, just maybe, a non-interventionist Republican is preferable to a war-mongering Democrat. Second, Google Trends tell us that we are in for a Hillary-Paul Face Off. We need to prepare for the bizarre but increasingly likely possibility of an anti-war Republican underdog taking on a pro-war, insider Democrat.

The Bush Administration still hasn’t told us the real reason we went to war. Was it really about oil or national security? Perhaps it was about spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun? Or maybe it was to stop Islamofascim from destroying America?

Don’t believe any of this for a second. These are are rationalizations at best, lies & propaganda at worst. The truth is that this war and the next one are about empire building. Hillary Clinton is part of that empire, whether she knows it or not. I hope Democrats realize this before it’s too late.

I leave you with this quote from Hermann Göring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, second in command of the Third Reich, and commander of the Luftwaffe:

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Sound familiar?