The end of the war is not near

Delivered by Ron Paul to the U.S. House of Representatives on March 4, 2009.
Transcribed by Matthew Matrisciano.
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Mr. Speaker, the end of the war is not near. I might ask, are the troops coming home from Iraq as promised? Not quite. Sixteen months is too quick, so the plan now is to do it in thirty-four months. The administration claims all the troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Sure they will. We’re told that 50,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq in August of 2010, and we’re supposed to cheer. We’re told that they won’t be combat troops, so we’re to believe that means they won’t be exposed to any danger. If they are non-combat troops, does that mean they are bureaucrats, policemen, teachers, or soldiers without weapons?

This will hardly satisfy the Iraqis, who resent any foreign troops at all in their country. A U.S. puppet government protected by 50,000 American soldiers is not the road to peace. Would the Iranian-friendly Shiite majority not be motivated to take advantage of the instability we have created? Will the 100,000 Sunni militants we arm and subsidize continue to obey our wishes?

It sounds to me like a powder keg exists with the indecisiveness of our Iraqi policy. There is no intention to close [down] the dozens of military bases that now exist. The world’s biggest embassy will remain in Baghdad and incite continued resentment toward the American occupation. Our soldiers will remain easy targets of the rightfully angry nationalists. Our presence will serve as an incentive for al-Qaeda to grow in numbers and motivate more suicide bombers. An indefinite presence, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, will continue to drain our financial resources, undermine our national defense, demoralize our military, and exacerbate our financial crisis. All this will be welcomed by Osama bin Laden, just as he planned it—and actually more than he had hoped for.

More likely, the outcome will be that greater than 50,000 Americans will be in Iraq in August of 2010, especially when the contractors are counted. Violence will accelerate. We will be an occupier at the end of 2011, and we will remain a pariah in the Middle East. The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be much bigger—unless the dollar follows the path of the dollar-based world financial system, and collapses into runaway inflation. In this case, the laws of economics and the realities of history will prove superior to the madness of maintaining a world empire financed by scraps of paper. Our military prowess, backed by a nuclear arsenal, will not suffice in overcoming the tragedy of a currency crisis. Soviet nukes did not preserve its empire or the communist economy.

This crisis demands that we quickly come to our senses and reject the foreign policy of interventionism. Neither credit coming from a Federal Reserve computer nor dollars coming from a printing press can bail us out of this mess—only the rule of law, commodity money, and liberty can do that.

Mr. Speaker, let’s consider reinstating the Constitution before it’s too late.

If it ain't broke, the government will try and break it.

From the AP: "Lack of a seat belt law could cost Kansas millions."

But I thought seatbelt laws were to keep people safe, to keep them from dying! What sort of devilry is this, that a seatbelt law would simply be about state revenue?

Il denaro fuori dal nulla!

In a classic example of government breaking something even more by trying to fix it comes this news from D.C.:

President Barack Obama is hailing Senate passage of legislation providing government-sponsored health care to roughly 4 million uninsured children.

You and I and everyone else all knew that this or something in the vein of it was in the works and would be passed rather quickly. Obama is all about bringing Change! to the U.S., whatever it might be. Change!, my friends, is coming, and it's oddly not all too different from what we've had for the last several years. But Change! is not the focus of my post but, rather, this golden nugget:

Obama's statement said the Senate vote is especially significant at a time when "the worsening economy causes families to lose their jobs and health insurance."

Where is the money for this coming from, might I ask? Well, since this is a government-sponsored and -run program, one can rightly assume that the money is coming from the government. Where does the government get its money from? Taxes. Whom does the government tax? The people. Upon whom does the economy depend? The people. Sounds like a winner to me, Mr. Obama!

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States or: Incontra il direttore nuovo, uguale a il direttore precedente

All of the excitement over Barack Obama's inauguration is, quite frankly, disgusting, sickening, and shortsighted. He's going to bring "Change!" to America, he's going to magically fix the economy, he's going to fix our foreign policy, he's going to fix the environment, he's going to do everything that everyone wants and more, and only at the low, low price of ever-increasing federal debt. Anyone who wanted actual change should have supported Ron Paul, who has consistently actually done what he's said. Sfortunatamente that ship has sailed, and I don't see a chance for a true candidate for change for a long, long time. I must deal with what we have now: an imposter of a candidate for change.

I had the pleasure of helping my class attempt to watch Obama's inauguration Tuesday. Because of a comment on a certain Slashdot article a short while back I discovered that the Senate had set up a website to stream the inauguration using Flash. When my professor ran into restrictions on every major news website she went to, I directed her to the Senate website. Of course, the webserver was painfully slow, so the speech was constantly rebuffering, and five or six minutes before class ended she said we could have left already.

So I left. I was starving, and I went to the Circle K just down the street and got myself a soda and candy bar and sat in the adjoining restaurant. Of course, it had a TV, and of course the TV was playing the inauguration. The group of people was two or three times larger than my class yet was much more muted. Perhaps out of awe, but I certainly appreciated the relative silence. For all of Obama's talk about change I really couldn't and can't see any, just a few superficial things he'll be doing differently.

And because of my inability to spot any real change in Obama's plans, I have to admit that I was surprised to read that Obama has lifted Ashcroft's restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, and has also signed an order to close the U.S.'s prison at Guantanamo Bay within one year. These two bits of news ever-so-slightly tempered my distrust of and cynicism toward Obama, in part because I thought he might actually want to approach the Neverending War—excuse me, War on Terrorism—in a different manner, but mainly because I had stopped caring about Barack Obama in much the same way that I had stopped caring about George W. Bush when I became a minarchist in high school.

My cynicism and distrust were brought back in full force, however, when I returned from Publix this afternoon to find an altogether unsurprising article on Slashdot, bastion of nerd-intellectual news that it is: "Obama sides with Bush in spy case." The blurb handily summarizes—a first for Slashdot—the linked Threat Level article:

President Obama has publicly sided with the Bush administration on the question of whether the President should be allowed to establish warrantless wiretapping programs designed to monitor U.S. citizens. "Thursday's filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless-eavesdropping program."

I don't know about you, but for all his talk of transparency and openness, I don't think that Obama will live up to much or any of it. He's in charge now, his party is in charge of the executive and the legislative—and when you and your coworkers or cow-orkers or cohorts or fellow mob-men and lawyers are in control of everything, it's really hard to do away with such a convenient thing as warrantless wiretaps. Of course, the cynic in me believes that even if the stay isn't a gesture of support for Bush, and even if Obama really does do away with the warrantless-wiretapping program, that there will still be widespread warrantless wiretapping—how's that for an alliteration?—but that it simply won't be public knowledge.

And just because you can request certain information from the government doesn't mean that you'll get it, and even if you get it, you might not necessarily be getting the actual information.

I do, however, see the administration's request for a stay as its taking the Bush administration's side because Obama voted for telecom immunity:

The Obama administration is also siding with the former administration in its legal defense of July legislation that immunizes the nation's telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicitity in Bush's eavesdropping program, according to testimony last week by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder.

That immunity legislation, which Obama voted for when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, was included in a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging, warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans' electronic communications.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Change has finally come to the United States, and it's never seemed so familiar.