Contra Ron Paul and "Blowback"

Miscellaneous General
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Ron Paul believes that “blowback” is the primary motivation behind the actions of nations. “Blowback” is a real thing, of course, and a natural consequence of any large nation’s foreign policy efforts, but it is only a sliver of motivation in the conduct of nations. To support Ron Paul, you have to believe he is right that “blowback” is the DOMINANT reality in the policy of Middle Eastern nations, which it is not, and never has been.

“Blowback” is a natural response to great nations anytime. To put it simply: if there was blowback from freedom loving people, we would be the villains. But since it is “blowback” from fiends and monsters, they are the villains. Actually, the world is a bit more complex than that, but if you’re looking for the bad guys, turn your eyes away from freedom loving people to the oppressors and religious madmen.

Question: Is there “blowback” from the Kuwaitis? Why not? We have large bases there. Is there “blowback” from the Kurds? Why not? We have “occupied” their land, have we not? Is the current Islamic violence against Christians in Egypt or Nigeria “blowback” for something America did? Or is it driven by a religious ideology?

Paul is so narrowly focused on a few hundred terrorists that he completely misses the big issues…ideology (Islamo-fascism), national interests, and thuggish leaders. Islamists are far more oppresive than any dictators we supported during the Cold War. Talk to Iranian Americans, and ask if Iran was better under the Shah or Khomeni. Paul would profit by reading the Ayatollah Khomeini’s book Islamic Government. The Iranian Revolution was not “blowback,” it was ideologically driven, and far more brutal than the Shah ever was. Anti-Imperialism is just a mask for Islamic domination.

Dr. Paul also holds the incredible belief that The Golden Rule foreign policy will turn ideological monsters into friends. What happens if we pull all our troops back from the world, and China starts eating up the pacific rim, Russia retakes the former Soviet satellites (now free people), and Islam marches deeper into Africa and Europe? What if they don’t want to be friends?

One more question: English language Russian media is heavily promoting Dr. Paul as the “peace candidate.” Why do you think they are doing this?

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Which is why Ron Paul wants you to stop backing them (Islamists).

Because they like Islamists so much?

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Open up a history book sometime, sweetheart.

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No he doesn’t. He has never said that. He’s said that ‘blowback’ is the primary reason a few specific events happened, but he’s never said anything like it being the “primary motivation behind the actions of nations”, or even the primary motivation behind all of the actions of Middle Eastern nations.

Why would there be? Military bases aren’t really a big deal–they don’t significantly affect the population. Things like supporting brutal dictators are what cause hatred and blowback, because the population is poor and oppressed because of our actions. The Kuwaiti people are fairly well off, so there’s no reason for there to be blowback.

Not against us, because we deposed a government they hated. And the Iraq war didn’t affect Kurdistan as much as the rest of Iraq, because the Kurds largely stayed out of sectarian violence that devasted most of the country. There has been plenty of Kurdish blowback against Turkey though, which is what Ron Paul and anyone else who understood blowback would expect as a response to Turkey’s oppression of the Kurds.

In Egypt, yes, according to the CIA’s definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence) Violence that happens as a result of the the collapse of a dictatorship we supported is a kind of blowback. Violence against Christians in Nigeria may not have anything to do with America, but that doesn’t make it not blowback, it’s just blowback from the decades old conflict between the Muslim and Christian parts of Nigeria, rather than blowback against America.

I don’t see what this choice has to do with American intervention in Iran. The real question to ask would be the Shah vs. Mossaddegh, the prime minister we overthrew to install the Shah in 1953. And it doesn’t matter what Khomeini’s motivations were–it’s still blowback. Khomeini was only able to get in power because of popular support, which he could only get because he was overthrowing the dictator we installed. If we had stayed out of Iran in 1953, Khomeini would never have been able to install his government.

Oh really?

What Islamist government has done anything that bad?

Nothing, because that won’t happen–they’ve learned from our mistakes, and realize how stupid such imperialism would be. Russians remember not only our wars in the Middle East, but their own disasterous war in Afghanistan–do you think they want to repeat such experiences in Eastern Europe? The Chinese do have an interest in the rest of the world–but they’ve been investing in rather than conquering countries to achieve their goals, because it makes much more sense to act that way. They wouldn’t even be able to afford imperialism–they’ve got a huge property bubble that could burst any time, and a demographic crisis coming up soon caused by their one child policy that’ll probably bankrupt them as their population ages dramatically.

How exactly do you think American intervention is going to stop the spread of religion? If anything, our interventions help spread radical Islam. Who do we overthrow? Not Saudi Arabia, the most fundamentalist Islamic regime in the region–they’re our strong ally. Instead we overthrow Saddam’s largely secular government. Next we overthrow Ghaddafi’s secular regime and replace it with more fundamentalists. Now we’re trying to overthrow Syria’s secular regime and replace it with fundamentalists. It’s almost as if the United States is deliberately trying to spread radical Islam to encourage anti-Western violence, which would serve as an excuse to start more wars and transfer more money to the elites those wars benefit.

tl;dr version: Ron Paul understands much more about the world than you (see video).

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Why did Al Qaeda attack New You City, not Montreal? Do you believe the major problem is, “They hate us for our freedom,” rather then the reason Osama bin Laden stated, which is because we have bases on their holy land and we support Israel? Its not about good guys vs. bad guys, but that they precieved our actions as bad. It doesn’t make their actions good, but it is important to know why they did what they did to prevent future blowback.

Russian media is proably saying this because it is true. Our media says this also, but rather sees this as a dangerous foriegn policy.

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That’s just idiotic. Here is a hard baseline number of Iraqis killed as a result of the US occupation and colonization of Iraq. This number does not reflect the probable deaths in Iraq (which are likely 10 times that lowball number)… it’s simply the number that no one, not even George Bush himself, can refute based on journalistic evidence.

You can’t kill a number of people large enough to populate a moderate metropolis and not expect “blowback”. Each and every individual killed has parents, children, siblings, spouses, cousins, grandparents, close friends and other associates - dozens of people are affected by each and every death. It is the people left behind who form the pressure cooker in which vengeance stews and eventually explodes.

The CIA and senior defense officials have stated on multiple occasions on the public record that American policy in the Middle East prior to 9/11 was the primary motivation of the 9/11 attackers. All the mistakes we were making in the Middle East before 9/11 have been amplified a hundred-fold.

Bullshit. That’s like the school bully saying he got sucker punched by the nerd he beats up every day after school because of his “greatness.”

Indeed. That is an incredibly accurate and well-nuanced picture of the state of geopolitics in 2012.

You and I really don’t know what it is driven by. Appearances alone do not establish cause and effect, particularly in human affairs.

Yes, I’ve been brainwashed by the radio waves emanating from the Kabaa and I’m a mindless apologist for violence committed in the name of Allah

Either that or I just hate imperialism.

No, it will turn them into indifferents. Indifferent to us, at least. See, we don’t actually live in the DC Comics universe (this may be surprising to you, so don’t freak out, OK?). There are no super-heroes. There are no super-villains. Evil people are all motivated by about the same things that anyone else is motivated… more money, more women, more prestige, etc. And regardless of the color of their skin or the manner of their phoney-baloney religiosity, they all share one uniting attribute: a sociopathic lack of empathy and basic moral decency.

Of course, this description is just as applicable to your average cabinet-level bureaucrat in any supposedly enlightened, developed nation as it is to a machete-wielding al-Shabaab fighter.

Who cares? It doesn’t matter. Let them control whatever territory they like. They can enslave the rest of the world to their heart’s content and they still won’t have a fraction of the wealth and power that we will have if we return to honoring the principles that used to be core values of our culture: diligence, property rights, true equality under the law (meaning the government itself is subject to the law), free exchange, entrepreneurialism and true capitalism (instead of crony capitalism that keeps the profits and makes the taxpayers eat the losses), and so on. Free men are immeasurably more productive than slaves. That’s the true point of the story of the 300 Spartans. Free people have something to live for, something worth defending. Slaves are just mindless automatons, hardly worth 1000-to-1 whether on the battlefield or in the marketplace.

Clayton -

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Blowback does not drive all the actions in the middle east, but unintended consequences that result in violence against us are blowback. They wouldn’t attack us if we weren’t there. Iran has tried to, but couldn’t gather the support.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUFpwokJd9w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLMtRt88ZU

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This appears to be a strawman of Ron Paul’s position. AFAIK, he uses a similar definition to this one provided by Wikipedia: “unintended consequences of a covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the aggressor government [i.e. the government that undertook the covert operation]”. If anything, Ron Paul doesn’t seem to limit his definition of “blowback” to the unintended consequences of only covert operations - he also includes overt operations, such as the US and allied military invasion of Iraq.

I also don’t think that Ron Paul has ever claimed that blowback - as defined above - is the “dominant reality” in the policy of Middle Eastern nations. What he has claimed is that numerous US government interventions in Middle Eastern nations have resulted in blowback. Not all of the blowback - maybe not even a majority of it - was conducted by foreign governments per se. Ron Paul and myself both fail to see how that’s relevant. The blowback has occurred nonetheless.

What do you mean by “great nations”? Do you mean “large nations”? Do you mean “powerful nations”? Or do you mean “really good nations”?

Your characterization of blowback as only coming from “fiends and monsters” begs the question: what makes those people “fiends and monsters”? If you’re declaring people who commit acts of blowback as “fiends and monsters” by definition, then please come out and say so. However, you can’t then logically appeal to the more commonly accepted meaning of “fiends and monsters”, as that would entail an equivocation.

As you yourself just said, the world is more complex than that. A non-zero probability (“it can happen”) is not the same as a probability of one (“it will happen”). You could also ask why there was no blowback from the Kurds when Saddam Hussein’s regime was murdering them en masse with the tacit support of the US government. Did Ron Paul ever claim that violence against Christians in Egypt or Nigeria is blowback for something the US government did?

Both the Wikipedia definition and the slightly different definition that Ron Paul seems to use in no way imply that blowback can never be ideologically driven. Indeed, what do you think is not (or cannot be) ideologically driven?

Are you implicitly arguing here that, if “we” pull all “our” troops back from the world, that China will “start eating up the pacific rim”, that Russia will retake the fomer Soviet satellites, and that “Islam” will march deeper into Africa and Europe? If so, can you please support these assertions?

By what I surmise is your reasoning, the US should’ve been taken over by the British Empire when the latter was at its zenith, but that didn’t happen. Why not?

Do you intend this as a rhetorical question? If not, then I’d say that, while I’m not sure, it certainly seems possible to me that the Russian government is, in fact, interested in peace.

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While I think Russia Today is kind of a propaganda network, they coincidentally are promoting a lot of the right things. I think there are a lot of business interests that Russia may happen to have. But this is a smear tactic to say that, because they are biased, they stand to gain at your expense. Their interests may be legitimate in and of themselves.

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From family experience- no life was not better under the Shah. He was as brutal as you can get. Life was better for American political scientists that like to experiment with peoples lives under the time of the Shah sure.

It absolutely was a consequence of the Shah’s dictatorship. And no it was not more brutal than the Shah and never will be. You’re just making things up you have no personal experience with iran or Islam and are only able to regurgitate the beliefs that you were fed that help you feel better about the United States government as the “good guy”. There’s just as much oppression and madmen here as there is in Iran- go and visit the country, you’re imagining some fantasy-land Mordor and I really don’t know why. Its as if promoting western style of dress is supposed to be the only indication of freedom for some people- how arrogant can you get.

Let me ask you a question. Why do you believe the world to be a childish story book where there are good guys and bad guys? And why do you identify so dearly with the US government as if their actions rub off on you? They don’t. If they do something bad- that doesn’t make you a bad person- so don’t take it to heart so easy that people are getting angry at US foreign policy.

And if you’re going to call certain regimes oppressive- why not start with the one that has the highest incarceration rate and prison population in the entire world? That’s a whole lot of people being oppressed.

The only reason China and Russia might be “ideological monsters” at this point is because the United States ideology seems to be “We control everything or you die”

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Why does it have to be either the shah or the mullahs? How about somebody better than both? It was installing Reza Pahlavi and standing by him as he cracked down on opposition destroying secular alternatives to himself that ultimately made it into a binary choice between him and Khomeini.

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This.

The OP’s confusion arises from the failure to realize that there is no “Russia” or “America”. There are Russians and Americans. There is the Russian government and its propaganda arm (Russian media) and there is the American government and its propaganda arm (US media). If you’re an American and you want to know about the dirty secrets of the American government, you won’t find it by consulting the American media. But just like the American media is more than happy to report on and expose the evil tyrants who rule countries that the American government does not yet control, so the Russian media is happy to report on the tyrannical acts of the American government whether acting on its own or through its puppets in countries it controls.

Modern super-governments are the biggest mafias around. When you open your eyes and see the truth, the world of politics will become so simple as to be almost transparent. It’s like breaking out of the Matrix… the only thing that surprises you anymore is how you could have ever been so blind to it all.

Clayton -

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Well Clayton, you did me a favor with your use of the word “colonization” about the Iraq war. Now I see it is all Kool-aid and I don’t need spend a lot of time here. Also, your silly answer to my question about Russia’s support for Ron Paul shows you can’t think outside a Paulista box. The answer is obvious. And finally, your comment: “I say let them control whatever territory they like. They can enslave the rest of the world to their heart’s content…” reveals the moral compass Paul has taught you to embrace. I, for one, could never go there.

I’ll overlook your Hollywood view of the Spartans.

But I will leave you with this: Ron Paul did say we should try to be friends with Iran, not neutral. When asked on “Fox News Sunday” what he would do to deter Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, the good Doctors insightful alternative was “maybe offering friendship to them.” Brilliant. That’s the kind of off-the-cuff stuff he says all the time. He also completely took the Palestinian/ terrorist side when Israel struck Gaza to find stop their missile launches. He even stooped so low as to call Gaza a “concentration camp” set up by Israel. Not neutral.

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NeoCon, I certainly hope that you’re not engaging in groupthink and writing off this entire forum because of what a single individual has written.

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The terrorist side? Isn’t it more terroristic to hold a population captive and subject them to starvation, destruction of their homes, displacement, regular white phosphorus gassings, and random killings? Because that’s what the Israelis do.

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The tactic NeoCon is using is the old “cherry pick a few things you can sink your teeth into and ignore the rest.” It relies on the opposition being willing to attack the new content so that the substantive stuff gets buried down the memory hole. I’m always surprised how well it works.

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Does it look to you like I fell for it? My intention was to call him out on the very behavior you just described.

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You usually go for the jugular. This was a little tame subtle.

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I guess because I was making an insinuation instead of an accusation? :stuck_out_tongue: