Debate Zinger!

I'm watching the New Hampshire Republican Primary debate and I must say that the best line of the night so far hasn't come from any of the candidates, but instead from co-moderator Chris Wallace.  Following a passionate but misguided rant by Congressman Ron Paul about how 9-11 is basically our fault for having a troop presence on the Arabian Peninsula and that we should just pull out of Iraq immediately, completely withdraw from the Middle East and come home and protect our borders, Wallace asked him this follow-up question:

"So Congressman Paul, and I'll like you to take thirty seconds to answer this.  You're basically saying that we should take our marching orders from Al-Qaeda if they want us off the Arabian Peninsula we should leave?"

Almost before the question was completely out of Wallace's mouth and as if he were scolding an errant child, Congressman Paul pointed the pen he was carrying in his right hand directly at Chris Wallace and yelled, "NO!"  The grumpy old man look on his face was absolutely priceless.  The audience erupted with applause and I heard distinct laughter coming from the other candidates.

I almost wish that Wallace would have asked this question: "Congressman Paul, you suggested that our troop presence in Saudi Arabia was one of three reasons why we were attacked by Al-Qaeda.  Even if we had no troops in Saudi Arabia following the first Gulf War, wouldn't that still, by your own account, mean that Al-Qaeda would have had two other reasons for attacking us?"  

In fairness to Congressman Paul, he did receive a fair amount of applause from the audience after launching some of his foreign policy missives. This got me thinking.  There is still an isolationist strain within the Republican Party, but it is certainly the minority position and rightly so.  It is absolutely inconceivable and unrealistic to think that the world's only remaining superpower can disengage from the world's hot spots and expect to live in an era of harmony and bliss.  That may have been possible one hundred years ago, but not in a world where it doesn't take a large military force to dole out death and destruction on a frightening scale.  We witnessed what a few motivated and knowledgeable individuals can do with three airplanes.  Imagine the scale of devastation that could be inflicted by a group of radicals in possession of a nuclear device or even a significant amount of conventional explosives and the right target.  I'd like to not have to imagine such a tragedy, which is why I believe that America has a moral purpose to remain actively engaged in working to bring the most disconnected and tyrannical regimes of the world into the full embrace of the the world community. 

In this regard I'm a devotee of the model offered by Thomas Barnett where the world is broken into two groups of nations:  a functioning core and a non-integrated gap.  Nations comprising the non-integrated gap are closed and impoverished societies ruled by tyrants who stoke anger and hatred among their voiceless and powerless citizens and who will always find it strategically to their advantage to scapegoat the functioning core nations for their national misery.  The threat that nations in the non-integrated gap pose toward those within the functioning core is palpable and American foreign policy needs to be focused on shrinking the non-integrated gap while welcoming more and more of it into the functioning core.  This is the task of a generation or longer, and will be accomplished with a mixture of carrots and sticks.   Not all regimes will be treated the same because some will accept carrots while others won't.  Either way, I believe it to be profoundly naive to think that the answer to the threat posed by the tyrannies within the non-integrated gap is yet more disconnectedness. 

Comments

[CSS]

Wallace was a goof for asking such a stupid question, as if he thought Paul was advocating a bin-Laden policy!! Wallace should be fired!

ben-Laden defeated the Soviets in afghanistan. How? By bleeding their economy and he's doing it again with us in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seems to me G.W. is taking the bait from ben-Laden a heck of a lot more than the brilliant Ron Paul! why doesn't Wallace ask G.W. if his policy is doomed to fail because it is a replica of the Soviet policy? Why? Because G.W. won't listen and retreats to his world of denial and proclaims: "We will stay the course!"

Pride goes before a fall.

[CSS]

I am curious... why is America focused more on four airplanes and the deaths of 3,000 on 9/11 (and I know someone killed in the Pentagon that day) as a major threat, but ignore the number of Americans killed by drunk drivers, or lung cancer, or homicide?

Why is it that four airplanes deserve BILLIONS of dollars and not the other? In terms of productivity and sales and GDP the deaths of the folk on 9/11 are far less than the ones I mentioned.

Misplaced priorities is what I call it.

[Joe]

The Soviets were not defeated in Afghanistan because Bin Laden and the mujahideen drained the Soviet economy. Rather, the Soviets were defeated because the Reagan Administration supplied the mujahideen with Stinger missiles that subsequently took away the superiority of Soviet airpower. The Soviet economy was partially taxed because Reagan made an active committment to provide weapons and military intelligence to the mujahideen, but that was one front in an overall economic war being waged against the Soviets by the Reagan Administration.

Several Reagan Administration policies, rolled out beginning in the early 1980s', were depriving the Soviets of the hard currency they needed to keep their economy afloat. The administration leaned on our allies to end vital technology transfers and the sale of other commodities needed by the Soviets. In the mid-1980s, the Reagan Administration convinced the Saudis to flood the market with oil, causing the the price per barrel to drop precipitously. This was undertaken to hit the Soviet economy hard by drastically reducing the amount of money the Soviets were getting from oil exports. While all this was occuring, the U.S. defense build-up was forcing the Soviets to devote what finances they did have to weapons. All together, Reagan's policies, including the efforts to aid and arm the mujahideen, brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In other words, it wasn't the Afghan campaign alone that bled the Soviet economy and forced them out. Had the United States not intervened, the Soviets may very well have remained and even triumphed there. The Soviets clearly had hard currency problems for many other reasons that contributed to forcing them out of Afghanistan. Without these other financial problems, money wouldn't have been an issue in Afghanistan. It was an issue because of the Reagan policies. The Soviets were also taking casualties at a rate far in excess of what we have taken in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The United States treasury, far more flush than the Soviet treasury ever was, is easily able to fund the Iraq War. Not to mention we have an all-volunteer army and, unlike the Soviets, aren't forcing people to serve.

[Joe]

I think it's a misnomer to argue that the United States isn't focused on drunk driving, lung cancer or homicides. We have laws and penalties against drunk driving, private and federally-funded efforts to find a cure for cancer and laws and penalties against homicide. There's no way to completely end drunk driving deaths, homicides or disease. We can find cures for diseases, but it takes considerable time and there are scores of diseases. To say we aren't focused on it is completley mistaken. How would you objecively define "focused?"

That leaves the question of why we are spending billions of dollars in an aggressive effort to protect ourselves from terrorism. People can agree to disagree about strategy and tactics, but the number one role for the President of the United States is to provide for the national defense. Everything else is secondary. Personally, I believe in American power and the exercise of that power in support of the expansion of representative governments and free markets. Soft power is ideal, but hard power is sometimes necessary when certain factors converge. One person's "unjust war" is another person's "war of liberation." I find the effort to transform Iraq and the broader Middle East to be a noble effort worthy of America's honor. I have found that people either fundamentally "get" the War On Terrorism or they don't.

Honestly, if someone were to stand up before a standard cross-section of several thousand Americans and suggest that we are too pre-occupied over the 3,000 plus deaths that occured on 9-11, they would be booed off the stage and probably forever villifed. Look how quickly and forcefully several prominent Democrats ran away from Howard Dean when he suggested that the Iraqi people were no better off with Saddam gone. That statement in and of itself probably did more to marginalize Howard Dean than anything else he did.