Monday, January 16, 2012

Ron Paul-ia - again

So I managed to watch the entire debate on Fox news tonight and one point really interested me. The gist of it was Ron Paul talking about how the US can't just go along with going into a foreign country and killing people to get to a target without somehow talking about it with that country first (in reference to Bin Laden and Pakistan). He was pretty much getting booooed with those comments but he said something afterward that SURELY must make people think. He said 'What if it was us, and a Chinese dissent was here? Would it be okay then for China to just come in and start bombing the United States?'. You could hear crickets chirping. But seriously - he has a point!

Here's a little spin on things - what if they had found out that Bin Laden was hiding out in Montreal (like, oh I don't know, maybe a wanted Rwandan war criminal?). Would they just send in the troops and blast up a montreal safe house without alerting our PM or anyone else first? Enter Canada with special forces and take him and others down and then just leave? What would we Canadians think of that? Or like RP said - what if China found a bunch of it's highly wanted war criminals or factions hiding out in the US? Would it be okay with the American people if China started sending drones in to bomb and retreat, bomb and retreat, and then finally get an actual location and send in Chinese troops without alerting the White House? What on earth would American citizens think of that?

RP basically said also that the US has to tread more carefully, and perhaps follow rather like a 'do unto others' principle. He got boooooos for that as well. Apparently not even the Christians in the audience thought that the govt should follow one of the Ten Commandments on that score! I fear that RP is right when he talks about war mongering.

I saw someone on the RP facebook page say that the audience tonight reminded him of the Family Guy episode where Lois was running for the school board and I couldn't agree more. In that episode, when Lois was talking real issues, the audience boooooed with gusto. But when she just simply started answering " 9/11" to every question, the audience went wild with support.

Sound familiar?

5 comments:

  1. Foreign policy is the one place where RP is exactly wrong.

    Read more about Pakistan and the ISI. If they talked to Pakistan OBL would have vanished.

    Americans can trust us to get him ourselves if we found out he was hiding here. Your example does't work. Canada is not equal to Pakistan. Pakistan is a friend at gunpoint (ie not a freind but not stupid either.)

    I think RP is the foil to the Tea Party and nothing more. He is there to ensure they pick the progressive.

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  2. It's a tough one to me because while I agree that Canada is 'different', the US would still have to trust that everyone who found out that Bin Laden was in Canada was supportive and wouldn't leak the info. Would they take that chance? All it would need is one person in the 'inner circle' to be secretly sympathetic or a totally bonkers risk taker, and the news would get out and Bin Laden would be warned. If you had secret knowledge of where this man was, would you for sure trust everyone at the top level of govt in another country, Canada or not?

    Remember the uproar when it was first reported after 9/11 that the terrorists entered the US via Canada??? It was on the news for a long time, and people commented about Canada's weaker immigration laws, complained about how we harbour war criminals because of our rule of not extraditing people if we think they will be tortured or killed in the other country, etc. Then it finally came out that these men were living and training in the US, not in fact coming in from Canada, and the news just sort of went away. An apology was given by the Dept of Homeland Security head, Janet Napolitano, but I have heard govt people referring to that non-existent event as recently as 2010! Why did they think they came in from Canada in the first place? Was it just assumed?

    And then we are supposed to think that Canada would deal with it if Bin Laden was here.... deal with it how exactly? In the news right now is the story of a wanted Rwandan war criminal and you are led to believe we just found out about this guy and are going through the court system to get rid of him. I see headlines about how the UN wants us to wait and check things out more, but how Canada wants him gone... when the reality is, we have known about this guy since 1996!!! He has been in Canada since 1993 and it was discovered in 1996 that he lied on his application in regards to causing harm to humans.... and then it took until 2005 for the Supreme Court of Canada to rule that he should be deported.... um it's 2012 and this guy is still here! That is how Canada deals with suspected war criminals from other countries - and everyone knows it. So how would we deal with Bin Laden? Some Canadians were killed in 9/11 so maybe we would want to keep him for ourselves.

    Would we hand him over to the US, to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, with the media about torture going on there? I suspect that the US would not want to take a chance that we would keep him and wrap him up in our court system for 20 years, and they would swoop in and nab him - just like they did in Pakistan. And civilians could have been killed. That is what Ron Paul was talking about. We think it's okay to happen in another country far across the world - but what would we think if it happened right here at home? What if your relative lived next door to Bin Laden, or someone like him, without realizing it, and was killed while trying to take him down. Would you say that was okay and necessary, acceptable collateral damage, especially after finding out the US moved in to take him without letting Canada know what it was doing?

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  3. Harper would hand him over in a snap. If he didn't then it would be right for them to just take him. I don't respect any court or law or state that enforces injustice.

    Your right that our country has its share of leftish looney tunes that would make OBL king as some kind of apology. Those people need their authority broken and their feelings hurt. I would even support Obama doing that to us if we were that insane.

    Thanks for your good response though.

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  4. I just think that we need to be careful with our thoughts sometimes. I have quite a few family members who are currently in the military or recently retired/left and they have all been to Iraq and/or Afghanistan many times since 1990. My son's father as well, with the British military. He has been to Iraq 5 times let alone everyone else in the family. His new wife was in the british army as well and received a medal because she had a part in capturing the #2 guy on the 'deck of cards' and transporting him via ambulance to the base (she was the driver). She left the military immediately upon returning from that mission and finalizing all her stuff. My uncle was in the Red Sea twice, aboard HMCS Charlottetown. He retired recently and supports the military, but not necessarily where they are being sent. My cousin was on medical discharge after getting MS but returned after being in remission for 5 years and trained US soldiers in Oklahoma and Wash State for a few years before recently being cleared to go to Afghanistan himself. He too supports the military but not necessarily where they keep being sent. People keep saying this has been going on for over 10 years, but in my family it feels more like it's going on 22 years now. My oldest son was born while his dad was in Bosnia helping with the cleanup after the civil war there, but otherwise every mission has dealt with and around the middle east. Since 1990. That's a very very long time and have we gotten anywhere? Now we are talking of Iran, while also being involved in Yemen and Oman (some media outlets do not widely report on that but my best friend's husband has been in Oman twice in the past few years, supporting US missions going on in Yemen). How many people do we all have over there? And for how much longer, and in how many more countries are we going to be? That seems to be part of Ron Paul's message - a lot of this not REALLY knowing or understanding for sure what is going on and who we are really helping (or not helping, depending on the situation).

    We 'helped' with Egypt and it's still in turmoil and will continue to be for quite some time. We 'helped' in Libya and it's going to be the same there. We 'helped' in Afghanistan and Iraq but there are still terror groups running around, and still bomb blasts killing hundreds of people, and still discord. For example, the last base my ex husband was sent to was Basra - a huge british operations base was just outside the city for a VERY long time. And just the other day a massive bomb blast went off, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. Oh boy, we all did a lot of good over there. Yay for us. It's just endless.

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  5. Now we are looking at Iran. The other GOP candidates (both those remaining in the race and those who have left in recent weeks) literally pound their fists on the podium saying we have to do something about Iran. Well I hope they signed their own children up for the military if they believe in it so much. Mitt Romney has 4 or 5 strapping young men that look the perfect age to be sent there - are any of them going? Are any of them even in the military? Not that I have heard. The only person I can think of right now that has a son or daughter in the US military is Sarah Palin but she isnt in this race anyway.

    I hear some people like Mike Church calling this 'precog' like in the movie Minority Report. I laughed my head off when I first heard him say that on Sirius Patriot radio because it is so true! That's what we all do. Everything is 'pre-emptive' or 'pre-ventative', when half the time we don't have any proof that what we did was right. We help in Egypt and Libya before even knowing what kind of govt would replace the 'oh so bad Mubarrek and Gadhaffi'. We cheer on the GOP leaders that want to send someone into Iran and bomb those nuclear sites that may or may not be forming weapons. I understand the idea on paper - hit them before they can hit us... but is that always the right thing to do? With a country that is backed by China and Russia? Do we want to go a round with them again? We can only sit and watch the news. We don't know what is going on ANYWHERE unless we happen to be involved in the operations ourselves directly (intelligence) - but we cheer them while knowing that other times in the past have been touch-and-go with validity of the true situation. Think 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' and GW Bush. That has become a catch phrase - do we want that to happen with Iran? Bombing the crap out of a mountain and finding out later that oops, it was a nuclear power plant just like the ones in the US and Canada and Japan? Oh dear, my bad! But hey - they COULD have used it to make a weapon so it was still okay to bomb it and start some serious 10 year long military involvement - while we are still cleaning up after 22 years +++ of Middle East involvement in 5 or more countries. It is mind boggling and endless and we have to keep paying for it.

    that is without going into any detail at all about how many political forces are involved with the weapons manufacturing plants in the US. That is a whole other story and something to think about when wondering WHY exactly they really want people to support sending endless waves of soldiers to these countries.

    ps - It's not always our own govt that thwarts us when trying to deal with war criminals. I read yesterday that the UN was trying to issue a 'stay' on the Rwandan guy, telling Canada that we should keep him, in accordance with the torture agreement we signed, until further investigation can be done. I imagine similar would happen with OBL. We would probably have allowed the US special forces in, along with some of our own - but that's where I also say that the US would have to trust us 100% not to have a mole in the group that could leak info. They have enough trouble trying to make sure that's not going on in their own ranks as it is, let alone fettering out another country's military.

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