We must engage terrorists abroad where they live, so we don’t have to fight them here at home where we live.
Supporting the US military action in Iraq is the same thing as supporting our troops, and
If you disagree with either (a) or (b) above, you are unpatriotic and should not be allowed to speak.
In his speeches before Congress, his writings, and his remarks during the GOP Primary Election Debates, Ron Paul has show that apart from the obvious and un-American attempt at stifling open debate and free speech, this triple dose of fascist indoctrination is fundamentally flawed in the following ways:
1. The mere fact that our kids are dying in Iraq does not justify the conclusion that we need to send more of them over there to die. The fact that they are indeed dying makes us understandably emotional about the issue. It is less painful for us to believe that kids are dying for a noble purpose than for no good reason at all - but that fact alone does not lend the originally wrong purpose any legitimacy. We now all know they are dying for the wrong reasons. Sending more of them to die does not right that wrong.
2. Fighting terrorism abroad could possibly, theoretically (though not necessarily) make sense if we simultaneously protected our borders and kept terrorists from coming in unhindered. However, the fact that we are not protecting our borders exposes the entire exercise as nothing more than a criminal sham. It negates any claims that we are protecting our national security interests in fighting them abroad. Pulling our troops back and stationing them along the border makes far more sense than the policy we are pursuing now.
3. By fighting them in their own neck of the woods, we are indeed invading their space. The fact that this makes them angry can hardly be denied. It may be justified to say: “They are terrorists, so we don’t care if they are angry - we must fight them” but the sad truth is that our fight against them cannot be effective since we can never successfully identify them before they actually attack us. As a result, our troops are required to wait until the kill us before we can fight back. That makes our kids in Iraq sitting ducks - target practice for terrorists. At the same time we do nothing to keep them from coming across our own southern border.
4. If our government really “supported our troops” it would not send them into combat ill-equipped and understaffed, without a clear mission and in order to “fight” diverse groups of enemy combatants that cannot be identified unless they attack first. On top of that, in the case of roadside bombs, it is extremely difficult to identify the attacker even then - and in the case of suicide bombers it is useless to even try to identify them. When neocons say: “Support our troops!” they really mean “Support our policy of exposing our troops to danger without any appreciable benefit.” It’s a classic switch-and-bait maneuver.
In doing this, neocons are increasing the risk level of a domestic terrorist attack threefold: They are giving Islamic terrorists more reasons to hate and attack us, they are making it easier for them to come here and hurt us, and they are diluting our national defensive capabilities by diverting troops to fighting unwinnable engagements with unidentifiable enemies in foreign countries without proper logistic support.
- And they have the audacity to claim that disagreeing with this policy is “unpatriotic”!
The reason for this apparently insane policy is of course to scare us into giving up more of our freedom so we can all be “safer” - but this is yet another non-sequitur:
How does having less freedom make us safer? It does not. By giving the same government that exposes us to a triple-whammy of additional security threats more power to monitor and control our daily lives without our knowledge and consent, and to ship us off to Guantanamo Bay at their sole whim and discretion, we all become less safe - not more so. At the same time the terrorists’ job becomes far easier - and therefore less dangerous to them.
In effect, Neocons are making America safe for terrorism. It’s time to make America unsafe for Neocons - and by exposing their lies on public television during the debates and post-debate interviews, Ron Paul is doing exactly that.
He deserves our help.
