Calling Hillary Rodham Clinton “a war hawk,” Sen. Rand Paul says that if the former secretary of state seeks the presidency, some voters will worry that she will get the U.S. involved in another Mideast war.
Paul is a leading anti-interventionist in the GOP and is considering running for president. Last year he opposed President Barack Obama’s call for military action in Syria.
In an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Paul predicted a “transformational election” if the Democrats nominate “a war hawk like Hillary Clinton.”
“I think that’s what scares the Democrats the most, is that in a general election, were I to run, there’s gonna be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, ‘You know what? We are tired of war,'” Paul said. “We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she’s so gung-ho.”
Michael Czin, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said on Sunday in a statement that Democrats are eager to debate Paul about “his fringe, isolationist vision” that Czin says would end all aid to foreign allies, including Israel.
“That’s the vision he’s laid out and defended time and time again and that even conservatives have said would bring ‘terrible misery’ to millions of people across the globe,” Czin said Sunday in a statement.
As a senator in 2002, Clinton voted in favor of giving President George W. Bush the broad authority to invade Iraq. She has said over the years that she regrets that vote, and in her new book “Hard Choices” wrote that “I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”
On the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Paul said he found the war-like images disturbing.
“When I see things like that, and I see, like, a warzone, and I see bazookas and tanks and all of this stuff in American city, it offends me, because many of these people, some are rioting, and they need to be arrested,” he said. “If you’re committing a crime, arrest people. But if you’re standing up, and you wanna voice dissent, you know, it is really what America is about, is being able to dissent.”
Paul also suggested that race might not be a factor in the events in Ferguson and linked the unrest to the war on drugs.
“Let’s say you’re African-American and you live there, let’s say none of this has to do with race. It might not, but the belief — if you’re African-American and you live in Ferguson, the belief is, you see people in prison and they’re mostly black and brown, that somehow it is racial, even if the thoughts that were going on at that time had nothing to do with race.
“So it’s a very good chance that had this had nothing to do with race, but because of all of the arrest and the way people were arrested, that everybody perceives it as, ‘My goodness, the police are out to get us,’ you know? And so that’s why you have to change the whole war on drugs. It’s not just this one instance.”
(AP)
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5 Responses
The Republicans do have a problem since a muscular foreign policy is expensive, and requires high taxes to fund it. An isolationist policy is less expensive (with conservative isolationists looking for lower taxes, and liberal isolationists looking at money freed up for domestic spending).
However if you oppose “tax and spend”, you are of necessity an isolationist.
And while isolationism (giving Putin a free hand to reestablish the former Soviet/Russian Empire, and giving Islamic State a free hand to seize control of the MIddle East) may prove costly in the long run, American voters focus on the short term. That’s why we encouraged the German and Japanese build-ups in the 1930s when they could have been opposed inexpensively, and waited until opposing them was extremely expensive.
#1
Should and/or could the US in it’s downward spiral continue to police the whole world (by itself)?
Are lily liberals who just more or less follow polls’ lead on foreign policy like Hillary worth expending and/or fighting for ,just to burnish their credentials?
An apt description of where the world is going
In Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes the following about soft despotism:
Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people
Isolationism just does not work in today’s world. What happens in the middle east, or China directly affects events here and in the whole world.
Like it or not, the US and every other nation has no choice but to be involved on a global level.
that said, the correct actions for the US at this time are still open to reasonable debate.
I bet if the US isolates itself, its leaders will still find ways to diss Israel.