The sanity of his answer was stunning. At another juncture, he was asked about Iran. Again, Paul's common sense answer was something unheard of in such a forum.
"We blockade their country, we try to wreck their economy, and somebody assassinates five of their scientists. And we get all worked up that they are being warlike when they threaten to shut down the Straits of Hormuz. I don't understand this! We're the one's who are warlike!"
He even had the courage to say the motivations for the 9/11 attacks were things we had done, and are doing, in the Middle East.
People on the antiwar left have been saying this stuff for decades. But, as with the advocates of a secular state of Palestine in the mid-1940s, the forces of paranoia, covetousness and violence always win the day. They proceed ahead in the secure knowledge that, mistakes and debacles aside, war is self-justifying: Militarists who are good at making war will find it necessary to continue doing more of what they are so good at; their actions will create more enemies, and more weapons and more violence will be necessary. It's the endless cycle of violence Martin Luther King spoke of.
That's where we are now.
The Modest Proposal
I'm not a Ron Paul For President fan, but I found his honest exasperation inspiring. My mind began to wander and I imagined him in an over-sized camouflage jumpsuit like some Dickensian Ghost of Occupations Past materializing through a wall into the Obama White House bedroom; he'd shake his chains a little, tilt his head and show that silly grin and, then, when he had the President's undivided attention, he'd make his case for sanity. Like Howard Beal in the film Network, a puzzled Obama might ask the ghostly phantom, "Why me?"
"Because you're the President of the United States and you haven't earned your Nobel Peace Prize, dummy!"
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