between appreciating the ramifications — good and bad — of given foreign policy, and assigning moral culpability and the worst of intentions to our country as a reflex. I doubt that Ron Paul hates America; most people who live in this country, whether liberal or conservative, do not hate America or want to destroy it. There is, however, ample evidence that Paul is reflexively opposed to US foreign policy to the extent that it makes him say things about the country which would be slanderous if said about a person. Being and non-interventionist does not mean that one need to equivocate between two things which are not alike, or to say untruths about our country. Ron Paul does both. From his op-ed column on antiwar.com:

“As an opponent of all violence, I am appalled by the practice of lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza.[..] [b]ut I am also appalled by the long-standing Israeli blockade of Gaza – a cruel act of war – and the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the latest Israeli attack that started last month. There are now an estimated 700 dead Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale.”

Despite condemning both sides, Paul – through omission as well as by writing an article mostly condemning Israel – seems to be characterizing Israel’s actions in Gaza as rooted in the same basic impulse as those of Gazans launching rockets, when this is not the case at all. This is a tendency with Paul, and has nothing to do with being philosophically isolationist: one can be isolationist while acknowledging a qualitative moral difference between Israel and Palestine.

Lastly, Paul engages in blithe hand-waving and rhetoric to a discouraging extent. Let me use two examples from antiwar.com:

“Other countries have their problems, to be sure. But how would we feel if China or Russia came to our soil and tried to depose our problematic leaders or correct our policies for us? Our problems are ours to solve, and we need to give other countries that respect as well.”

While I’m no fan of moralistic or humanitarian approaches to foreign policies, this is, to be frank, bullshit. Most of our problems, and the problems in first world nations, are self-caused and minor; self-caused because we’re stupid enough to vote in support of them, and minor because we have a legacy of freedom and a guarantee of same (albeit in more truncated forms, in some respects), as well as the resultant prosperity. For us, solving our own problems is a matter of making minor lifestyle adjustments. In third-world countries run by dictators and tyrants, such a blase treatment is cruel: what the hill is the average North Korean supposed to do to “solve his own problems”, and why, from a moral standpoint, should we “respect” the “right” of Kim Sung Il to “solve” his country’s problems? Another example of this rhetorical device used to brush away the implications of his worldview:

“We went into Korea by direction of the United Nations, not a congressional declaration of war, to unify Korea. And yet that war ensured that Korea remains divided to this day; our troops are still there. South Korea today is much more willing to reconcile differences with North Korea, and yet we obstruct such efforts.[..] We went into Vietnam and involved ourselves unnecessarily in a civil war to bring peace and harmony to that country.[..] Ironically, since losing in Vietnam we now have a better relationship with them than ever. We now trade, invest, travel, and communicate with a unified, western-leaning country that is catching on rather quickly to capitalist ways.”

All of the above is true, but it ignores and brushes away basic facts which, when added to the story, make Paul’s case for non-interventionism quite dishonest and horrific. We went into S Korea to make sure that the Peninsula was not overrun by the communist state in the north, which was backed by the USSR and China. We failed to unite the peninsula, but we did preserve half of it. Now, Paul suggests that there is nothing that should worry us about acquiescence to a Stalinist, totalitarian client state and its protective neighbor, China. This is nonsense: if he wants to argue that this is better than the alternative, he’s free to do so, but making the argument for non-interventionism in this way ticks off conservatives for good reason. Secondly, Vietnam is *not* a Western state, nor was our departure good for the region: as soon as we left, Cambodia became a killing field, and the S Vietnamese were killed and persecuted by the N Vietnamese to the point of causing an international crisis. Again, you can argue that these effects were better than staying, but you can’t reasonably argue that everything was and is hunky dory after we left.

That’s the thing about Paul: he refuses to acknowledge the good that resulted from intervention, pretends that our intervention has only resulted in bad things, and acts as if our occupations and those of other nations are conducted in the same manner. One of the Iraqi dissidents who misled the Bush administration was interviewed recently. When asked about why he lied, he responded that it was so that the US would depose Saddam, occupy Iraq and make it into a democracy. Can you imagine anyone saying that about China or Russia? According to Paul, though, this type of person and phenomena doesn’t exist, and the only foreigners are those who are justifiably angry about American interference.