At the most recent GOP debate, Ron Paul provided, as usual, the voice for peace and reason in foreign policy:
“This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous that is just not true,” Paul said in the debate. “Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida has been explicit. They have been explicit and they wrote, and said that we attacked America because you had bases on our Holy Land in Saudi Arabia. You do not give Palestinians fair treatment, and you’re bombing. I’m trying to get you to understand the motive.”
Glenn Beck, most recently of Fox News, made this mind-bogglingly aggressive reply:
You can’t export democracy. They don’t want it. They don’t understand it. That’s fine. They attack us. We pound them into glass, and then we go home. We don’t fix their stuff. They don’t have stuff to fix. They don’t mind it. They’re fine with it. Who’re we to impose our values on them? Great. You live any way you want. You screw with us, we pound you back into the stone age where you already are. We drive back into your cave. We kill all the people who tried to kill us, and then we go home.
So many things address here, but I’ll try to be brief:
- “You can’t export democracy.” Agreed — if “you” is the U.S. government and the military is the export agency. Free trade of goods and ideas and charity has been known to do some good work, though.
- “They don’t want it.” Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t — recent protests in the Middle East seem to indicate that they do, but not at the tip of an American gun. Also, “they”? The Middle East is not actually a single nation or state.
- “They don’t understand it. That’s fine.” Insulting, much? No doubt some people in the Middle East understand democracy and some don’t. The same could be said of America.
- “They attack us. We pound them into glass, and then we go home.” Let me fix that for you: “They attack us, we waste 10 years and over $1 trillion pounding into glass people who never attacked us and may not even have been alive when the attacks happened. We do not find the people who actually attacked us and then we do not go home.”
- “We don’t fix their stuff. They don’t have stuff to fix.” In practice, we do try to fix their stuff, and to the extent that they don’t have stuff to fix, let’s not forget stuff like years of sanctions on Iraq before we ever invaded — sanctions which didn’t so much hurt Saddam as they definitely hurt the average Iraqi. And, on a final note, the less stuff someone has, the greater blow it is to their lifestyle when you demolish it.
- “They don’t mind it. They’re fine with it. Who’re we to impose our values on them? Great. You live any way you want.” Ah yes, the great “I don’t care if you destroy all I own even though I never hurt you but just happen to live in the same region and have the same color skin as a person who did” tradition of the Middle East! It would be a huge imposition of unwanted Western values to force these people to care that their houses were bombed!
- “You screw with us, we pound you back into the stone age where you already are. We drive back into your cave.” Because everyone who lives outside of America is in the stone age — and it’s not like Afghanistan has been subject to nearly constant war for the last several decades or anything. And even if it had, it’s not like war could destroy an infrastructure just beginning to modernize.
- “We kill all the people who tried to kill us, and then we go home.” Again, a small correction: “We can’t find the people who tried to kill us, and then we let tens of thousands of our troops linger to try to find about 100 guys while taking on trillions in new debt and then we never go home.”
