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By Doug Bandow
After the latest Republican presidential debate, viewers must ask: are the candidates crazy? Not Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who proposes dropping a nuke on Mecca or Medina. But the others, who have tied themselves to the Bush administration's disastrous Iraq policy.
Only Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has forthrightly criticized the administration. In the latest presidential encounter, most of the candidates followed the lead of Sen. John McCain, who asserted: ``the surge is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working." McCain was responding to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney who only said ``the surge is apparently working," and talked about reducing the number of U.S. troops and pulling them back to a support role.
In contrast, when asked about leaving forces in Iraq to limit violence against Iraqis who supported Washington, Rep. Paul observed: ``The people who say there will be a bloodbath are the ones who said it would be a cakewalk, it would be slam, dunk, and that it would be paid for by oil. Why believe them? They've been wrong on everything they've said."
Thus, he insisted, ``I would leave. I would leave completely. Why leave the troops in the region? The fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11. So why leave them in the region? They don't want our troops on the Arabian Peninsula. We have no need for our national security to have troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and going into Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening Iran is the worst thing we can do for our national security."
The bottom line? ``I am less safe, the American people are less safe for this," he said. ``We need a new foreign policy that said we ought to mind our own business, bring our troops home, defend this country, defend our borders."
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee responded that ``we bought it because we broke it" so ``we can't leave until we've left with honor." But Paul retorted: ``How many more [lives] do you want to lose? How long are we going to be there? How long _ what do we have to pay to save face?"
After the debate Huckabee declared: ``He really lit my fuse when he continued to assert that it was our fault we were attacked on Sep. 11."
Of course, Rep. Paul said no such thing. But Gov. Huckabee was not alone in putting words in Rep. Paul's mouth. In the previous debate, Sen. McCain again proved to be one of the war's chief cheerleaders, saying ``we must win."
In contrast, Rep. Paul bluntly stated: ``We shouldn't be there. We ought to just come home." Former Gov. Romney then offered the demagogic nonsequitur: ``Has he forgotten about 9/11?"
Before that came the interchange with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Rep. Paul asked: ``Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for ten years. We've been in the Middle East."
Giuliani dishonestly charged that Rep. Paul had blamed America, causing that latter to reply: ``They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there."
As Huckabee, Romney, and Giulini certainly know, Rep. Paul did not blame the U.S. for 9/11 and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. First, it has long been evident that being ``over there," as Rep. Paul put it, generates opposition that can lead to terrorism. This is a statement of fact, not of blame.
Had Washington not inserted troops in middle of the Lebanese civil war, for instance, there would have been no bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983.
Had American officials not sought to buttress the Saudi monarchy with U.S. forces, there would have been no Americans living in the Khobar Towers to be killed in the 1996 bombing.
One of the neo-conservatives-in-chief, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said of America's presence in Saudi Arabia: ``It's been a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina."
Recognizing that terrorists have reasons for killing means neither that their actions are justified nor that Americans are "to blame" for terrorism. But the only way to make good policy is to recognize reality.
The Huckabee-Romney-Giuliani strategy of sticking their heads in the sand to win political points guarantees more American casualties in the future.
The problem is particularly acute with Iraq. The invasion and occupation of Iraq have created more terrorists and more terrorism.
Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institution told Congress earlier this year that ``the invasion of Iraq gave the jihadists an unmistakable boost. Terrorism is about advancing a narrative and persuading a targeted audience to believe it." U.S. policies ``have too often lent inadvertent confirmation to the terrorists' narrative."
London's Chatham House has concluded that Iraq ``imposed particular difficulties for the UK, and for the wider coalition against terrorism. It gave a boost to the al-Qaida network's propaganda, recruitment and fundraising, caused a major split in the coalition, provided an ideal targeting and training area for al-Qaida-linked terrorists."
In reviewing the July 2005 London bombings, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee explained: ``Iraq continues to act as a motivation and focus for terrorist activity in the U.K."
Many Islamic extremists make the same point. Of course, some conservatives who cite the words of jihadists to prove that ``we are at war" simultaneously deny that the same words explain why they attack Americans.
But many terrorists obviously believe that the Iraq war is another U.S. assault on Islam. Lebanon's Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah says simply: ``the occupation of Iraq has increased acts of terrorism against the U.S."
America's occupation spawned copycat killers in other nations, such as Britain, Indonesia, and Spain, as well as drew foreign fighters to Iraq. According to researchers Reuven Paz of Israel and Nawaf Obeid of Saudi Arabia, most of these recruits were new to the jihadist movement, radicalized by the conflict.
Equally worrisome, the war has pushed perhaps 15,000 or more Iraqis into al-Qaida. Explains Friedman: ``The chaos in Iraq has allowed for extensive training and development in various terrorist tactics and urban warfare, including increasingly proficient use of improvised explosive devices." Graduates of Terrorism U will likely circulate the globe, multiplying their bloody work.
In contrast, Iraq was not related to 9/11 or al-Qaida before the conflict. Even President George W. Bush, if not Vice President Richard Cheney, admits this fact.
Moreover, the 9/11 commission found no operational relationship between Hussein and Osama bin Laden; future Iraqi al-Qaida leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was present, but only in the Kurdish zone beyond Hussein's control _ because of Washington's ``no fly" zone. After occupying Iraq for four years, U.S. forces have found no evidence that Hussein engaged in terrorism against America.
Ironically, President Bush's Iraq war, which forced the premature transfer of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, actually helped bin Laden survive.
Obviously, it won't be easy to simply ``come home" from Iraq as Ron Paul proposes. Nevertheless, the answer to Mitt Romney's question was ``hell yes he remembers 9/11!" That's why Paul Rep. believes the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq and should now withdraw from Iraq.
President George W. Bush has led the country over the abyss into a needless and needlessly botched war. Now he is leading his party over an electoral abyss.
Indeed, several of the GOP candidates are being advised by the very neoconservatives who concocted the current Iraq policy. Unless leading Republicans join Rep. Paul in detaching themselves from the failed Bush policies, many more voters are likely to conclude that the leading Republicans are crazy.
ChessSet@aol.com
Doug Bandow is the Robert A. Taft fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of ``Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire'' (Xulon Press).
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