27 thoughts on “Rand Paul”

1. I think I agree with Rand Paul on this one. He doesn’t mean that Moslem extremism is the fault of the neocons. Moslem extremists are the fault of Islam. But the power vacuum that led to the rise of ISIL is exactly the fault of those who wiped out regional dictators without decent plans for what to do afterwards. That includes the neocons, and it includes the current administration. America has made itself look ridiculous in the Middle East, crashing around and breaking things in its great power, and then getting bored and leaving, and that is what led to ISIL.

   1. But he doesn’t blame the current administration at all. He says it’s all the Republicans’ fault.

      1. Transcript? I doubt it. Given how badly both articles mischaracterized what I think is his position, I don’t feel compelled to conclude that from the little quote slices given.

         Just speaking for myself, I’m an isolationist but would be in favor right now of sending a division to destroy ISIL’s position in Iraq. They are clearly a dangerous enemy and shouldn’t be allowed to conquer territory. But then leave. ISIL will lose much of its support once its friends see that it can’t really win anything.

         1. But the power vacuum that led to the rise of ISIL is exactly the fault of those who wiped out regional dictators without decent plans for what to do afterwards.

            would be in favor right now of sending a division to destroy ISIL’s position in Iraq. They are clearly a dangerous enemy and shouldn’t be allowed to conquer territory. But then leave.

            Do you seriously not see any conflict there?

            1. Seriously don’t. Armies are for smashing things, for destroying serious threats. If we had done that in Iraq, I would have had no complaint. That would have been a perfectly good plan. Indeed, that’s what we did in Afghanistan, then, and it was fine. Smashed the Taliban down, because of what they had done to us.
               Instead, the new president Obama and the Democrats decided that _that_ one was the right war, and got into the same pointless business there in Afghanistan. Same results.

               On the other hand, smashing Libya and Egypt was completely pointless. They had done nothing to us, and there was no reason to think that the new governments would be any better for us than the old. Not any better for us, not any better for their people.

               We don’t choose our targets in a sensible way.

            2. So your disagreement isn’t with the lack of a post action plan (without decent plans for what to do afterwards), it’s that the post action plan should have been “But then leave”??

               Sorry, that just won’t work long-term.

         2. “But then leave.”

            That is what led us to the current “power vacuum”. Thank goodness, at least, that we did not just leave after WWII or Korea.

            We have evolved into a reluctant hegemon with severe ADHD. If we don’t start getting our act together and seriously focus on the threats facing us, we are in for a world of hurt.

            1. Exactly. We are STILL in Japan, STILL in Korea. If we are going to expend blood and treasure on wars in foreign lands, we need to fix what we break and protect it. This go in and bomb then go home makes us look like fair-weather friends.

   2. Mike, there were *very *good* plans to replace Saddam Hussein! They simply were not carried out! In March of 2002, President Bush ordered the State Department to put together an Iraqi Government in Exile, built around the Iraqi National Congress. Instead, the US State Department dithered, dangled, dipped and whirled for 10 months before holding the first conference to accomplish this task. As a result, they could report in May 2003 that there was no group of Iraqis ready to become a government. So, they just *had* set up the colonial administration that fit far better with the desires of a Saudi government that was far more afraid of a democratic shia exemplum for those Saudi Shia who were a majority of those sitting on top of almost all of the Saudi oil. The existence of this colonial administration then handed Al Zarqawii his opening for leading a Salafist Sunni insurgency.

      The problem was *not* a Republican government, but State Department careerists who had risen through the ranks hob-knobbing with Ambassador Bin Sultan’s bought academics in the Universities that are frequented by those seeking the graduate degrees needed for advancement in State and the CIA for the last 40 years.

   3. Leaving wasn’t the “neocons” idea, that was all Obama. And leaving is what created ISIS. So you and Rand Paul are both wrong on this one.

      1. “Leaving was what created ISIL” I think not. Nation-building was our mistake (shared by me, I’m afraid). Wiser people (Jerry Pournelle is a good example) said from the beginning that Iraq is just not suited to this kind of thing. He said it before the _first_ Iraq War, I’m paraphrasing by memory: Why do we care which set of thugs rules Kuwait?
         By the time we were done, we had just barely enough energy left for the Surge, but nothing for Iran. So now Iran will get a nuclear bomb because we forget what our goals are. And ISIL can conquer in between bombings because we forget what our goals are.
         Armies are for smashing things. Use them in emergencies to smash really dangerous enemies.

         1. That is just so warped and twisted. Leaving is what created the power vacuum. Had we stayed, it wouldn’t have happened.

            What if we hadn’t stayed in post-WWII Europe? What if there had been no Marshall Plan? No NATO? Would we then have said the ensuing disintegration of Europe showed they were “just not suited to this kind of thing”?

            Perhaps you are unaware, but saying those people are “just not suited to this kind of thing” comes across as rather bigoted.

            1. It’s bigoted to say that a certain culture is a mess? Sorry, but I don’t think that’s bigoted, I think that’s realistic. They’re not a mess because of the color of their skins. I feel the same way about many inner-city people in the US.

               Gosh, maybe we should invade some other awful countries and build their nations. Plenty of awful countries out there. So what if it cost us every bit of political capital that the Republicans had built during the Reagan years? Remember we had the presidency and both houses of Congress? Gone, gone, because we refused to limit the mission.
               Note that even without Iraq collapsing, we had lost any ability to combat Iran. So you want to keep propping up Iraq, when its own soldiers would rather not defend themselves. I don’t agree with you. It isn’t our job, and doing this did not enhance our security, nor anyone’s.

            2. You’re digging your hole deeper. The old “culture” dodge has been used to justify inaction forever. It’s not unlike airily proclaiming “some of my best friends are (fill in the blank)”.

               Conservatives will never compete for a wider set of voters until they stop offering excuses for inaction, and start proactively advocating policies to fix the problems from a conservative stance, e.g., using market dynamics, and implementing positive incentive structures.

               It is the curse of modern political polarization that the Party that wants to help is incompetent to do so, and the Party competent to do something doesn’t want to.

               Iraq was very different from your run-of-the-mill hellhole. Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, and his sons were no better. He had started numerous wars in a region which is vital to Western interests. He clearly had no scruples in the means he would employ to gain his ends. He had successfully subverted the sanctions regime which was supposed to hold him in check. And, if he didn’t have the WMD we were looking for, it was just a matter of time until he did. I, for one, am very glad he is gone, and I would not trade even the present turmoil to get him back.

            3. “I, for one, am very glad he is gone, and I would not trade even the present turmoil to get him back.” Well, we don’t agree. Which is fine, but you don’t seem to be able to look past whatever reasons we had back then, to deal with the unintended consequences of today. We have made our position much worse, and your solution is to keep throwing the army at them in hopes that it will get better. It won’t.
               This is not the traditional use for the US Army. There was a good reason that it traditionally was bulked by conscription in times of war: it meant you only did it in a real emergency, and when you did it, the whole country was furious at the SOBs who forced our peaceful country into all-out war.

               We aren’t a policeman. I for one am glad that Rand Paul is out there, and I for one am saddened that the only party that cares about fixing our runaway government is governed by people who think that that is somehow the same as having a massive standing army policing the world. It’s no accident that Rand Paul is able to offer a balanced budget when no one else can: he favors cuts in massive government and in massive defense spending. The major parties just disagree on which way they will spend our money.

            4. Well, my final word is that, from my perspective, things were going well before BHO pulled the plug, and the current problems trace to his precipitous pullout, not to the original action.

2. Like too many with a libertarian bent, Rand Paul seems to take to the idea that the normal agency costs of the State are something to be blamed on defending anyplace outside the legal boundaries of the US. He wants defense to begin at the shoreline. Countries who do that have aerial photographs taken after a war, with overlapping craters covering large amounts of their countryside and the remnants of their cities.

   Beyond that, the US survives on the world-wide productivity of industrial society’s networks. 300+million people cannot survive on our land without industrial wealth. The continuing industrial revolution is a world-wide phenomenon. It has networks with nodes all over the planet. The US, alone, *cannot* be an industrial society! We have too few nodes in the networks. If we allow *any* of the waves of reaction against industrial freedoms of action to destroy the nodes outside legal US boundaries, we will eventually starve, here.

   It matters not whether it is the aristocratic reaction rising between 1850 and 1915, the racist reaction, rising between1875 and 1945, the socialist reaction rising between 1917 and 1991, or the scriptural literalists of Islam, rising between 1928 and today, …*any* of them would destroy essential industrial freedoms of action.

   Rand Paul, with too much of the libertarian community, want to believe we can sit behind our seas and be safe and prosperous. It is not so amidst the elites and would-be elites of a species of large obstreperously violent primates from agrarian cultures, who value State hierarchy, and the positions of power it offers, more than any benefit of industrial society. The revival of an imperil caliphate is no different than any of the other empire builders of the last 150+ years.

   1. The revival of an imperil caliphate is no different than any of the other empire builders of the last 150+ years.

      While I agree with most of what you’ve said, and agree strongly with some of it, I think we can agree that there are some significant differences. Though the Imperial Japanese did utilize kamikaze flyers, they didn’t exactly institutionalize it to the degree we are seeing today.

   2. Yeah, that’s why I don’t automatically vote LP.

      Far too much isolationism.

      There’s not a lot of tent for hawkish libertarians like myself, rather unsurprisingly…

      (Plus, I’m with Ayn Rand [IIRC, since I can’t remember the specific wording of her quote] on pretty much one single thing, which is that it’s not just allowable but damn near a duty to overthrow oppressive states.

      Not those that “Are Not Libertarian”, but those that murder and enslave their subjects – not citizens, and offer them no say in their governance. (Let people in liberal democracies choose to wear chains, so long as one can leave; Nozick’s insight is fundamentally correct.)

      Like, oh, Iran, or the Islamic State, or pretty much any theocracy or actually-Communist state.)

      1. I am with you, but unfortunately, most people apparently would rather put a band aid on a weeping wound than apply the antibiotics that would make it go away.

      2. I take the pragmatic view on foreign policy that the first duty of government is to keep the peace, and toppling a government that does so it rarely to advantage even if brutal means are used. On the other hand, a nation that presents an active threat to international peace, or actively supports those who do, may be a valid target for a “police action”. By this reasoning the Sadam government paying suicide bombers against Israel was a reason to take a hard line with them, but Libya was not a valid target.

   3. The US, alone, *cannot* be an industrial society!

      And yet, some commenters on this blog and elsewhere, will loudly insist that a handful of people on Mars can be.

      1. This is why Jeff Greason’s “island hopping” idea is necessary to any plans to colonize the solar system. If all you’ve got is the ISS and an outpost on Mars, you’re lacking critical infrastructure and a marketplace. With refueling stations in LEO and L1 and the surface of the moon and Phobos and maybe Ceres, Mars is part of an extraterrestrial economy instead of an isolated node.

      2. “The US, alone, *cannot* be an industrial society!

         And yet, some commenters on this blog and elsewhere, will loudly insist that a handful of people on Mars can be.”

         Which is why I pound the table so often against the idea of “the next single and greatly inspiring Space Project”. *Any* single settlement will exhibit the productivity of, at best, a nice agrarian society with some added robots and machines. It is the networks of industrial society that provide its productivity, be they physical networks, market networks, intellectual networks, spiritual networks, and even political networks. It will be no different in Space.

3. The way I read Paul’s’ comments, he criticising the hawks for *arming* ISIS/radicals. Not the same as saying we motivated them. I think this is a lot more defensible position.
   Mind you, I still prefer Bolton’s foreign policy in most respects. I don’t believe this disqualifies Paul, who is strong in other areas, but it’s not a smart comment.

4. “He wants defense to begin at the shoreline.” Quote? I doubt it’s true. There is a big gap between “defense begins at the shoreline” and “our particular strategy for the last decade has left a power vacuum for our worst enemies.”

   1. Mike, read my reply to your first mention of strategy on Iraq. There was a fine strategy, that was subject to bureaucratic veto, unfortunately.

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