In favor of Obama’s drone strikes

The “blowback” theory promoted by Ron Paul is contradicted by the fact that the US has not been deeply involved in the Middle East for most of its history. Outside of the coup in Iran in 1953, for the entire Cold War period there is not a single case where American intervention can even be alleged, much less proven. (The US considered a plan to oust the Iraqi dictator Qasim in 1960 by sending him a poisoned handkerchief, but it may have been aborted, and declassified CIA records confirm that his overthrow three years later was “an event we had nothing to do with” although they had “excellent reports on the plotting.”) And even then, the US was deeply reluctant to approve the overthrow of the deranged Iranian demagogue Mohammed Mossadegh (who, contra Paul, did not really receive 99.9% of the vote). The Truman administration repeatedly refused British requests to stage a coup, and some CIA officers refused to participate.

Compared to the massive US role fighting communism in Latin America, Korea, and Indochina (and earlier US involvement in Europe and Asia during the World Wars); American involvement in the Muslim world has historically been minimal. US officials have always been very sensitive about offending Islamic culture. The US foolishly saved Nasser from the British, French, and Israelis during the Suez crisis; steadfastly refused to support the 1965 purge of communists in Indonesia; rejected a British plan to oust Qaddafi in 1969; bent over backwards to appease the Iranian fundamentalists; saved Arafat from being assassinated by Israel in 1982; withdrew from Lebanon after we were attacked; withdrew from Somalia after we were attacked (despite saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslims); failed to seriously support Kurdish revolts against the Iraqi Ba’athists in 1975 or 1991; took no action against Iraq or Syria for backing the other side during the Cold War; supported Arab Iraq against Persian Iran during the Iran-Iraq war; stopped ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo; and missed numerous opportunities to kill bin Laden because we were concerned about his civil liberties. Even after 9/11, President Bush still went out of his way to prevent a planned Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2007.

Why did the Afghans hate us? We helped them resist a brutal, murderous, and criminal Soviet occupation–and then were the leading provider of humanitarian aid in the 1990s, saving the country from famine. The US only evicted the Iraqis from Kuwait after a great deal of hand-wringing, under UN auspices, and with the support of most Arab nations (including Syria!). Paul’s credulous embrace of hysterical Iraqi propaganda about the UN sanctions ignores the reality that Iraqis ate much better than people in neighboring countries, childhood obesity was an epidemic in Iraq in the 1990s, no independent observers were allowed to assess living conditions, Amatzia Baram reported no difference in the rate of Iraq’s population growth, and the oil-for-food program (first offered to Iraq in 1992) essentially gave Saddam $3 billion a year in extra revenue. The sanctions regime ensured that all Iraqis had access to decent rations of food, that Saddam could not use food as a weapon, and that the Iraqi government spent at least 72% of its income providing for its people (it had never previously spent more than 25%); mortality improved from what it had been before the Gulf War in northern Iraq, even though south and central Iraq had access to far more per capita income and the north was under a separate blockade. The UN spent billions providing for the entire population of Iraq, rebuilding thousands of villages and embarking on vast water sanitation projects, while Saddam exported food to raise money to buy weapons.

If Ron Paul really believes that 9/11 was revenge for, or perhaps even justified by, the 1953 coup in Iran; he needs to have his head examined. Islamic terrorists have been attacking the US since the days of Thomas Jefferson. The US only intervened in the Gulf War in response to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait, after tolerating Iraqi terrorism for many years, and even then refused to march on to Baghdad. The US clearly has gotten more deeply involved in the Middle East in response to terrorist atrocities—not the reverse. Our post-9/11 drive to democratize Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya may be unprecedented, but it is still a response to 9/11.

Total war does not bring “blowback”, but lasting peace, as the case of Japan clearly demonstrates. Our enemies are not motivated by any legitimate criticism of American foreign policy, but by their fanatical ideology.