A Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Comprehends it not: Ron Paul Exits the Stage

Last week Ron Paul officially ended his campaign for the presidency, and so once again "politics as usual," carries the day. The Ron Paul campaign was the most electrifying in years successfully tapping into America's growing disenchantment with the Bush Administration. The record of the last eight years has been a cruel one: record high gas prices, preventable terror attacks, anemic job growth, and a baseless and costly war. Ron Paul was the only candidate who spoke to all these concerns, and his record of consistency and principle was able to spark a revolution throughout the country. He was not an establishment candidate, but one grown out of America's populist soil: anti-war protesters, civil libertarians, gun-rights' activists, tax opponents, vegan radicals, and all those who feel alienated and distrustful of the two parties.

While his candidacy was always a long-shot he was still able to raise tens of millions of dollars, outperform Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Tom Tancredo in the Republican primaries, and call attention to important matters that otherwise would have been neglected. Just how boring -- or more boring -- would the Republican debates have been without Ron Paul railing against the Iraq war, the follies of nation-building, and the deceitful conmen known as Neocons? Without him stirring controversy, the debates would have been pitiful, bland, and monochrome.

Despite the success of the Ron Paul campaign it all comes to naught unless it influences the direction of public policy. Will the Ron Paul revolution continue under some other banner, or will his troopers just resign themselves to defeat, with some returning home and others returning to the ineffectual Libertarian party?

Even with the strong anti-war sentiment in the country, the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement have built a little cocoon around George Bush and moral sanctity of the Iraq war. Neither Bush's leadership nor the wisdom of going to war is open to question. Many in the Democratic Party are against the war and probably support an immediate withdrawal, but the leadership has capitulated to almost all of Bush's demands, and their attitude seems to be that "yes, Iraq was a mistake, but we just can't pick up and leave." Of course, this idea ensures that our occupation of Iraq will be indefinite.

Regardless, the American people had a choice to set a better course for themselves and their country, and either because of indifference, habit, defeatism, ignorance, apathy or whatever, they chose politics as usual.

So get used to the new 100 year war.

A day that should live in infamy: March 19th 2003

Today is the fifth anniversary of a great national tragedy, the war in Iraq. However, President Bush still doesn't see it that way and today he delivered a speech strewn with the same old bromides he's been using for years.

On this day in 2003, the United States began Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the campaign unfolded, tens and thousands of our troops poured across the Iraqi border to liberate the Iraqi people and remove a regime that threatened free nations.

It is ridiculous to suggest that our invasion of Iraq was an humanitarian act of goodwill meant to "liberate" the Iraqi people. The war in Iraq has killed ten of thousands of Iraqi civilians, fueled a sectarian conflict and so destabilized the country that John McCain recently said we may have to occupy Iraq for one hundred years. What kind of liberation is this?

When President Bush says that Iraq threatened "free nations," it is just a bald faced lie. After the conclusion of the first Gulf War comprehensive sanctions were imposed on Iraq, causing its weapon's programs and economy to drift into disrepair. Iraq had no intention of threatening anyone. Iraq's neighbor to the north, Turkey, was also against the war. President Bush also kindly forgot to mention that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found.

Aided by the most effective and precise air campaign in history, coalition forces raced across 350 miles of enemy territory -- destroying Republican Guard Divisions, pushing through the Karbala Gap, capturing Saddam International Airport, and liberating Baghdad in less than one month.

President Bush speaks as if the operation to "liberate" Iraq was an unrivaled display of military genius. The reality is that Iraq was such a broken and poor country that it was easy for us to race across the southern border and occupy Baghdad. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times and a supporter of the war in Iraq, said, after a brief visit to the country in 2003, "we defeated the Flintstones." He noted that outside of the major cities, Iraq wasn't even in our millennium.

What our troops found in Iraq following Saddam's removal was horrifying. They uncovered children's prisons, and torture chambers, and rape rooms where Iraqi women were violated in front of their families. They found videos showing regime thugs mutilating Iraqis deemed disloyal to Saddam. And across the Iraqi countryside they uncovered mass graves of thousands executed by the regime.

It's undeniable that Saddam Hussein ran Iraq like a prison state, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that President Bush -- or Cheney or Rumsfled -- were acting out of compassion when they decided to invade Iraq. If their concern was Iraq's humanitarian plight, why didn't they speak out against the U.N. sanctions that were killing innocent Iraqis, mostly children? Why didn't Donald Rumsfeld speak out against Iraq's use of chemical weapons when he was sent as a personal envoy of Ronald Reagan in 1983 to forge closer ties between our two countries? Saddam has been running a prison state for over twenty years, sanctions have been killing Iraqis for over ten, and President Bush wants us to believe that suddenly everyone in his Administration grew a heart? President Bush pretends to express sympathy for Iraq because it gives him the excuse he needs to implement his real objective: military and financial dominance of Iraq.

The battle in Iraq has been longer and harder and more costly than we anticipated -- but it is a fight we must win. So our troops have engaged these enemies with courage and determination. And as they've battled the terrorists and extremists in Iraq, they have helped the Iraqi people reclaim their nation, and helped a young democracy rise from the rubble of Saddam Hussein's tyranny.

The Bush Administration originally claimed the war in Iraq would cost $60 billion, but now it's run up into the hundreds of billions with no end in sight. Also, how will we know when we "win" in Iraq? Bush never says.

Bush also never bothers to list the horrible costs of the war. He can say that Saddam's torture chambers are now empty, but what about the fact that our invasion of Iraq triggered the world's third largest refugee crisis? Or the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers have been wounded? There have been no real benefits to the war in Iraq, just the old saw that we must stay in Iraq and hope things will get better.

Hopefully one day Americans will remember March 19th 2003 in the same way they remember the September 11 terror attacks or Pearl Harbor. It should be remembered as a national tragedy, a day in which a band of war criminals lied this nation into a pointless, costly, and treacherous war.

Is war with Iran on the horizon?

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITEE TESTIMONY -- ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, February 1, 2007

It seems as if the United States is always on the cusp of plunging into a full scale war with Iran. Last year, President Bush made the allegation that Iran was responsible for providing sophisticated "explosively formed projectiles" to the Iraqi insurgency. This year the State Department added the Al-Qods to the list of terrorist organizations. Finally, there has been much saber rattling over Iran's nuclear weapon program, and while the latest NIE on Iran defused much of the tension, the White House remains adamant that Iran is determined to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Last weekend there was an "incident" in the the strait of Hormuz in which Iranian speedboats "swarmed" several Navy ships. During the communication there was a threat, "I am coming to you...you will explode in a few minutes." Originally, the Pentagon claimed that this threat came from one of the speedboats, but now things are not so clear. Supposedly, it may have came from shore, or from another merchant freighter in the strait. However, this doesn't stop President Bush from playing up this incident for all it's worth:

"Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere, so the United States is strengthening our long-standing security commitments with our friends in the Gulf and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late."

You're not imagining things if you think this rhetoric sounds awfully familiar.

We agree that the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.

This was from a speech in Cincinnati made on October 9th, 2002 as part of the Administration's attempt to justify the use of force in Iraq.

Americans need to understand that those who formulate America's foreign policy, the Neocons, are adamant that the United States overthrow Iran's regime, and occupy the region. We must interpret all events in this light. It's very possible that there will be an attempt to provoke Iran or possibly stage a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident to start a war with Iran. We should be skeptical of any report released by the Pentagon or the White House that alleges Iran is "threatening" the United States. America will not benefit from a war with Iran, but the Administration desperately wants one, and right now there is no telling how far they will go to get one.