Roguely Stated

This administration serves as a reminder of why being a middle-school bully never pays when it comes time to get a date for junior prom. People, just like countries, remember how others are treated. So it is for America, four years into an unending war, faced with growing anti-American sentiment, and the remnants of a coalition that could fit into a Fiat.

The Truth about Our World Standing

There should be no misunderstanding about our stature in the world. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, a study of 50 nations and their sentiments about the US, delivers the bad news. Our favorable rating has collapsed, from France to Jordan, Spain to Pakistan. We have lost the trust and support of moderates in the Middle East (Turkey). We are perceived as a threat to world peace, through our actions in Iraq; people in Great Britain, our closest ally, believe that our involvement in Iraq is a greater threat than Iran.

These trends are important. Stopping the deterioration of these relationships, which once served as the backbone of US supremacy, should be a primary focus of the next US President. We must reverse this trend if we expect to win in Iraq, negotiate peace in the Middle East, and prevent Iran and North Korea from becoming nuclear states.

The Wisdom of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan

There is no easy way to restore a global reputation, but being stubborn and closed-minded certainly does not work. Addressing the “why” of the sinking favorable ratings above is probably a good first step. Enter my two unlikely dance partners: Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul.

As a self-proclaimed moderate, it feels a bit unnatural to place the words “wisdom, Ron Paul, and Pat Buchanan” all in the same heading. But this past week, both of these men identified a worrisome gap in our national debate: addressing the “why do they hate us” question. Paul’s (R-TX) days as a participant in future debates is now numbered because of his audacity to attribute Muslim hatred toward the US as a product of past US policies in the region. Breaking the format of Q & A at the South Carolina GOP debate, Giuliani claimed ownership of 9-11 with a pointed response:

“That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of 9-11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before, and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us what he really meant by it.”

The telling part of this entire exchange was the audience’s thunderous applause to Giuliani’s rebuke of Paul; a word fight between two very different men. Paul voted against Iraq; Giuliani lived through 9-11. Thankfully (and I really mean that Pat), Pat Buchanan understands what Paul truly meant, unlike the audience in South Carolina. From Buchanan’s blog:

“When Ron Paul said the 9-11 killers were “over here because we are over there,” he was not excusing the mass murderers of 3,000 Americans. He was explaining the roots of hatred out of which the suicide-killers came.

Lest we forget,

Osama bin Laden was among the mujahideen whom we, in the Reagan decade, were aiding when they were fighting to expel the Red Army from Afghanistan. We sent them Stinger missiles, Spanish mortars, sniper rifles. And they helped drive the Russians out.

What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States. Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?

Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war in the 1990s said it was U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, U.S. bombing and sanctions of a crushed Iraqi people, and U.S. support of Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians that were the reasons he and his mujahideen were declaring war on us.”

I want to be clear about two things: I do not support Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan and I certainly do not excuse 9-11 as an acceptable form of retaliation by Al-Qaeda. But Paul and Buchanan make a valid point. Our next US President must understand how US policy reverberates throughout the world. While we can never excuse terrorism as an effective or deserved policy response, as a nation we should care about why people hate us and why the world fails to support our actions.

If we silence the “Ron Pauls” from future debates, ignore our loss of soft power, or fail to address the question of how our policies resonate across the globe, we continue to be the middle-school bully who cannot understand why no one wants to be his date.

Tags: 9-11, al-Qaeda, Bush, Giuliani, GOP Debate, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul
Related Posts:

A New Low? (3)

Vetting Support for Veterans (0)

Containing Iraq (0)

Perspective (2)

Running down the clock on Iraq (3)