Paul: Limit military to national defense

By SARAH PALERMO

Monitor staff

Last modified: 8/19/2011 12:00:00 AM

History is an excellent teacher, and though her lessons can be painful, Americans had better start listening up, says Texas Rep. Ron Paul.



If not, the 6,000 soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan will have died for nothing, he said in a meeting yesterday with the Monitor editorial board.



"I'm hoping and praying we can get a message out of this, learn a lesson. If you don't change your viewpoints, if you don't understand history . . . they will have died in vain. We thought we learned our lesson in Vietnam," he said, but war "is constant, it's endless, it's killing. How many more people have to die before we wake up and admit that those people should not have died? If we would have only had the proper policy, those (soldiers) would have been alive today."



The proper policy, Paul said, is to keep our military limited to national defense, not intervening in other nation's affairs.



"Great countries are brought to their knees because they go empire building," he said during the hour-long interview.



Paul is running for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential election and made a two-day visit to New Hampshire. He began Wednesday night by officially opening his campaign headquarters in the city and ended with a house party in Amherst last night.



Known mostly for his decades-long crusade to shrink the size of the federal government, Paul jokingly suggested yesterday a few dozen jobs that could be added to the rolls.



"Anybody who wants to start a new war should have his head examined (and) there's room for a lot of psychiatrists down there in Washington," said Paul, paraphrasing former defense secretary Robert Gates.



Paul has stood apart from his Republican competitors in his staunch criticism of the country's military spending. If elected, he said he would close the dozens of military bases America has around the world to bring billions, if not trillions, of dollars in savings and economic stimulus to the country.



"What do we need 'em for? . . . It's $1.4 trillion we spend on maintaining our militarism," Paul said. "It mostly gets us into more trouble by getting involved over there. We're just getting killed over there, shot at and wasting our money. There's no authority for it, for us to be the policeman of the world."



For Paul, everything the federal government does must find, at its roots, authority granted by the U.S. Constitution. That means no Environmental Protection Agency, no federal health care programs and no income tax.



Reducing taxes is the only job creation program he believes the Constitution would allow.



"We need more spending, in the private economy," he said. "People need to be able to make business decisions on how to allocate their resources. That's how we got into (the recession). Our big problem is . . . misdirected investments by the government."



The Federal Reserve system also contributed to the recession, he said, through "this silliness of constantly creating new money when you need it."



Other Republicans in recent days have been critical of the Federal Reserve, with Paul's home-state Gov. Rick Perry, the newest candidate in the presidential field, saying recently, "printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous - or treasonous in my opinion."



"I don't use those words," Paul responded yesterday. "I think they're misinformed on monetary policy and that's the more important thing. Evidently (Perry) thought it was good politics. I have never met the man, I don't know what his monetary policy is. I'm not disappointed he addressed the Fed, but he doesn't do it the way I do."



Paul is consistently courteous even toward those he disagrees with, partly because the country's situation isn't the fault of any one person, he said.



The country has been led astray for years, he said, duped into believing in Keynesian economic theories that "they are to be taken care of and we are to be the policemen of the world. It's not (Fed Chairman Ben) Bernanke, it's the system. It's not Obama, it's not George Bush. It's a system of foreign policy that has been around a long time, a foreign policy I challenge. I probably slip up, but I basically try really hard to not personalize. I don't enjoy that at all."



(Sarah Palermo can be reached at 369-3322 or spalermo@cmonitor.com.)





