Rand Paul appears with U.S. senate candidate Steve Lonegan.

A whole lot of conservatives who decided to stand with Rand are now asking why he is going over to the side of liberal internationalists like Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

(Star-Ledger file photo)

No one was surprised when a character like Marco Rubio signed that silly letter to the Iranians.

Rubio is a complete ignoramus when it comes for foreign policy. He made that clear at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. So did Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

As Daniel Larison of the American Conservative notes, neither of these nutty neocons understands who's fighting whom in the Mideast.

Neither understood the painfully obvious fact that the Shiite Iranians are the most bitter enemies the Sunni Islamic State faces. Rubio went to far as to tell Sean Hannity that "if we wanted to defeat them militarily, we could do it. He [Obama] doesn't want to upset Iran,"

Larison observes that "As others have noted already, this criticism makes absolutely no sense. If Obama didn't want to 'upset' Iran, he would probably be committing the U.S. to do far more against ISIS, since the Iranians loathe ISIS and have been fighting them in Iraq. If ISIS were defeated, it would deprive Iran of a hated regional enemy, so they would hardly be 'upset' by this outcome."

So that explains Rubio's embrace of the nutty neocon approach seen in that letter. He's simply ignorant.

But what about Rand Paul? He was supposed to be the voice of sanity among Washington Republicans. Yet he joined 46 other senators in signing a letter that is based on the most farfetched fantasy ever to take over the Beltway intelligentsia, the idea that breaking off negotiations with Iran would somehow advance the cause of halting nuclear proliferation in the Mideast.

In fact, as Jeffrey Lewis notes here, it was a similar decision by the Bush administration that gave North Korea the breathing room to develop a nuke:

As I noted here, the leading experts on nuclear nonproliferation argue that the best course for the U.S. is to keep monitors in place and get a deal that has a long "breakout period" during which the U.S. could act against any Iranian program.



Shi'a Muslim fighters allied with Iran hold a position on the scene of heavy fighting against advancing Jihadist militants and fighters of the Islamic State; the removal of Saddam Hussein led inevitably to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and greatly strengthened the position of Iran, the very nation the "neo" conservatives were trying to weaken.

Virtually all traditional conservatives believe this. The baying for war with Iran comes entirely from liberals such as our own Democratic U.S. Senator, Bob Menendez, and the various lefties who write for the Washington Post, one of whom shows just how nutty liberals can be with this piece.

(ADD: the link above is to a piece by a certain Joshua Muravchik. One of my liberal friends argued Muravchik is a right-winger. Nonsense. Virtually every neocon intellectual has a left-wing past. Here's his from Wikipedia:

"Muravchik was National Chairman of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) from 1968 to 1973, and executive director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority from 1977 to 1979. He was also an aide to the late Congressman James G. O'Hara (D-Mich.) in 1975 and to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in 1977 and as a campaign aide to the late Senator Henry M. Jackson in his pursuit of the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination.")

Why did Rand go over to the side of the Washington Post lefties?

Justin Raimondo wants to know. In this piece, the prominent libertarian calls this "Rand Paul's Munich:

Read the entire piece. As Raimondo notes, if Rand thinks he is somehow going to suck up to the left-wing money machine of people like Sheldon Adelson, that's not going to work.

He'd be better off leaving that sort of thing to a real professional, like Bob Menendez. Our senator had cleverly positioned himself as the defender of Israel in what looks like an effort to corner contributions for what is going to have to be a big defense fund.

As for Rand, he should be the voice out there pointing out to the Wilsonians that their vision for the Mideast has failed miserably. Like that Democratic former governor of New Jersey, the neocons have an almost childlike belief in the power of democracy. It never occurs to them that in a country full of Muslim fundamentalists, any democratic election will create an Islamic fundamentalist state.

They tried removing dictators in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and now Syria. And always they profess shock when the newly liberated foreigners pursue their own interests rather than ours.

And then when the inevitable happens, they lie about their past views.

No one is a worse offender than that former Walter Mondale speechwriter who constantly parrots his liberal views on the pages of the Post.

I'm talking of course of Charles Krauthammer. He was at it again just the other day, wondering out loud why Iran is accumulating such power in the Mideast.

Uhh, Chuck, get a clue. Iran came to power because people like you prevailed upon George W. Bush to overthrow the dictator who was keeping them in check.

This has been obvious to us conservatives for more than a decade.

In that regard, I've been reposting some of the many columns I wrote in the past in which I interviewed real experts such as ex-CIA guys and former soldiers with decades of experience in the Mideast. They all saw this coming - unlike the liberal on the pages of the Post. Here's one that's perfectly on point. I wrote it in July of 2012, when the Syrian debacle was just getting underway.

It was headlined "Israel, and the United States, in a precarious position"