There is something important to note about US interventionism in faraway lands: None of the people that the US government is killing, maiming, or destroying is invading and trying to conquer the United States. Neither are the governments of the nations in which the victims are citizens. No one is invading and trying to conquer the United States.
There is something else important to note about US interventionism in faraway lands: It makes Americans less safe. Let us count the ways.
1. American tourists and business people traveling abroad are now subject to angry and vengeful retaliation for the death and destruction that the US government is wreaking in those faraway lands.
Yes, I am fully aware that American tourists and business people are not responsible for the death and destruction that is being inflicted by the Pentagon and the CIA in places like Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and other countries. But the problem is that many victims of the Pentagon’s and CIA’s deadly and destructive crusade don’t separate private American citizens and the US government. Like many Americans do, they conflate the federal government and the American people. Thus, when they exact revenge by killing or maiming American tourists or American business travelers abroad, say with well-placed bombs, in their minds they are exacting revenge against the US government.
2. Americans here at home are now subject to angry and vengeful retaliation by American citizens here at home and foreigners living in the United States who sympathize with the victims in those faraway lands. That’s where the threat of domestic terrorism comes into play.
3. To protect against the threat of terrorist retaliation arising from US interventionism abroad, the US government wages a “war on terrorism” that ends up destroying the freedom of the American people in an ostensible attempt to keep them safe from the retaliatory threats of terrorism that their foreign interventionism brings into existence. The fact that the federal government now wields such totalitarian-like powers as assassination, indefinite detention, mass secret surveillance, and torture over the American people is an ongoing testament to how foreign interventionism has made Americans less safe at the hands of their own government.
And for what? What’s the point of all that foreign interventionism, especially given that it clearly makes us — the American people — less safe, both from terrorists seeking revenge and from the US government itself?
The answer is: money, empire, and power. It’s all one great big racket by which the US national-security establishment, including all those “defense” contractors, maintains its grip on the gigantic tax-funded warfare largess that comes with foreign interventionism. It’s also about maintaining foreign colonies, puppet regimes, and foreign military bases that keep the United States as a worldwide empire. And finally, it’s about maintaining power and control over the American people, destroying their freedom and security in the process.
There is but one solution to all this deadly and destructive mayhem: (1) Bring all US troops home from everywhere and discharge them and (2) restore a limited-government republic to our land by dismantling, not reforming, the national-security state governmental structure that was brought into existence after World War II. Doing that would put our nation well on the road to the restoration of liberty, peace, prosperity, normality, and harmony with the people of the world.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is a project of Dr. Paul’s Foundation for Rational Economics and Education (F.R.E.E.), founded in the 1970s as an educational organization. The Institute continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home. Visit http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org