Ron Paul on House floor 3/4/09: The End is Not Near

Ron Paul speaks out on the House floor against the continuous meddling by the US in the Middle East:

(Watch here)

Mr. Speaker, the end of the war is not near. I might ask, are the troops coming home from Iraq as promised? Not quite. Sixteen months is too quick, so the plan now is to do it in 34 months. The administration claims all the troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Sure they will.

We're told that 50,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq in August of 2010, and we're supposed to cheer. We're told that they won't be combat troops, so we're to believe that means they won't be exposed to any danger. If they are non-combat troops, does that mean they are bureaucrats, policemen, teachers or soldiers without weapons? This will hardly satisfy the Iraqis, who resent any foreign troops at all in their country. A U.S. puppet government protected by 50,000 American soldiers is not the road to peace.

Will the Iranian-friendly Shiite majority not be motivated to take advantage of the instability we have created?

Will the 100,000 Sunni militants we arm and subsidize continue to obey our wishes? It sounds to me like a powder keg exists with the indecisiveness of our Iraqi policy.

There is no intention to close the dozens of military bases that now exist. The world's biggest embassy will remain in Baghdad and incite continued resentment toward the American occupation. Our soldiers will remain easy targets of the rightfully angry nationalists.

Our presence will serve as an incentive for al Qaeda to grow in numbers and motivate more suicide bombers. An indefinite presence, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, will continue to drain our financial resources, undermine our national defense, demoralize our military and exacerbate our financial crisis. All this will be welcomed by Osama Bin Laden, just as he planned it. It's actually more than he had hoped for.

More likely the outcome will be that greater than 50,000 Americans will be in Iraq in August of 2010, especially when the contractors are counted. Violence will accelerate. We will be an occupier at the end of 2011, and we will remain a pariah in the Middle East.

The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be much bigger, unless the dollar follows the path of the dollar-based world financial system and collapses into runaway inflation. In this case, the laws of economics and the realities of history will prove superior to the madness of maintaining a world empire financed by scraps of paper.

Our military prowess, backed by a nuclear arsenal, will not suffice in overcoming the tragedy of a currency crisis. Soviet nukes did not preserve its empire or the communist economy.

This crisis demands that we quickly come to our senses and reject the foreign policy of interventionism. Neither credit coming from a Federal Reserve computer nor dollars coming from a printing press can bail us out of this mess. Only the rule of law, commodity money and liberty can do that.

Mr. Speaker, let's consider reinstating the Constitution before it's too late.