There is a lot being said right now about the billingsgate tumbling off the pages of a newsletter that, for at least a couple of decades, bore in some variation the name of congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. The foulness of the periodical's messages isn't in question, and the association between man and eponym has been interrupted along every investigative line by cutouts, don't-you-know. But even before one ponders all of this, Paul's repeated answers to typical policy questions organize to disqualify him from Republican nomination.
Appearing on Monday's Tonight Show with Jay Leno — which is these days a waypoint between primaries — Paul was invited by the host to explain an opinion that, simplified and passed along, became construed as "we were to blame" for terrorist attacks on September 11th and before. True, asked Leno, or Not true? Not true, replied Paul, but "Our policies have a lot to do with it." The congressman set up a figuration between murderers and Islamist terror groups. He used "insane" as an ascription to terrorists, but focused more on "motives," and finished with a clear but invalid argument: a) people acting reasonably have articulated motives, and b) some terrorists have articulated motives, so c) some terrorists are people acting reasonably.
The anti-modernism of Islamism's early twentieth-century underwriters, according to Paul, actually "can't motivate a people" to commit terrorism. The same mechanistic logic churned this out: a people? Members or abettors of terrorist groups number in the thousands, Muslims in the billions — even with polls showing radical sympathies, the overwhelming factor of non-participation means terrorism is not representative.
So what is the motive? Paul volunteered: "the motives are related to the fact that we occupy their countries." Then, through his introspective calculation that equates apples to oranges inasmuch as both fruits are round, he compared monarchical Iran and Communist China to the United States. "[W]e used our CIA to install the shah in Iran. If somebody did that to us, we'd be pretty annoyed. Or if the Chinese had military bases on our land or said that they came here to protect their oil, the American people would be pretty outraged. The Republicans and Democrats would be joined together. They would be really very annoyed."
It takes some acrobatism to juggle it all. First, the assumption that an individual, when "annoyed," conspires, for years, to target civilians in mass-casualty attacks. Here is the power of specious talk: resolved, when people get mad they repeatedly kill. Do they? — or just a certain, rare, dangerous sort? Second, whatever the Cold War wisdom of returning the shah to power in a 1953 coup, a constitutional monarchy is leaps and bounds from the world's oldest democratic republic. And as Michael Ledeen once quipped, "I cannot for a moment believe that the fanatical clerics in Tehran," the Khomeinists responsible for Iran's position as the signal terror-sponsoring state, "are enraged by the removal of a progressive liberal."
Third, Paul used his bizarre — and favorite — analogy with China. Beijing is to Washington as, say, London is to Paris? Not by any factual measure. What about military bases and the protection of oil? Who does Paul mean? Kuwaitis are openly grateful for American armor chasing out Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. The Saudi autocrats requested military assistance after Hussein's 1990 blitzkrieg; George W. Bush emptied the Prince Sultan Air Base in 2003. Al Qaeda has been anathematized by citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan — who are at worst ambivalent about American and multinational troops. Removed from the amenities of conjecture, Paul's A-to-B theory is comprised of unidentified actors without a grievance.
This same week, Rudy Giuliani's biggest statement on the Near East and Southwest Asian regions concerned the same increase in troops and intense counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan as yielding successes in Iraq. John McCain, speaking to the same Pajamas Media reporters as his competitor, brought up nuclear proliferation from North Korea, China's complicity in Sudanese genocide, the unsatisfactory state of American intelligence services — and the need to address each. Neither attempted a unifying concept of non-intervention. Poll standings or no, one is tempted by impure thoughts; that implications of The Ron Paul Newsletter are as dispositive as evidence would be to shorten the list of White House contenders who remain notional on foreign affairs.