Ark's Ark

The internet is buzzing about Ron Paul. For those who have managed to miss it, he is running for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US Presidential election. This is mostly on the back of his opposition to the Iraq war, and as a result, he seems to be drawing support from the left as well as the right, which makes it fairly interesting to watch. Anyhows, I thought I’d just jot down a few of my thoughts on him.

I must be clear that I am talking very much from the perspective of someone who is not an American. While US citizens quite rightly want a stable economy, healthcare, and education, all we in the rest of the world really want is for the US to stop going around blowing things up, and stop using more than its fair share of global resources.

So for the purposes of this entry, I am going to try to ignore a lot of things that would have me howling with rage if I lived in the US. Such as:

• His links with White Supremacists.
  
• His hardline anti-immigration stance.
  
• His opposition to Roe v Wade.
  

Ron Paul has stated that he will end US engagement in Iraq. This is good. But is it so good that we in the peace movement should hope for his success? Even if we are willing to cast aside concern for the well-being of US citizens trapped in an extreme libertarian right-wing country

He is opposed to US citizens being subject to international law. No real change there from the current administration.

He believes that gun control is a UN plot to weaken America’s ability to resist an armed UN takeover:

For more than a decade the United Nations has waged a campaign to undermine Second Amendment rights in America. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on members of the Security Council to address the “easy availability” of small arms and light weapons, by which he means all privately owned firearms. In response, the Security Council released a report calling for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control, a report that admonishes the U.S. and praises the restrictive gun laws of Red China and France!

It’s no surprise that UN officials dislike what they view as our gun culture. After all, these are the people who placed a huge anti-gun statue on American soil at UN headquarters in New York. The statue depicts a pistol with the barrel tied into a knot, a not-too-subtle message aimed squarely at the U.S.

They believe in global government, and armed people could stand in the way of their goals. They certainly don’t care about our Constitution or the Second Amendment. But the conflict between the UN position on private ownership of firearms and our Second Amendment cannot be reconciled. How can we as a nation justify our membership in an organization that is actively hostile to one of our most fundamental constitutional rights? What if the UN decided that free speech was too inflammatory and should be restricted? Would we discard the First Amendment to comply with the UN agenda?

In a 2003 piece Ron Paul asserts the US right to go to war with whomever they damn well feel like, with no respect towards international law.

Our anticipated war in Iraq has been condemned by many around the world for the worst of all reasons: namely, that America is acting without United Nations approval. The obvious implication is that an invasion of Iraq is illegitimate without such approval, but magically becomes legitimate when UN bureaucrats grant their blessing. Most Americans rightfully resent this arrogant attitude toward our national sovereignty and don’t care what the UN thinks about our war plans. Perhaps our heritage as a nation of people who do not take kindly to being told what to do is intact. Still, only the most ardent war hawks connected with the administration have begun to discuss complete withdrawal from the UN. I have advocated this for twenty years, and have introduced legislation to that effect.

The administration deserves some credit for asserting that we will go to war unilaterally if necessary, without UN authorization. But it sends a mixed message by doing everything it can to obtain such authorization. Efforts to build a “coalition” through the promise of billions in foreign aid dollars only reinforce the perception that we’re trying to buy support for the war. The message seems to be that the UN is credible when we control it and it does what we want, but lacks all credibility when it refuses to do our bidding. The bizarre irony is while we may act unilaterally in Iraq, the very justification for our invasion is that we are enforcing UN resolutions!

Our current situation in Iraq shows that we cannot allow U.S. national security to become a matter of international consensus. We don’t need UN permission to go to war; only Congress can declare war under the Constitution. The Constitution does not permit the delegation of congressional duties to international bodies. It’s bad enough when Congress relinquishes its warmaking authority to the President, but disastrous if we relinquish it to international bureaucrats who don’t care about America.

Noted constitutional scholar Herb Titus has thoroughly researched the United Nations and its purported “authority.” Titus explains that the UN Charter is not a treaty at all, but rather a blueprint for supranational government that directly violates the Constitution. As such, the Charter is neither politically nor legally binding upon the American people or government. The UN has no authority to make “laws” that bind American citizens, because it does not derive its powers from the consent of the American people. We need to stop speaking of UN resolutions and edicts as if they represented legitimate laws or treaties. They do not.

In short, I do not believe that Ron Paul is a man of peace. He is an anti-UN paranoiac, with no more respect for such international treaties as the Geneva Conventions than George Bush or Kim Jong-il. (I wonder if he has been reading the Left Behind series.) Whatever he gets up to in internal politics, which is, I suppose, the US’s own business much as we wish the citizens there well, it is clear that he desires to end all the positive actions the US takes in the world (of which there are many). He has stated that he would totally scrap the foreign aid budget. While it is true that a lot of that money is used to prop up dictators, it is also used to do a great deal of good, and is one of the few aspects of US foreign policy at the moment likely to help improve international opinion.

For the US to withdraw from the UN would probably be the end of the UN. Or at least they’ed need to start looking for a new HQ. There would be upheaval as the powerstruggles began to fill the vacuum.

He is against the Iraq war, that is clear and good, but is he against war? Evidence would suggest otherwise. While his reasons may be different, it would appear he is just as willing to project US power through violence, anywhere in the world, with even less heed to international opinion than the current administration. (I would especially not want to be Mexico if Ron Paul got elected).

The world needs a US that will play nice with others. The US needs to work with others in order to achieve its global policy goals. I do not think Ron Paul is the person that is going to make that happen. I’ll keep on praying for Kucinich, in the absence of Gore running.

I certainly don’t think Ron Paul is the worst of the Republican nominees (he might actually be the best of them), and I am also encouraged by his excellent American Freedom Agenda Act which would go some way to pushing back the Bush assault upon the US Constitution. But heck, I don’t get a vote anyway. What do you think?