Libertarians “Framed” on Foreign Policy

 

 

Professor Skidmore-Hess framed it this way in a past discussion…..

….. foreign policy still places Libertarians more to the left; consider how far Ron Paul’s views on foreign policy are from the rest of the 2008 candidates for example.

I would like to respond briefly to this sleight of hand which is prominent in political dialogue. In Don’t Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff, points out numerous examples beautifully illustrating the framing model. For example,when George W. Bush (Dubya Hereafter) was in office he often spoke of “tax relief” which indirectly places Democrats in a poor light, by definition. If Dubya was offering “tax relief” and he was Republican, Democrats, by necessity were the oppressors with regards to tax increases.

The same is true as we look at Congressmen Ron Paul’s foreign policy. Since his view is contrary to the “run-of-the-mill” Republican it must necessarily be akin to the Liberal stance on foreign policy, right?  This “joining of the hip” dilemma is  due to the nature of our two party system, for it is certainly a false dilemma!

With that in mind I would like to read an excerpt from one of Dr. Paul’s recent book The Revolution: A Mainfesto. Pages 20-21

“When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed the that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic fundamentalism. Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. The world’s expert on suicide terrorism convinced me to rethink this apparently plausible answer. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, for his book Dying to Win: The strategic logic of Suicide Terrorism, collected a database of all 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors that we have believed. The world’s leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tmail Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or the Sudan.

The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.”  Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the United States had troops stationed. While al Qaeda terrorist are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strongWahhabist (radicalIslamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed….Pape is convinced after his extensive research that the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim territories, the greater the chance of more 9/11- type attacks on the United States.

Typically this is called “blowback”.

I don’t recall any rhetoric or argumentation coming from the left, in recent years(which is as long as I have been interested in politics), that remotely addressed our occupation in foreign lands and the backlash that might bite us in the ass in the long run.

I always ask the question: Would you like it if China took your land and built a military base?

We would never stand for such acts, yet, turn a blind-eye when our super-sized government does it to other countries.

I guess they deserve it though…cause we are America, damn it!

 

~ by rle4 on August 18, 2009.