Introducing the 2008 U.S.A. Presidential Election Thread!

[尼古拉前执事]

Rudy Giuliani v. Ron Paul, and Reality
Wed May 16, 12:29 AM ET

The Nation – Rudy Giuliani made clear in Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate that he is not ready to let the facts get in the way of his approach to foreign policy.

The most heated moment in the debate, which aired live on the conservative Fox News network, came when the former New York mayor and current GOP front-runner angrily refused to entertain a serious discussion about the role that actions taken by the United States prior to the September 11, 2OO1, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have played in inspiring or encouraging those attacks.

Giuliani led the crowd of contenders on attacking Texas Congressman Ron Paul after the anti-war Republican restated facts that are outlined in the report of the The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Asked about his opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Paul repeated his oft-expressed concern that instead of making the U.S. safer, U.S. interventions in the Middle East over the years have stirred up anti-American sentiment. As he did in the previous Republican debate, the Texan suggested that former President Ronald Reagan's decisions to withdraw U.S. troops from the region in the 198Os were wiser than the moves by successive Republican and Democratic presidents to increase U.S. military involvement there.

Speaking of extremists who target the U.S, Paul said, "They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting."

Paul argued that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "delighted that we're over there" in Iraq, pointing out that, "They have already... killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary."

Giuliani, going for an applause line with a conservative South Carolina audience that was not exactly sympathetic with his support for abortion rights and other socially liberal positions, leapt on Paul's remarks. Interrupting the flow of the debate, Giuliani declared, "That's really an extraordinary statement. That's really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."

The mayor, who is making his response to the 9-11 attacks on New York a central feature of his presidential campaign, was joined in the assault on Paul by many of the other candidates.

But congressman did not back down, and for good reason. Unlike Giuliani, the Texan has actually read the record.

The 9-11 Commission report detailed how bin Laden had, in 1996, issued "his self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia" and identified that declaration and another in 1998 as part of "a long series" of statements objecting to U.S. military interventions in his native Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general. Statements from bin Laden and those associated with him prior to 9-11 consistently expressed anger with the U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people and U.S. support of Israel.

The 9-11 Commission based its assessments on testimony from experts on terrorism and the Middle East. Asked about the motivations of the terrorists, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the commission: "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States."

Fitzgerald's was not a lonely voice in the intelligence community.

Michael Scheuer, the former Central Intelligence Agency specialist on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has objected to simplistic suggestions by President Bush and others that terrorists are motivated by an ill-defined irrational hatred of the United States. "The politicians really are at great fault for not squaring with the American people," Scheuer said in a CNN interview. "We're being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live. And there's a huge burden of guilt to be laid at Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, both parties for simply lying to the American people."

It is true that reasonable people might disagree about the legitimacy of Muslim and Arab objections to U.S. military policies. And, certainly, the vast majority of Americans would object to any attempt to justify the attacks on this country, its citizen and its soldiers.

But that was not what Paul was doing. He was trying to make a case, based on what we know from past experience, for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

Giuliani's reaction to Paul's comments, especially the suggestion that they should be withdrawn, marked him as the candidate peddling "absurd explanations."

Viewers of the debate appear to have agreed. An unscientific survey by Fox News asked its viewers to send text messages identifying the winner. Tens of thousands were received and Paul ranked along with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as having made the best showing.

No wonder then that, when asked about his dust-up with Giuliani, Paul said he'd be "delighted" to debate the front-runner on foreign policy.

[尼古拉前执事]

May 15, 2007
Do we really want another ignoramus in the White House?
Posted by James Ostrowski at May 15, 2007 11:26 PM

George Bush didn't know the President of Pakistan. Tonight, Rudy Giuliani, desperate to sound like a conservative in South Carolina after his liberal social views were highlighted, distorted Ron Paul's accurate remarks about the causes of 9/11, and noted that he had never heard those views expressed before.

However, two well-known official reports support Ron Paul's statement that our intervention in the Middle East caused blowback on 9/11.

Here's the official (huge PDF file) US government report on 9/11:

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How did Bin Ladin—with his call for the indiscriminate killing of Americans—win thousands of followers and some degree of approval from millions more? . . . He also stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world. . . . He spoke of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel. *****America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.

And here's an article I wrote shortly after 9/11 which quotes from Tony Blair's White Paper on 9/11:

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Most libertarians argue that the attack was a murderously evil response to U.S. wars, trade sanctions, and troop presence in the Middle East and the Islamic world—policies the libertarians have consistently opposed. Ranged against them are neoconservatives who believe that it is inappropriate to discuss the terrorists’ true motives and who prefer instead to ascribe their actions to a generalized hatred of Western civilization and "our way of life."

The libertarian analysis would imply a fast and radical pull-back of U.S. involvement in foreign affairs, starting with its trade sanctions and its troops scattered all over the Islamic world. This approach is not inconsistent with a determined, yet narrowly focused, hunt for the surviving co-conspirators. The neoconservative approach would lead not only to no reduction in foreign adventurism, but to a large and long war throughout the entire Middle East region.

On Thursday before the bombing of Afghanistan, the libertarian analysis received strong support from a most unlikely source. Britain’s Tony Blair released a white paper, a bill of particulars against Mr. bin Laden. This 4,400-word document, released with the approval of the U.S. president, was designed to convince the world that bin Laden is responsible for the attacks on September 11. Those who proffer the report for this purpose cannot at the same time deny the facts alleged therein insofar as they bear on the issue of his motivation.

The report quotes bin Laden himself, speaking on October 12, 1996:

The people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed by the Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators. . . . It is the duty now of every tribe in the Arabian Peninsula to fight jihad and cleanse the land from these Crusader occupiers. Their wealth is booty to those who kill them. My Muslim brothers: your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [i.e., Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy—the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking you to do whatever you can to expel the enemies out of the sanctities of Islam.

Later in the same year, bin Laden said that "terrorizing the American occupiers [of Islamic Holy Places] is a religious and logical obligation."

These words barely need any elucidation. They squarely complain about U.S. support for Israel and about American troops in Saudi Arabia. There is nothing about forcing people in Peoria to abandon Western values and convert to Islam at gunpoint.

The report quotes bin Laden again, in 1998, urging that

. . . the killing of Americans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and every Muslim to be carried out in whichever country they are until Al Aksa mosque [in Jerusalem] has been liberated from their grasp and until their armies have left Muslim lands. We . . . call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it. We also call on Muslims . . . to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them. (Emphasis added.)

When asked, in 1998, about obtaining chemical or nuclear weapons, bin Laden said, "Acquiring such weapons for the defense of Muslims [is] a religious duty." (Emphasis added.)

The white paper’s delineation of bin Laden’s prior activities also demonstrates that his primary concern is with specific interventions by the United States into the Middle East and the Islamic world. Al Qaeda is implicated in the attack on U.S. military personnel in Islamic Somalia in 1993 and in two U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa in retaliation for U.S. intervention in Somalia. The report quotes bin Ladin’s interview with Time magazine on December 22, 1998, discussing the embassy bombings:

The International Islamic Jihad Front for the jihad against the U.S. and Israel has, by the grace of God, issued a crystal clear fatwa calling on the Islamic nation to carry on Jihad aimed at liberating the holy sites. The nation of Mohammed has responded to this appeal. If instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans . . . is considered to be a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation. . . . Any thief or criminal who enters another country to steal should expect to be exposed to murder at any time. . . . The U.S. knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now. . . . God knows that we have been pleased by the killing of American soldiers [in Somalia in 1993]. This was achieved by the grace of God and the efforts of the mujahideen. . . . Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God. I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America. (Emphasis added.)

As for the recent attacks, the white paper states:

In the months before the September 11 attacks, propaganda videos were distributed throughout the Middle East and Muslim world by Al Qaeda in which Osama bin Laden and others were shown encouraging Muslims to attack American and Jewish targets. In the run-up to 11 September, bin Laden was mounting a concerted propaganda campaign amongst like-minded groups of people—including videos and documentation—justifying attacks on Jewish and American targets; and claiming that those who died in the course of them were carrying out God's work.

The British report on bin Laden is the most thorough and authoritative statement issued by Western political authorities about his motivations. The report thoroughly supports the libertarian analysis of the political cause of the attacks of September 11. The existential cause of the attacks was, of course, the free will of the perpetrators.

Do we really want to elect a president who is ignorant of these important historical documents?

[Pravoslavnik]

I watched the Republican debate and was quite disturbed by the quality of the questions and the exchange between Guiliani and Ron Paul mentioned in the above posts. Rather than asking the candidates how they would interrogate and/or torture terrorists who had just bombed a U.S. shopping center (i.e., "Just how tough and militant would you be as President"?) I would like to hear Fox News ask the Presidential candidates two simple questions:

1) Why, in your opinion, did Al Qaeda attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11?

2) What sort of geopolitical response would, in your opinion, reduce the risk of an escalating Jihad against the U.S.?

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   If we are going to elect someone President of the U.S., at the very least, we should find out how they think about complex geopolitical issues...but, then again, Fox News is not in the business of keeping the public informed.  They are in the Republican entertainment business.

[尼古拉前执事]

Here is another good article on it from the initial topic from http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/18/martin/index.html , except that they mistakenly think Giuliani won the debates. I may not agree with everything he says, but think he brings up some good points to consider.

Paul's 9/11 explanation deserves to be debated
By Roland S. Martin, CNN contributor

Roland S. Martin is a CNN contributor and a talk-show host for WVON-AM in Chicago.

i — [/i]Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was declared the winner of Tuesday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, largely for his smack down of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who suggested that America's foreign policy contributed to the destruction on September 11, 2001.

Paul, who is more of a libertarian than a Republican, was trying to offer some perspective on the pitfalls of an interventionist policy by the American government in the affairs of the Middle East and other countries.

"Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years," he said.

That set Giuliani off.

"That's really an extraordinary statement," said Giuliani. "As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq; I don't think I've ever heard that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11."

As the crowd applauded wildly, Giuliani demanded that Paul retract his statements.

Paul tried to explain the process known as "blowback" -- which is the result of someone else's action coming back to afflict you -- but the audience drowned him out as the other candidates tried to pounce on him.

After watching all the network pundits laud Giuliani, it struck me that they must be the most clueless folks in the world.

First, Giuliani must be an idiot to not have heard Paul's rationale before. That issue has been raised countless times in the last six years by any number of experts.

Second, when we finish with our emotional response, it would behoove us to actually think about what Paul said and make the effort to understand his rationale.

Granted, Americans were severely damaged by the hijacking of U.S. planes, and it has resulted in a worldwide fight against terror. Was it proper for the United States to respond to the attack? Of course! But should we, as a matter of policy, and moral decency, learn to think and comprehend that our actions in one part of the world could very well come back to hurt us, or, as Paul would say, blow back in our face? Absolutely. His real problem wasn't his analysis, but how it came out of his mouth.

What has been overlooked is that Paul based his position on the effects of the 1953 ouster by the CIA of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

An excellent account of this story is revealed in Stephen Kinzer's alarming and revealing book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," where he writes that Iran was establishing a government close to a democracy. But Mossadegh wasn't happy that the profit from the country's primary resource -- oil -- was not staying in the country.

Instead, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known British Petroleum, or BP) was getting 93 percent of the profits. Mossadegh didn't like that, and wanted a 50-50 split. Kinzer writes that that didn't sit too well with the British government, but it didn't want to use force to protect its interests. But their biggest friend, the United States, didn't mind, and sought to undermine Mossadegh's tenure as president. After all kinds of measures that disrupted the nation, a coup was financed and led by President Dwight Eisenhower's CIA, and the Shah of Iran was installed as the leader. We trained his goon squads, thus angering generations of Iranians for meddling in that nation's affairs.

As Paul noted, what happened in 1953 had a direct relationship to the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. We viewed that as terrorists who dared attack America. They saw it as ending years of oppression at the hands of the ruthless U.S.-backed Shah regime.

As Americans, we believe in forgiving and forgetting, and are terrible at understanding how history affects us today. We are arrogant in not recognizing that when we benefit, someone else may suffer. That will lead to resentment and anger, and if suppressed, will boil over one day.

Does that provide a moral justification for what the terrorists did on September 11?

Of course not. But we should at least attempt to understand why.

Think about it. Do we have the moral justification to explain the killings of more than 100,000 Iraqis as a result of this war? Can we defend the efforts to overthrow other governments whose actions we perceived would jeopardize American business interests?

The debate format didn't give Paul the time to explain all of this. But I'm confident this is what he was saying. And yes, we need to understand history and how it plays a vital role in determining matters today.

At some point we have to accept the reality that playing big brother to the world -- and yes, sometimes acting as a bully by wrongly asserting our military might -- means that Americans alive at the time may not feel the effects of our foreign policy, but their innocent children will.

Even the Bible says that the children will pay for the sins of their fathers.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer. This is part of an occasional series of commentaries on CNN.com that offers a broad range of perspectives, thoughts and points of view.