Ron Paul and the MSNBC Debate

"During the recent MSNBC Republican presidential debate, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made three profound points on U.S. foreign policy that the American people would be wise to heed. Needless to say, Paul’s three points, being libertarian in nature, aren’t likely to be favorably received within the Washington, D.C., establishment, especially among lobbyists for the military-industrial complex. Perhaps that is why, despite Paul's first-place finish in post-debate polls conducted by MSNBC, ABCNews.com, and C-SPAN — or maybe because of those results — the Washington Post used its lead editorial on Tuesday to specifically question Paul’s participation in the rest of the Republican presidential debates.

The first point was that the Iraq War violated the traditional American policy of foreign nonintervention that characterized our nation through most of the first 125 years of its existence. What Paul was referring to was summed up in the speech that John Quincy Adams delivered to Congress on the 50th anniversary of the Fourth of July: that America does not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and that, if America were ever to embrace such a policy, the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force” and she would become “the dictatress of the world.”

What better example of the validity of Adams’s admonition than President Bush’s war on Iraq?"

Ron Paul and the MSNBC Debate