(cross-posted at Daily Kos)
I didn’t have a chance to watch the second GOP presidential debate – aside from not having cable television at my home in New York, I don’t watch Fox News on principle. Nevertheless, the now-famous exchange between Rep. Ron Paul and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was quite telling. It’s also a sad state of political discourse in our country, particularly on the Republican side.
In essence, everything Paul said is correct. I don’t agree with his belief of the traditionally conservative position on isolationism; it was the disregard for international affairs after World War I – instituted by 3 Republican presidents over 12 years – that led to the growing ineffectiveness of the League of Nations and planted the seeds for World War II several years later. Nevertheless, it is useful to understand that not all international intervention is good intervention. I’ll quote Paul’s lines from the debate using this transcript of the exchange.
Paul: “Non-intervention [ meant to say “intervention”? ] was a major contributing factor. 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 ten years. We’ve been in the Middle East. I think Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now We’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s 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. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.”
To anyone who has studied even the basics of world history, Paul’s statements are legitimately backed up. The West (I’m using this general term to denote America and Western Europe) has played the role of interventionists in the Middle East region ever since the Crusades, but especially more so since the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The comment about Middle Eastern politics being ‘irrational’, on the other hand, is a misguided opinion because it inherently posits democracy as the ‘rational’ political system. In that region, democracy was never a prevalent system, and the Islamic and Persian culture is much different from Western society. Despite this erroneous opinion, though, Paul largely hits the mark right on. After Giuliani responded (which I will discuss later), Paul further emphasized his point:
Paul: “I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes there was blowback. The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. If we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us cause we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us cause we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us.”
Paul correctly defines blowback as it pertains to American policy in the Middle East. While it literally discusses unintended consequences, a forward-thinking person would be able to tell that unwanted intervention in a sovereign country’s affairs can lead to devastating results in the future, there was not much foresight given during the Cold War era, when numerous CIA-backed coups occurred around the world. The attacks that occurred almost 6 years ago weren’t attacks on our freedom or our way of life, as Bush stated on the night of the attacks. They were retaliation for decades of unwanted American intervention in Middle Eastern affairs.
In a neutral setting, one would expect Paul to be applauded for his level-headed evaluation of our foreign policy under the Bush administration. But there was a lot of silence after he spoke. Instead, the biggest applause line was garnered by Giuliani, who responded to Paul in this fashion:
Guiliani (interrupts): Can I make a comment on that? That’s really an extraordinary statement. As someone who lived through the attack of September 11th, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. [ applause ] I would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us he didn’t really mean that. [applause]
Giuliani’s response is intellectually dishonest (and possibly ignorant). Paul never said that the attacks happened because of our previous attacks on Iraq; he mentioned it as one reason out of many. Furthermore, it reveals that the only reason Giuliani is running for president is because he believes some higher moral authority was granted to him for being mayor of the city hit hardest that day. He’s not the only person to live through those attacks – everyone did, and a fair number of us, like myself, were pretty damn close to where the attacks occurred. It’s an insult to everyone else that because he portrayed an emotional steadiness in the months after the attacks, nothing can challenge the ‘historical’ version of what occurred – even the truth.
After the debate, Giuliani was declared the winner by some in the the mainstream media and by some conservative bloggers (although, based on Free Republic’s collection of post-debate headlines, it appears that Mitt Romney did okay as well), largely on the strength of his strong, well-received (by the live debate audience) retort to Paul. The fact that such an idiotic response could be seen in a good light ties into Al Gore’s main theme in his latest book, The Assault on Reason – namely, that politics has devolved so much into sound bites and 30-second advertising that reasonable discourse no longer has a place in contemporary times. Gore makes this point clear in the book (excerpted from an excerpt):
Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason–the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power–remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.
[…]
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.”
[…]
Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself–because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.
Simply put, political discussion is no longer a discussion. It is more like a directive instead: we are told to listen to the candidates speak to us – not to engage us – and go on our merry ways. In a time when the collective attention span of the nation is swayed at the mass media’s discretion, it isn’t going to be the reasonable that gets highlighted. It will be the sensational. So what an uninformed person (like myself about the GOP presidential debate, before educating myself) gets from the spat between Paul and Giuliani is that Giuliani was right to put Paul in his place for daring to possibly suggest that the September 11th attacks were blowback for past foreign policy mistakes – and it furthers this wrongly projected image of Giuliani being a ‘strong leader’ instead of the bully that he actually is. It’s more sensational than going into a discussion on the history of the Middle East region and discovering that perhaps Paul’s assertions contained some valid points.
But that would be reasonable. And in today’s political arena, reason is dismissed.