Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul Page B

defending our liberties and Constitution.
    Many on the right who endorse the preventive-war mentality of overseas aggression are sincere in their belief that this effort is required to defeat the enemies of liberty. They refuse to see any connection between a policy of perpetual war and the loss of civil liberties at home. They believe their own rhetoric. This deception only facilitates big government, deficits, and the diminishment of individual liberty they say they are fighting to preserve. Tea Party activists will often claim to oppose the system of tax and spend, bailouts and socialism, but to the extent that they uncritically defend U.S. foreign policy, they are supporting all the policies they claim to be against.
    To inspire a nation’s support and individual sacrifice for a flawed policy requires a dangerous enemy. But what happens when there is but one superpower and no hated enemy with which to incite the people and gain their support for constant militarism? In the Cold War, the U.S. government used the Soviets to generate the people’s support of empire building for “national security purposes.” And throughout the Cold War, the U.S. empire grew, liberty suffered, and debt skyrocketed. In the past decade, the real wealth of the middle class has declined as a consequence.
    After the collapse of the Soviet system—a result of its flawed economic system, not a military defeat—instead of our getting a “peace dividend,” we were introduced to a new enemy, militant Islam, and a new place for building the American empire throughout the Middle East. In order to define our new nemesis,our government needed to schizophrenically flip-flop on previous alliances.
    Our “friend” and ally Saddam Hussein had to be turned into a Hitlerian monster about to attack us with nonexistent nuclear weapons. After U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie gave him a green light to invade Kuwait over a border dispute and mineral rights, it became easy for the war propagandists to excite the American people into supporting what is a twenty-year war in the Middle East, redesigning the Middle East by fomenting civil wars and regime change and constant turmoil.
    Why wouldn’t Saddam Hussein trust the United States in his military answer to an old conflict with a rival neighbor, since the United States supported him in his decadelong war against Iran? Various special interest groups joined this concerted effort. To create a new enemy against which we can unite, many interest groups came together: oil interests, neocon intellectuals, pro-war Christians, and “patriotic” Americans convinced that a great danger to our security existed and had to be stopped. Protecting “our” oil and our military presence around the world to prevent a new superpower from developing was an easy-to-sell policy to the American people.
    The republic is on its last legs and the military approach of brute force is impractical and unsustainable for the twenty-first century. Though our weapons have become more sophisticated and more numerous, current warfare has changed from state control to stateless resistance, al Qaeda and Taliban style—a modern-day form of guerrilla resistance.
    We are now faced with what William S. Lind has referred to as fourth-generation warfare. The idea is that those who seethemselves as defending their homeland can, in fact, compete with the overweening force of a world power with a nuclear arsenal. We have more weapons and spend more money on our military and sophisticated surveillance technology than all the other nations put together; yet after ten years we have not located Osama bin Laden nor have we brought peace and stability to Iraq or Afghanistan.
    We have spent a couple trillion dollars, and most importantly, sacrificed a lot more Americans than died on 9/11. Nearly 6,000 have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of physical and mental casualties have been sustained, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and