But Who Was Right – Rudy or Ron?

My note now that the GOP leaders have discovered, to their surprise the establishment candidates are running dead last and Ron Paul ahead, a smear campaign will be underweigh. In short there are NO big money interests that have ANY interest in seeing Paul win, and every reason to want him to lose. He would end:
a. corporate welfare - remember that most large corporations pay NO taxes, on top of getting huge subsidies and the law manipulated in such a way that hurts middle class tax payers and benefits the super wealthy.
b. the iraq war

From Pat Buchanan @ LewRockwell:

It was the decisive moment of the South Carolina debate.

Hearing Rep. Ron Paul recite the reasons for Arab and Islamic resentment of the United States, including 10 years of bombing and sanctions that brought death to thousands of Iraqis after the Gulf War, Rudy Giuliani broke format and exploded:

"That's really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of 9/11, 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 to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."

The applause for Rudy's rebuke was thunderous – the soundbite of the night and best moment of Rudy's campaign.

After the debate, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," came one of those delicious moments on live television. As Michael Steele, GOP spokesman, was saying that Paul should probably be cut out of future debates, the running tally of votes by Fox News viewers was showing Ron Paul, with 30 percent, the winner of the debate.

Brother Hannity seemed startled and perplexed by the votes being text-messaged in the thousands to Fox News saying Paul won, Romney was second, Rudy third and McCain far down the track at 4 percent.

When Ron Paul said the 9/11 killers were "over here because we are over there," he was not excusing the mass murderers of 3,000 Americans. He was explaining the roots of hatred out of which the suicide-killers came.

Lest we forget, Osama bin Laden was among the mujahideen whom we, in the Reagan decade, were aiding when they were fighting to expel the Red Army from Afghanistan. We sent them Stinger missiles, Spanish mortars, sniper rifles. And they helped drive the Russians out.

What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States. Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?

read on But PB sums it up with this great point:

Understandably, Republicans do not want him back, telling the country how the party blundered into this misbegotten war.
By all means, throw out of the debate the only man who was right from the beginning on Iraq.

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Justin Ramando at antiwar reminds us that the democrats/left is of little good in opposing this war (since they won't seriously examine its causes):

"As the U.S. stumbles, or is pushed, into another unwinnable land war in Asia, the anti-war protestors of the future will come from the ranks of the Right. Buchanan, and the editors of this magazine, in alliance with other conservatives and libertarians, stood firm against the war hysteria that preceded Gulf War I. This time around, with the stakes even higher, that same alliance has the potential to expand its ranks to include the overwhelming majority of Americans. Let our rulers unleash the dogs of war to mask their own corruption: they will ignite a social and political explosion that will make the sixties seem relatively tranquil."

I wrote that in the June 1998 issue of Chronicles magazine, at the end of a piece entitled "Wagging the Dog," wherein I pointed out that the evidence of Saddam’s aggressive intent was nil, that the U.S. was starving and sickening many thousands by imposing sanctions, and that an invasion would lead to a civil war, the break-up of Iraq, the rise of Iran, and significant political turmoil in the U.S.:

"Some Republicans… bravely spoke out. Representative Steven E. Bayer, of Indiana, dared ask: ‘Why are emotions running so high at the White House? Why are the tom-toms of war sounding?’ Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, excoriated his jingoist colleagues for ‘trying to appease the military industrial complex and appear tough for campaign ads.’ He complained that ‘once hostilities begin, debating the policy which created the mess is off-limits; the thinking goes that everybody must support the troops by blindly and dumbly supporting irrational and irresponsible policies.’ The only solution, he concludes, "is a pro-American constitutional policy of nonintervention.’ But ‘unfortunately, we cannot expect such common sense to prevail in the current political climate.’"

Those were the Clinton years, when it was neither unusual nor even treasonous for a Republican to question the administration’s war moves against Iraq: as Ron Paul pointed out in the South Carolina GOP presidential debate the other day, we bombed Iraq for years before launching the present disastrous enterprise, all the while tightening deadly sanctions like a noose around the necks of ordinary Iraqis. What kind of hatred this produced was brought home to us on September 11, 2001, in a highly dramatic occurrence of a concept popularized by Chalmers Johnson in Blowback, his classic study of the socio-cultural, political and military costs of interventionism.

When Ron Paul dared to make this point at the South Carolina debates, the debate-is-off-limits dictum he foresaw all those years ago was invoked by Giuliani, the rest of the so-called frontrunners, and the MSM – although, at this point, they may have some trouble enforcing it. Giuliani’s thuggish behavior, and the efforts of his militant supporters to close down all debate about the consequences of U.S. foreign policy for the security of this country, won’t be enough to stem the rising tide of criticism, coming from the right as well as the left.