Críticas de Jonah Goldberg a Ron Paul

WWTD? Who Cares?

There are far, far, far more Arabs and other Muslims who did not become terrorists because of our actions in the Middle East. But their “perspective” accounts for nothing in Paul’s analysis. The upshot seems to be that our foreign policy must always be held hostage to whichever group of murderers decides to get pissed off at us. Sorry, no sale.

Even more annoying, Paul seems to invest in bin Laden a certain strategic omnipotence and takes his word for everything. This is usually a leftwing trope. The terrorists are “delighted” we’re in Iraq, he claims, because Osama bin Laden says so. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t (my guess is that opinions vary wildly between those terrorists who are dead and in Hell and those who are still awaiting their travel orders). But either way, why on earth is their opinion dispositive? If, as Paul gushed, the CIA is correct that there is such a thing as “blowback” (and there obviously is) surely Osama bin Laden is as subject to this immutable law of the universe as the rest of us are. “Careful what you wish for” is good advice for terrorists and dictators, too. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein is still cackling with laughter about how he has the Americans exactly where he wants them?

Again, blowback hardly blows in only one direction. Paul invokes Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal from Beirut as a wise response to blowback. But many students of the rise of Islamism see Reagan’s painful decision as a terrible error, in that it provided one of the first lessons that America has a glass jaw. One could just as easily argue that the blowback from the pullout was worse than the decision to send the Marines there in the first place. Moreover, the moral variable is left out entirely. If you send cops into a mob hangout, the cops will face blowback from criminals with guns. That hardly means the cops had it coming.