On the 11 October 2018 edition of the increasingly vapid FOX & FRIENDS, Senator Rand Paul was interviewed. He provided a clear and concise explanation about why non-intervention is an indispensable – perhaps the key – component of a national-government policy meant to establish, in fact, not merely aspiration, the republic-saving tool known as “America First”. Senator Paul’s performance is yet another in a growing chain of examples of how much he has matured as politician, a legislator, a thinker, and a man who can speak with telling impact on those millions who supported his father and those who today support the Trump administration.
The best part of the interview, for me, was Senator Paul’s calm demolition of FOX’s preeminent juvenile twit, Brian Kilmeade. As Senator Paul explained the madness of the United States currently being militarily involved in seven foreign civil wars, none of which threaten a single genuine U.S. national security interest, Kilmeade descended into an even-more-than-usual babbling mess, sputtering out that Senator Paul was wrong about U.S. participation in foreign civil wars. When the latter stood by the obvious truth he had stated, Kilmeade accused the Kentuckian of wanting to turn over “Yemen to Iran” and their Huthi coreligionists. Like all illogical and anti-American Neocons and Israel-Firsters, Kilmeade harbors the delusion that America has a right to have a definitive say in Yemen’s destiny, and, worse yet, that he and his ilk know precisely what the content and design of that destiny must be.
Senator Paul, who is a Southern Gentlemen blessed with some empathy for the daft, did not nail Kilmeade’s ears to the floor – so I will try. In the first place, Kilmeade and his fellow-travelers always have championed the “right” of the United States – due to it being “exceptional” – to determine the destiny of any country on which they fixed their malign gaze.
Claiming to want to bring democracy, elections, human rights, women’s rights, peace, and stability, but really only wanting power, these interventionists and the unable-to-win-a-war U.S. military have left a trail of nation-states that now form an enormous funeral pyre whose flames continue to be fed by U.S. and foreign casualties, trillions of U.S. dollars, the destroyed infrastructures of several of the world’s least-wealthy states; and budding civil wars. Kilmeade and his interventionist brethren, when they stand back and view this McCain-designed disaster, will decide that they must again exercise America’s divine right of “exceptionalism” and advocate re-intervention in the same places where first application of the altruistic myth of militarized American exceptionalism has already and predictably failed.
The human and material destruction of Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq are all the product – in whole or in part – of the illogical abstraction known as American exceptionalism. It also is the product of the U.S. governing elite’s hubris; its well-maintained ignorance of foreign peoples, their histories, and their ways; and its complete lack of concern about the certain, disastrous impact of that doctrine on Americans and their families, the national government’s debt, and the alienation of Americans’ affection for their government.
In the governing elite’s eternal devotion to military interventionism, undergirded and justified by the absurd doctrine of “American exceptionalism”, the republic’s citizenry has only four roles to play; namely, to pay for it, to die or be maimed for it, to never question it, and to condemn and ostracize those who oppose it.
What Senator Paul and President Trump cannot yet say, is that the only proper response to Kilmeade’s question “do you want to give Yemen to Iran?” is that such an occurrence would be (a) irrelevant to the national-security interests of the United States, and (b) would be a blessing for the United States as the bankrupt, isolated, and inflation-ravaged Persians can assume responsibility for a country, economy, and society that are in even worse shape than their own.
The even harder-to-speak but essential truth for men of goodwill toward the republic and its citizens is that if the Yemenis killed – with or without Iran’s involvement — each other to the last person, leaving Yemen quiet and unpopulated, it would be no skin off the republic’s nose. The citizenry, moreover, would pocket an enormous monetary savings because their government had not ridden, Custer-like, to the rescue and, in doing so, inevitably lost another prolonged war. The same fact pertains to Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the Palestine-Israel war.
The devastation delivered so far by the post-9/11 interventionism of the governing elite and its rah-rah boys in the Congress and media is small beer when compared to what is coming. To date, the interventionists have ruined non-threatening nation-states one at a time, but they seem to have not yet fully recognized the seeds of continental catastrophe contained in their witless destruction of Qahdafi’s Libya. Libya minus the Qahdafi regime has destabilized not only itself, but has afforded Islamists of all stripes the path over which an entire continent is being destabilized.
From the Sinai Peninsula-Israel border west to Mauritania, and from Algiers south to the economically dying Republic of South Africa, the Islamists – native and foreign – are gradually emerging as viable threats to many of the already corrupt regimes that misgovern the continent. Libya, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Cameroon, Mali, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, and Mali are all struggling against Islamist propaganda, sabotage, and fighters. Moreover, the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda — in north, central, and western Africa – are alive and, if not completely well, recovering strength.
If they are receiving accurate intelligence briefings, Senator Paul and President Trump should be able to clearly see the disaster the Neocons, the Israel Firsters, and perhaps even U.S. generals and diplomats are steering the United States toward on the African continent. As the growth and advance of Islamist forces noted above unfolded, the media have reported that the U.S. military’s presence across the African continent greatly expanded in a way that roughly mirrors the Islamists’ progress. At this point, multiple domestic and foreign media list the following as places where the U.S. military has at least small bases: Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Egypt, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. (1)
Several media pundits have described the establishment of these U.S. military bases as a “lily pad” approach to the Islamist problem in Africa. The term sounds harmless enough, but the reality is that these bases almost certainly were created to preposition troops, equipment, and ammunition; to build airfields or improve old ones; to waste large amounts of money building Potemkin local allies; to modernize harbor facilities; and to build a cadre of troops familiar with the lay of the land, as well as with the local peoples and their languages, customs, tribal arrangements, and their loyalties to local authorities.
These bases are designed to make an undeclared, unconstitutional U.S. military intervention in Africa easier, faster, and quieter when the congressional, media, and military war-mongers are ready to again demonstrate to the world and the republic’s citizenry the fact that only this country’s governing elite is “exceptional”, and it only in the sense of starting and losing unnecessary wars, bankrupting the U.S. treasury, making the republic multiple vengeful enemies, and killing and maiming the soldier-children of American parents.
On FOX, Senator Paul struck a sound blow in favor of non-intervention and on the priority of placing the well-being of America and Americans far ahead of any foreign matters. Kilmeade’s shrill and agitated response suggests that some of his ilk believe that non-interventionists are gradually securing an ever more sympathetic ear from the citizenry. After four consecutive presidents’ used the U.S. military to condition citizens to believe it is America’s proper, even mandatory role to play the military enforcer for the construction and maintenance of the New World Order, now is the time for Senator Paul and President Trump to keep this issue in front of Americans. Both men and their lieutenants could do no better than to update the 1941 words of Charles A. Lindbergh so that their focus are on the whole world, not just on Britain and Europe, and then use them repeatedly when speaking to Americans about what the term America First means.
“We are assembled here tonight,” Colonel Lindbergh told a capacity crowd attending an America First rally at Madison Square Garden on 23 May 1941,
“because we believe in an independent destiny for America. Such a destiny does not mean that we will build a wall around our country and isolate ourselves from contact with the rest of the world. … An independent American destiny means, on the one hand, that our soldiers will not have to fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours. On the other hand, it means that we will fight anybody and everybody who attempts to interfere with our hemisphere, and that we will do so with all the resources of our nation. It means that we rely on our own strength, our own ability and our own courage to preserve this nation and to defeat anyone who is rash enough to attack us. It means that we have faith that these United States of ours can compete in commerce or in war with any combination of foreign powers, and that we are no more afraid of the Europe of Germany than our forefathers were afraid of the Europe of France or England or Spain.” (2)
Amen, Colonel, amen.
Endnote:
–1.) See, for example, https://daily.jstor.org/why-is-the-u-s-military-occupying-bases-across-africa/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/05/21/map-the-u-s-currently-has-troops-in-these-african-countries/?utm_term=.399faee3b147; and https://observer.com/2017/12/us-military-has-presence-in-50-of-54-african-countries/
–2.) Charles A. Linbergh, “We Lack Leadership That Places America First”, Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VII, pp. 482-483. http://www.charleslindbergh.com/pdf/speech7.pdf
