Have We Lost Our Minds?

Did anyone notice Rudy Giuliani smirking during last night’s debate? The first time I noticed it was when Ron Paul responded to Chris Wallace’s patronizing question about whether we should be taking our marching orders from Al Qaeda. Ron Paul’s response:

We should take our marching orders from our Constitution…we should not go to war without a declaration, we should not go to war when it’s an aggressive war. This is an aggressive invasion, we’ve committed the invasion of this war, and it’s illegal under international law.

In my experience, smirking is something people do when they feel threatened (when reason fails, try condescension!). So is chuckling in this case, and Giuliani wasn’t the only one chuckling while Chris Wallace asked his question. It sounded like some of the other moderators were too.

It astounds me that someone running for the highest office in the land would chuckle and smirk while debating such a serious issue. Ron Paul’s response, despite it’s perhaps overzealous delivery, was constructed with reason. His argument during the famous blowback exchange with Giuliani was also constructed with reason. Giuliani’s response then?

That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11th, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.

Wait, that’s extraordinary? Either this man does not believe that our actions have consequences or he is purposely deceiving us. I am not sure which is worse, but it doesn’t really matter.

The problem with this exchange is that Giuliani’s argument is predicated on a fallacious belief about human nature. Psychology tells us that terrorists act out of reasons that seem rational to them, not out of evil (whatever that is). Blaming the 9/11 attacks on sociopaths or radical Islam or people who “hate our freedoms” goes against everything we know about human nature.

In general, people want peace. But when they grow up in an environment without hope, surrounded by poverty, when they witness extreme violence as children, and when they are recruited for a terrorist cause before they are emotionally developed enough to know any better, they feel justified in their actions when they pursue terrorist tactics. Can you really know what you would do in their shoes, in the complete absence of hope and in an atmosphere of continual injustice and powerlessness? Can you say with 100% certainty that you wouldn’t be mad as hell and want to do something about it? And could you blame the slightly more reasonable people around you who tolerate or even encourage your behavior because there are no other options?

I highly recommend this quick read about The Psychology of Terrorism.

We should not need psychology to tell us these things. I think most reasonable, emotionally mature people could empathize with the desperation these people feel if they opened themselves up to the experience. How could you not feel sad for a 10 year old boy who is forced to watch his mother get raped before being brutally murdered? And when he grows up to passionately hate whoever he blames for this injustice, even if this hatred is misdirected, can you really call him evil?

But let’s get back to the real issue at hand. What Ron Paul is saying is that our foreign policy was responsible for the conditions which breed terrorism. In this case it’s because we had troops stationed in Islam’s holiest land while we bombed Iraq between the Gulf Wars, killing innocent civilians in the process. In fact, since WWII we have toppled countless democratically elected governments just when their countries needed them most and usually replaced them with bloodthirsty despots who promised to be friendly to our business interests (at the expense of the people). Saddam Hussein comes to mind–it’s ironic that we invaded Iraq to liberate the very people we once enabled him to oppress.

Skeptical? Our own government has admitted to it in some cases, such as the coup d’état we staged in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh after he tried to nationalize the oil industry. We did the same thing the following year in Guatemala when we overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. We continued these type of policies into the 1960s, the 70s, the 80s and 90s (and this list omits our involvement in Africa plus a few assassinations that the CIA was most likely involved in). There was blowback then (1979 hostage crisis) and there is blowback now (9/11). We reap what we sow, and blowback is a bitch.

Jon Stewart recently summed up our foreign policy record in the Middle East in what was supposed to be a defense of Barack Obama’s lack of experience, but which sounded more like an endorsement of Ron Paul. This is a must see (and quite funny too).

Bottom line: we can’t allow Giuliani-style thinking to win. Our foreign policy is broken, it’s usually unconstitutional, and if we don’t change it soon we’re going to be in big trouble. Don’t listen to the fear-mongering politicians who needlessly put our troops in harm’s way while quietly taking away your liberties. Don’t let them tell you that the situation is more complicated than you realize and that thinking you can just pull out of Iraq is naive. It’s not. Sure, getting out of Iraq will be messy, but it’s better than the alternative and in the long run our grand-children will thank us.

I hope you’ll forgive me for the cliché, but we owe it to them.