Responding to Ron Paul

In this clip, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice picks apart all of Congressman Paul's all-too-predictable and slapdash accusations that come cloaked in the garb of "questions." Following Paul's statement, he finally proposes a question to Rice. She responds in kind and then proceeds to shoot down each of his previous assertions. Paul's accusations are getting a bit tiring. The light of any good points he may make (and he sometimes offers one or two) is dimmed significantly by his obsolete view of the role of the United States in the post-9/11 world. And therein, I think it's fair to say, is the schism within the conservative family: On the one hand, there are those who believe that 9/11 was a wake-up call to a new kind of war and enemy that demanded a fresh approach in dealing with such asymmetrical threats as rogue Islamic nations and Islamic terror cells within those nations. On the other side, one finds individuals like Congressman Paul and Pat Buchanan, who would rather lay the blame for events like 9/11 at the feet of the United States and its foreign policy. This understanding, both naive and deeply offensive, while not lacking a certain sophisticated speciousness, is revealed as untrue by the very statements of the terrorists themselves, who repeatedly remind us that they perceive this battle as fight-to-the-finish war waged in the name of Islam. Friends of mine from the Middle East have also rejected such theories as espoused by Paul and Buchanan, i.e., the belief that our foreign policy is the primary reason for the attacks perpetrated by radical Muslims against Western nations. As George Weigel put it in Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism, US foreign policy is the excuse, not the reason for the attacks against us.