Rand Paul Responds To His Critics On ISIS And Foreign Policy
An exclusive interview with the Senator from Kentucky.
By Ben Domenech
SEPTEMBER 17, 2014
The Federalist:
For the past week or so, there has been a flurry of accusations of inconsistency as regards your position on ISIS, Syria, and Iraq. How do you respond to your critics? Do you believe you’ve changed your mind about the proper policy approach in this arena, or is this just a matter of people not making a distinction about the threats involved?
Senator Rand Paul: The thing that I in some ways laugh at, because nobody seems to get this, is that I spent the past five years in public life telling everyone that “hey, I’m not an isolationist” … and when they find out I’m not, they say I’ve switched positions, because I’m not the position they were saying I was. You know what I mean? So for five years they’ve been accusing me of being something that I say I’m not. And then when they find out I’m really not, they say I’ve changed my position. You can see how it’s a little bit frustrating for me.
From the consistency angle, I’ve consistently said that we have to be very wary of intervention and that there are often unintended consequences. I still believe that. For example, in Libya, we toppled a secular dictator, and we wound up with a chaotic situation with jihadists roaming everywhere, swimming in our embassy pool. It’s a disaster in Libya. Any objective evidence would tell you that our intervention there was the wrong way to go.
In general, if you look throughout the Middle East, you’ll find it’s a complicated area with complicated movements on all sides, but if you wanted to generalize one statement: I think you could say that the toppling of secular dictators has led typically to chaos and typically to more radical Islam and that radical Islam has been more or less, but at least somewhat focused on attacking America or Americans, where the secular dictators were more concerned with their country and rule in their country. This happened with toppling Gaddafi, it happened with toppling Mubarak, it would happen with toppling Assad, and I think it did happen with toppling Hussein. Half of those have been Democrat initiatives, half of those have been Republican, and some have been mixed, but I’ve been consistent in saying that I think those were all mistaken interventions.
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