Seriously, Iowa? Ron Paul?

By Marc A. Thiessen, Monday, January 2, 11:24 AM




Rep. Ron Paul is in a dead heat with Mitt Romney for first place in the Iowa caucuses. If he does pull out a win on Tuesday, Iowa Republicans will have chosen as their commander in chief a man who says it was wrong to kill Osama bin Laden.

In a recent interview with a Des Moines radio station, Paul not only came out against killing bin Laden but gave a remarkable reason for his opposition: The operation that took out the man responsible for the massacre of nearly 3,000 people in our midst, he said, showed no “respect for the rule of law, international law.” International law? Back in 2002, Paul wrote in a column that “America must either remain a constitutional republic or submit to international law, because it cannot do both.” I guess it is goodbye constitutional republic since Paul now claims that international law constrains us from killing the man behind the most brazen attack on our country since Pearl Harbor — the man who, as we learned from documents recovered from his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,was actively plotting another attack to exceed the magnitude of 9/11. Since when do libertarians acknowledge the power of supranational law to prevent a sovereign United States from defending itself against foreign aggressors?

In the CNN/Tea Party debate that took place one day after the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Paul said he believes that the United States brought the 9/11 attacks upon itself.

Parroting the propaganda of al-Qaeda, Paul declared, “Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been explicit, and they wrote and said that we attacked America because you had bases on our Holy Land in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians a fair treatment, and you have been bombing … [Interrupted by boos from the crowd] I’m trying to get you to understand what the motive was behind the bombing. At the same time, we have been bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for ten years. Would you be annoyed? If you’re not annoyed then there is some problem.”


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/seriously-iowa-ron-paul/2012/01/02/gIQ...