Over at the Ron Paul Channel, RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul is warning of consequences from the US government escalating its military involvement in Iraq. Paul concludes:
Expect one day for this insanity of our foreign policy to translate into a much greater war in the region. When that comes, look for a stock market crash, oil prices to skyrocket and gold prices to soar.
Read and listen to Paul’s brief editorial here.
Paul warns in his editorial that increasing US military involvement in Iraq shows that the US is “falling off a cliff into the quagmire of an ever-worsening civil war in Iraq.”
In contrast, Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, insists “[t]here’s no mission creep,” despite President Barack Obama sending at least 650 American troops to Iraq in the past two weeks.
Who should we believe?
Consider that in November of 2002 Department of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the 2003 US war on Iraq would last “[f]ive days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
In contrast, Paul, in the fall of 2002 explained that the proposed war against Iraq would be a continuation of the 1991 US invasion of Iraq and subsequent twelve years of US bombing of the country and warned that the US may become involved in decades of “nation-building” in Iraq after a 2003 invasion.
The US military wasn’t largely out of Iraq until December of 2011, and then only because the Iraq government refused to agree to a US-pushed status of forces agreement that would give US military members immunity from prosecution in Iraq. In June, Kirby announced that the Iraq government had made the immunity promise. Now the US military is returning to Iraq, a hundred troops here and a hundred there.
Whether regarding war against the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the American people have been promised that US military action would be limited in extent and short in duration. That promise has worn very thin.
