Excerpts from Ron Paul's book The Revolution: A Manifesto


In a debate with the Vice President Al Gore [in 2000]...Bush also rejected nation building. "Somalia started off as a humanitarian mission and changed into a nation-building mission," he said. "And that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called 'nation building.'" He added, "I think what we need to do is to convince the people who live in the lands [themselves] to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here--we're going to have kind of a 'nation-building corps' from America?" [p 11]

...Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright...said on 60 Minutes that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the 1990s were "worth it." [p 16]

...given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to...blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? [p 16]

To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheurer [Michael Scheurer, chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late 1990's] points out that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. [p 17]

The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, for his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, collected a database of all 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we have believed. The World's leaders in the suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or Sudan...the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland." ... While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed. Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the U.S., France, and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon, there were no more attacks. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire potential suicide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs. [pp 21-22]

At the time of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Osama bin Laden actually offered to lead an army to defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam if necessary. Iraq had not attacked us, and figures in our own government, including Condalezza Rice and Colin Powell, had said that Saddam was effectively contained and no threat to anyone. Saddam's was not even a Islamic regime; it was a secular one--although, thanks to the war, that is now changing. [p 22]

I heard it argued that Saddam had indeed committed an act of aggression against the United States: he had shot at our airplanes. Those American planes were monitoring the "no-fly zones" over Iraq. Authority for such zones was said to come from U.N. Resolution 688, which instructs nations to contribute to humanitarian relief in the Kurdish and Shiite areas. The resolution actually says nothing about no-fly zones, and nothing about bombing missions over Iraq. That Saddam Hussein missed evey single airplane for 12 years as tens of thousands of sorties were being flown indicates the utter weakness of our enemy: an impoverished Third World nation that lacked an air force, antiaircraft weapons, and a navy. [pp 23-24]

The American media were so derelict in their duty during the Iraq war that one watchdog group actually offered a $1,000 reward for any reporter who would ask the administration a challenging question about prewar intelligence...For much of 2006 and 2007, it looked as if we were in for a repeat performance: propaganda and slogans, parroted by the media, threatened to take us to war yet again. Then things changed. In December 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate compiled by sixteen agencies of the American intelligence apparatus concluded that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and had not resumed it...The administration's rhetoric, on the other hand, gave the impression that nothing had changed. And from the administration's perspective nothing had changed, since it had apparently possessed this intelligence report for months, only making it known to the public in early December...First, administration officials tried to discredit the report...They then claimed that Iran's 2003 abandonment of its weapons program...showed that American pressure must have worked, since Iran backed off from developing nuclear weapons just as the United States was invading Iraq. Our government must therefore keep up the pressure by means of yet another round of sanctions. Russia and China did not buy into this analysis, and once again our isolationists in Washington placed America on a lonely and tenuous platform on the world stage...There is still no evidence that Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, has ever violated the treaty's terms--terms which state Iran is allowed to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian energy needs...In the late summer of 2007, with the administration aware that the evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program was on the verge of collapse, President Bush signed an executive order designating Iran's 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "terrorist" group, thereby establishing a new pretext for an attack on Iran. [pp 26-28]

...the leadership of al Qaeda hoped to lure us into a "desert Vietnam," an enormously expensive war that would deplete our resources and help their own recruitment by stirring up the locals against us...According to a study by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, the vast bulk of the foreign fighters in Iraq are people who had never been involved in terrorist activity before but have been radicalized by the U.S. presence in Iraq--the second holiest place in Islam. [pp 38-39]

It isn't just the Iraq war that busts the budget--it's our overseas presence as a whole. We have reached a point at which it now costs $1 trillion per year to maintain...With a $9 trillion debt, perhaps $50 trillion in entitlement liabilities, and the dollar in a free fall, how much longer can we afford this unnecessary and counterproductive extravagance? [pp 36-37]

Right now our government is borrowing $2.2 billion every day, mainly from China and Japan, to pay for our overseas empire. [p 159]

...we are paying about $1.4 billion every day just for the interest on the national debt. [p 81]

...a piece of legislation I introduced into Congress in late 2007 concisely reflects my views on civil liberties and executive power in light of the war on terror...the American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007. [see details p 123]

Interest rates were at their initial level for a reason: savings were low, and therefore with little for investors to borrow, the price of borrowing (i.e., the interest rate) was high. Had market-determined interest rates prevailed, investors would have been discouraged from excessive borrowing to finance long-term projects, and the result would have been sustainable investment and growth. Interest rates set by the market coordinate the production process in accordance with real economic conditions. Only the most profitable, socially demanded projects would have been undertaken. When the Federal Reserve artificially lowers rates, on the other hand, it systematically misleads investors and encourages unsustainable economic booms. F. A. Hayek's Nobel Prize in economics, which was awarded to him in 1974, had to do with exactly this: showing how central bank manipulation of interest rates and money cause havoc throughout the economy, and set the stage for an inevitable bust. [p 146]

The Federal Reserve now no longer reports the figures on M3, the total money supply. Spokesmen claim that among the reasons for this change is that it costs too much money to gather these figures--this from the institution that creates however much money it wants, is off the books, and is never audited. [p 150]

The first practical measure that should be taken is to legalize competition. Restore to Americans their right to use precious metals as a medium of exchange...Right now, various disabilities make it difficult for gold to be used in market transactions. Sales and capital gains taxes on precious metals should be promptly repealed, and the enforceability of gold clauses in private contracts definitively reaffirmed. [pp 154-155]

I have long favored giving young people the right to opt out of Social Security...But since current Social Security recipients are being supported by tax receipts from current workers, how would those people be cared for if young people began opting out? The transition period should be funded by curtailing our overseas expenditures, which are not only out of control but have also compromised our real security interests by spreading our forces so thin...In addition, the budgets of every federal cabinet department should at the very least be immediately frozen...Most departments, with the exception of the State, Defense, and Justice, deal with matters that our Constitution properly leaves to the states or to the people, and the people should no longer be exploited to support them. [pp 160-161]