[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 177 (Wednesday, December 2, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H13446]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE QUAGMIRE OF AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Certainly, in the last 24 hours, we've had a lot of 
discussion about Afghanistan and whether or not we should send more 
troops. As a matter of fact, that debate has been going on for a long 
time. The whole debate about Afghanistan is something that makes me 
think that we are bogged down, considering the fact that it has been 
going on for 8 years.
  This is not new for us. This is more or less the rule rather than the 
exception, and I believe this comes about because of the way we go to 
war. In the last 60-some years, we have never had a declaration of war, 
but we have been involved in plenty. We've been involved in Korea, 
Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and the Iraq War, and now Afghanistan, and 
it looks like it's going to be Pakistan as well.
  So I think the reason we get here is because we don't declare war and 
we slip into war, and then it becomes political. There are two sides. 
There is one side of the argument that says, Let's just come home. And 
the other side says, Fight it all out. And people say, No, you can't be 
an extremist on this. You have to have a balance. And the balance is 
chaotic. There's no way of measuring victory, and nobody wants to give 
up, claiming it would be humiliating to give up.
  But just think of the tragedy of Vietnam, all those years and all 
those deaths and all that money spent. Eventually we left, and South 
Vietnam is now a unified country, but we still have troops in Korea, in 
Europe, and in Japan. And we are bankrupt. So some day we are going to 
have to wake up and look at the type of foreign policy that the 
Founders advised us to have, and that is nonintervention: don't get 
involved in the internal affairs of other nations, have free and open 
trade and accept friendship with other countries who offer it, and that 
we shouldn't be the policemen of the world and we shouldn't be telling 
other people what to do. We cannot be the policemen of the world and 
pay for all those bills because we are literally bankrupt.
  In thinking about the dilemma that we have, I think back, even back 
in the 1960s when I was an Air Force flight surgeon for 5 years, and 
that was the first time I heard the term ``quagmire.'' And thinking 
about that for many, many years, that's all I can think about right now 
is to evaluate what we have. There are a few phrases that have been 
around for a long time, and I believe they more or less describe what 
is happening here. Quagmire. Certainly that is what we are doing. We 
are digging a hole for ourselves. ``Perpetual war for perpetual 
peace.'' We have all heard that term, and it sounds like we are in 
perpetual war. ``War is the health of the state.'' We all know the 
government size and sacrifice of civil liberties always occurs much 
more so in the midst of a war.
  A book was written many years ago by one of the most, if not the most 
decorated soldier we ever had, Smedley Butler. He wrote a book called 
``War is a Racket.'' And I have come to this belief that war literally 
is a racket for the people who push these wars, whether it's the 
military industrial complex or the special interests and the various 
factions, but it's never, it's never for the people.
  Today it is said that we're over there to protect our national 
security to go into Afghanistan. Well, it's down to 100 al Qaedas in 
Afghanistan, and, quite frankly, the Afghan Government had nothing to 
do--they said they harbored the al Qaeda, and that is true, but do you 
think those 19 guys needed to do pushups in Afghanistan to come over 
here and do what they did? The real planning wasn't in Afghanistan. It 
was in Spain. It was in Germany. Where was the real training? The real 
training was in Florida. The training was in Florida, and the FBI had 
evidence at the time that they were being trained, and it's totally 
ignored. And yet we are concentrating, we are still back to 9/11, fear 
of nuclear war. We have to go in, scare the people.
  Yet what is the motivation for individuals to become radical against 
us, whether it's in the Taliban or al Qaeda? There is one single factor 
that is the most influential in motivating somebody to commit suicide 
terrorism against anybody or us, and that is occupation by a foreign 
nation. And now, where have we occupied? We have occupied Iraq and 
Afghanistan. We are bombing Pakistan. But not only the literal 
occupation, but also, we have this threat on Pakistan.
  So I would say it's time for us to reassess ourselves and look at a 
noninterventionist foreign policy.

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