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Rand Paul was Against America Being Iran’s Air Force, Before He was for It
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 4, 2014 @ 9:32 am In The Point | 19 Comments
There are some ways in which Rand Paul reminds me of Obama. It’s not just that his view of foreign policy has anti-American roots, but that he paves it over with self-contradictory slickness using expediency to hide his views.
And like Obama, every one of his pronouncements on foreign policy is treated with artificially inflated significance. But if the pronouncement is compared to the complete contradictory thing he was saying before that, its significant collapses.
Case in point, Rand Paul now has a great new plan for ISIS. Be Iran’s air force.
President Obama may not have a strategy to combat ISIS, but Rand Paul does. And it involves the U.S. taking a backseat to Iran and Syria.
“Right now, the two allies that have the same goal would be Iran and Syria, to wipe out ISIS. They also have the means, and the ability, and they also have the incentive to do so because [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad’s clinging for power and clinging for life there,“the junior Kentucky Senator told Sean Hannity on Wednesday.
If Iran and Assad had the means to do it, then why haven’t they done it yet? Because we haven’t shown up to be their air force.
Paul, who is an early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination (though he hasn’t officially announced his candidacy) said that he believes there is a role for the U.S. in fighting ISIS along with Iran, Syria, and Turkey, and if he were president, he would seek congressional approval to “take care” of them “militarily.”
But, he said, “I still would like to see the ground troops and the battles being fought by those who live there, and I think we can give both the technical as well as air support that can be the decisive factor in this.”
Rand Paul wants us to support a dictator. This is exactly the kind of thing that he and his father would lecture us about and then claim that the next terrorist attack was blowback for. Except the rules don’t apply to them.
But here’s the ridiculous thing. You might think that describing Rand Paul’s plan as turning the US into Iran’s air force was harsh and unfair… but those were his words.
In June, Rand Paul was arguing against air strikes on ISIS with an op-ed titled, “America Shouldn’t Choose Sides in Iraq’s Civil War”
“What would airstrikes accomplish? We know that Iran is aiding the Iraqi government against ISIS. Do we want to, in effect, become Iran’s air force?…”
Apparently now Rand Paul does want us to be Iran’s air force. That’s literally his new plan.
But wait a month or two and Rand Paul will have another editorial out arguing that the “interventionists” like Rick Perry want to turn America into Iran’s air force.
And absolutely no one will remember that he was urging just that in September.
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