The Middle East: Goodbye to All That

The typical Ron Paul speech is shot through with paranoia, grandiosity, and omnibus weirdness, but America’s No. 1 libertarian extremist moves in from the margins when he talks about the country’s current aversion to foreign entanglements. “Somebody said the other day on the Internet, if those Paul people had been in charge, Osama bin Laden would still be alive,” Paul told an adoring crowd of fringe Republicans in late August. “But you know what I think the answer is? So would the 3,000 people on 9/11 be alive!”

The statement is, of course, historically clueless. The attacks of Sept. 11 were set in motion by Islamism’s sense of theological supremacy, by its loathing of modernity, and also by revulsion at the American presence on the Arabian Peninsula—a presence that was deemed by U.S. policymakers, correctly, to be vital to a functioning world economy. And yet Paul’s simplistic isolationism also reflects a broad desire for a clean break from the Middle East.