The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Biden’s Other Unwinnable War

Wednesday August 18, 2021

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Joe Biden’s speech following the Afghanistan debacle made for compelling television for one main reason: here is a government official – the man who holds the office once called the “leader of the free world” – recognizing the limits of government. 

No matter how long the US stayed, no matter how many troops the US deploys, no matter how much blood and treasure are expanded on this war, the US could not accomplish its ends. “How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer,” he asked. 

“Despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training and the best capacity to the Afghan security forces, we could not give them the will and they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country,” added his national security advisor. 

As I listened, I began to replace one set of words for another. Taliban equal SARS-CoV-2. Lives and fortune lost equal collateral damage of lockdowns. The dream of a free and democratic Afghanistan equals a nation without the pathogen that causes Covid. Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and other mitigation measures all equal the measures deployed for 20 years to achieve the unachievable.
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Biden's Afghan Speech - A Hit...And A Miss

Tuesday August 17, 2021

There was much to approve of in President Biden's speech explaining his decision to pull out of Afghanistan...and a few yellow flags of caution. We'll discuss the good and the bad. Also today: beware of new and dangerous legislation introduced in Congress. New Zealand madness. And more. Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Emmanuel Macron’s Covid ‘health pass’ tyranny reveals the true extremism of globalist faux-centrism

Tuesday August 17, 2021

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Macron was billed as the “moderate candidate” in the 2017 French presidential election but there’s nothing moderate about this authoritarian who has transformed France into a police state under the guise of countering a virus.

A few weeks ago, I was in the picturesque Suffolk coastal resort of Southwold. There is a large mural of the novelist George Orwell – who once lived there – at the entrance of the renovated pier. It couldn’t have been a more appropriate moment to be reminded of the author of “1984” for, in 2021, we are truly living in Orwellian times. Almost everything we are being told is an inversion of the truth. Extreme policies are being enacted across much of the Western world by those claiming to be “moderates,” while those who oppose the removal of basic, inalienable human freedoms and making them conditional on taking a new-on-the-market vaccine, or proving one’s “health status,” are the ones being labelled “extremists” – and categorised by the elite’s propagandists as either “far-right” or “hard-left.”

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in France.

It is now obligatory to present a “Pass sanitaire” – proving you have been vaccinated or tested negative for Covid-19 or have recovered from the virus, to gain access to cafes, restaurants, health centres, libraries, department stores, long-distance trains and a whole host of public places. France has gone from a relatively free society to a 1940s-style “Where are your papers?” state in an incredibly short time and without any proper parliamentary scrutiny or public debate. Macron the “moderate” has turned into Macron the dictator.
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Blame Bush and Obama for the Afghan Disaster

Tuesday August 17, 2021

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Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power.

But Trump and Biden shouldn’t blame one another. It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers, with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before.

By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the US built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency.

The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years.

They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as “collateral damage.”
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Should We Blame Biden For Afghan War Loss?

Monday August 16, 2021

The race is on to blame Biden for the dramatic fall of Saigon...er...Kabul over the weekend. Politicos who've been most responsible for the 20 year disaster continuing are now pointing fingers elsewhere. The truth is there is plenty of blame to go around...but will we finally learn the lessons? Also today, new threats according to Homeland Security...you'll never guess what they are? Today on the Liberty Report...
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Kabul Has Fallen - But Don't Blame Biden

Monday August 16, 2021

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This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away.
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Lockdowns, Masks and The Illusion of Control

Saturday August 14, 2021

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In the early 11th century, King Canute—while at the peak of his power—set out to demonstrate to his fawning courtiers the limited power of royal edicts.

After having his throne placed by the sea’s edge, he sat down and commanded the tide to stop rising. When the water began washing over his feet, he declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings.”

Nearly a thousand years later, facing a different force of nature—Covid-19—an entire global generation of presidents, prime ministers, governors, mayors, public health officials, scientists and citizens is being given the same lesson.

However, where Canute’s lesson sprang from his humility, this lesson springs from the hubris of the present-day ruling class and the credulity of the masses who place far too much faith in their rulers’ power.

The lesson was pointedly driven home on July 19th. That was “Freedom Day” in the United Kingdom, with government ending restrictions on social contact, allowing the reopening of remaining establishments such as nightclubs, and abandoning mask mandates.
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Yet Again, the Media's Covid Narrative Doesn't Add Up

Saturday August 14, 2021

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If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.
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Washington’s Clueless Ambassadors: Damaging American Interests Is Their Legacy

Friday August 13, 2021

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Whenever one gets into discussions about the decline of America’s ability to positively influence developments around the world a number of issues tend to surface. First is the hubristic claim by successive presidents that the United States is somehow “exceptional” as a polity while also serving as the world’s only superpower and also the anointed Leader of the Free World, whatever that is supposed to mean. Some critics of the status quo also have been willing to look a bit deeper, recognizing that it is the policies being pursued by the White House and Congress that are out of sync with what is actually happening in Asia, Africa and Latin America, being more driven by establishing acceptable narratives than by genuine interests.

The problem starts at the top. One can hardly have a great deal of respect for presidents who appointed neocon or neoliberal ideologues Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo or current incumbent Tony Blinken as Secretaries of State, but when all is said and done the area where the US fails is most egregiously is in the personnel it actually sends overseas. It has far more non-professional ambassadors than any other country in the world.

Does the American public know, for example, that fully 44% of American Ambassadors sent overseas under Donald Trump were political appointees, whose sole distinction in many cases is that they contributed large sums of money to the Republican National Committee? Though such individuals can sometimes turn out to be surprisingly effective, many frequently know nothing of the country that they have been assigned to and do not speak the local language. To cite my own experience, in my 21 years as an intelligence officer spent mostly in Europe I did not once work for an ambassador who was a Foreign Service Officer career diplomat and few of the political appointees I knew never bothered to learn the local language.
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