Four conclusions can be drawn from the most striking five minutes of last Tuesday's Republican presidential debate.
Congressman Ron Paul started the series of exchanges with a soliloquy on foreign affairs, using the candor that one of exceptional opinions might reserve for an invitation to dissent. It was an attempt to verbalize opinions for an audience without the same inchoate prepossessions, Paul's historical claims as peculiar in that night's setting as an excavation suddenly decompressing a tomb's relics into a downtown square. Out of the ramble came the assertion nobody standing behind a microphone liked, one which led Rudy Giuliani to disregard protocol and chide the congressman: that al Qaeda's murder is logically justified.
For his defense, Paul antedated the planned construction of military bases in Iraq, and compared the United States with China as if the relevant basis were the adoption of a national flag. But he also dismissed "the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics" while attributing to the Founders a rule to "be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them," indicating diametric troubles from the opening days of a Paul administration.
Reporter Wendell Goler asked the question a careful listener should have: if September 11th invalidated assumptions of the scale, intent and bearing of threats from overseas, why wouldn't the balance of the Republican Party abjure "non-interventionist foreign policy"?
In order: one, Ron Paul will now be identified by name, and as an eccentric; two, drawing a cordon sanitaire around the United States, on a map from sixty years ago or earlier, is less acceptable on the right, even now; three, Wendell Goler deserves top billing and a raise; four, although some maintain that each of Paul's competitors wanted to object, all but one had an undisclosed reason not to speak out, and thus the greatest plausibility as an articulate wartime commander-in-chief remains Rudy Giuliani's.