Despite the histrionics on display via Memeorandum, Ron Paul’s position against risking American lives to stop genocide is not outside of the mainstream. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro at Big Government describes his conversation with Paul:

And so I asked Congressman Paul: if he were President of the United States during World War II, and as president he knew what we now know about the Holocaust, but the Third Reich presented no threat to the U.S., would he have sent American troops to Nazi Germany purely as a moral imperative to save the Jews?”

And the Congressman answered:

“No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t risk American lives to do that. If someone wants to do that on their own because they want to do that, well, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t do that.”

Shapiro claims that “when I first presented the story of Paul’s comments about the Holocaust to major news media outlets two years ago, they were so stunned they were afraid to publish my story”.

Well, that was 2009, and we were still trying to convince ourselves that we should not have tried to stop the genocidal murderer in Iraq.

The reason we know we absolutely should have, had we known, stopped the Jewish genocide in Germany is because we didn’t do it and we know how it turned out. If we had known about it in time to stop it and we had stopped it before it reached that point, the same people who claim we should never have gone into Iraq would be claiming we should never have gone into Germany.

Iraq was a cake-walk compared to Germany. We can’t claim that hypothetical non-intervention in Germany is outside the bounds of rational discourse, and at the same time claim that intervention in Iraq was obviously unreasonable. If hypothetical intervention in Germany is so obvious that disagreeing with it is “disturbing” the same should be true of actual intervention in Iraq. We know, with as much certainty as we can know, where Saddam Hussein was headed.

Ron Paul’s position, misguided as it is, is a mainstream position within today’s media, within the left, and within a significant part of the right.