Paul Whacks Obama on Afghanistan: Don't We Know History?

Ron Paul, who despite being removed from the height of his primary popularity is still a star among a certain brand of conservative, took a whack at President Obama on Friday for misguided militarism in Afghanistan.

The Texas Republican, whose non-interventionist foreign policy made him beloved among the conservatives angered by Iraq and, he adds, military personnel, who donated more to his campaign than any other, took Obama to task for not being the anti-war president he pledged to be during the campaign.

"We get a new President who didn't like the war going on," he said. "So what are we going to do? We are going to drag another 17,000 Americans and pump them into Afghanistan. Don't we know anything about history?"

The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference offered moderate applause. If anything, the evolving position, at the least among neoconservatives, is that Obama isn't going far enough in Afghanistan.

It was a change from the days of the campaign, when Paul was the sole Republican in the primary field to offer at least a somewhat aligned foreign policy approach to that of Obama.

"The truth is foreign policy hasn't changed," said Paul, who attributes the ballooning of the deficit and the perilous state of homeland security to interventionism abroad. "We should be looking more to what George Bush said in the year 2000. He was strongly critical of the Clinton years, being the policeman of the world."

"We had to go spread our goodness into the Middle East," he said at one point. "The person most pleased with our foreign policy is Osama bin Laden."