What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others?

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan – and bombing Pakistan – is directly related to the hatred directed toward us and has nothing to do with being free and prosperous?

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair trade-off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens, no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan people are killed or displaced?

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” is self-destructive and produces no useful information – and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?

What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?

What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?

What if conservatives, who preach small government, wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?

What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?

What if a military draft is being planned for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?

What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?

What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?

What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?

What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?

What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded – nothing!

What happens if my concerns are justified and ignored – nothing good!

Please watch the 5-minute video of Rep. Ron Paul's "What If?" speech given on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 12, 2009 linked on line and read the transcript of the speech below.  As Americans, let us take these questions posed by Dr. Paul and discuss them with our fellow Americans ... our friends, our family, our co-workers, our neighbors, our ministers, our "representatives" in all levels of our servant governments, the editorial boards of our local newspapers, our favorite talk show hosts on radio and television, the persons next to us at the gas pump or in the checkout line at the grocery.

"There comes a time when our silence is betrayal, and that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam." - Martin Luther King, Jr., from his "Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break Silence" speech given to the CALC on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in NYC
For 56-minute audio and text of MLK speech, click here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Has the time come to take Dr. King's statement above and apply it to the U.S. government's bogus "Global War On Terror" which is totally based on a well documented pre-existing, pre-9/11 plan by the PNAC (look it up) to invade and occupy selected sovereign nations in the Middle East and Central Asia and which has been and continues to be sold and propagated to the American people by the lies told by the corporate-controlled media?  Has our overall silence as a people reached the point of betrayal?  If so, what will "we" do about it.  "We", two or more … starting with ourselves and the person we see in the mirror.

Click on this link to watch and listen to Dr. Paul’s 5-minute "What If?" speech: http://www.wimp.com/ronasks/