US Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has lashed out at Washington's engagement in 'perpetual war,' calling on the US administration to mind its 'own business.'"Perpetual war is bankrupting our country," the Texan congressman told a gathering of his supporters in the midwestern US state of Iowa on Wednesday.
"Every year we spend more and more money overseas," he noted, saying Washington's increasing expenditures in areas, including "intervention, propping up dictators, fighting wars that we don't need to be fighting" acted as a drain on the national budget.
Opposing the US government's undue interference in the economy as well as its military interventions abroad, Paul has pushed his way to the top place in Iowa caucuses, according to recent polls conducted by RealClearPolitics.com, a website, which tracks the US politics.
Washington and some of its allied states invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003.
The US has reportedly spent over USD 1,100-plus billion in taxpayer money on the war in Iraq, while some experts estimate that the indirect costs of the campaign, such as interest on additional debt, will exceed the direct costs.
The respected Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes wrote in a 2008 book that the combined costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has stood at between USD 5 and USD 7 trillion.
Paul has also rejected the US and its allies' allegations against Iran about the Iranian nuclear program and warned against any military confrontation with the Islamic Theocratic
Republic.
"Iran doesn't have a bomb. There's no proof... And for us to overreact and to talk about bombing Iran, that's much more dangerous," he said in an interview with CBS television's 'Face the Nation' on November 20.
The United States, Israel, and some of their allies accuse Iran of pursuing military objectives in its nuclear program and have used this pretext to push for the imposition of sanctions on the Islamic Theocratic
Republicas well as to call for a military attack on the country.
Iran, however, maintains that, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the IAEA, it has every right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, but has never found any evidence of diversion in Iran's civilian nuclear program.