Posted on 09/24/2001 12:48:12 PM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
"The only thing now to do," declared Sen. Burton K. Wheeler in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, "is to lick hell out of them."
The sentiment was pregnant with political significance, since the maverick Montana Democrat had been a leading isolationist. Earlier that year, he simultaneously derided President Roosevelt's foreign and agricultural policies, describing lend-lease for Great Britain as a plan to "plow under every fourth American boy."
Even as late as December 1941, Roosevelt was invoking presidential powers in contest with an isolationist Congress. In a series of "Neutrality Acts," Congress tried to keep out of the war by embargoing arms shipments to aggressor and victim alike, outlawing loans to belligerents and prohibiting American vessels from visiting war zones and American citizens from sailing on belligerent vessels. Congress and much of the public were in the grip of not only traditional suspicion of Europe, but also eccentric readings of World War I. They imagined that keeping citizens off the next Lusitania would avoid involvement, for example, and took seriously the notion that international arms merchants had provoked the Great War to fatten profits.
All of this was swept away by Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 8, 1941, Congress declared war by votes of 82-0 in the Senate and 388-1 in the House. The sole dissenter was the first woman ever to serve in Congress, Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican and devoted pacifist who'd also voted against World War I.
With the surprise terror attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we seem to be witnessing a remarkable parallel. The vote providing President Bush with an open-ended authorization to use military force against terrorists abroad passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1. The lone dissenter was Rep. Barbara Lee, protegee of and successor to former Rep. Ron Dellums in representing the views of Oakland and Berkeley.
So it's apt to ask whether we are witnessing the same kind of sea change in attitudes and politics the nation experienced 60 years ago. Have the events of the past 10 days ended a running debate, and crystallized a new consensus about America and its role in the world?
The unanimous Senate vote contrasts, remember, with the 52-47 margin approving the use of force in the Gulf War. The president's father found it easier to persuade the United Nations Security Council than the U.S. Senate. And some 53 members of Congress filed suit in federal court to block his unilateral advance deployment of troops, contending it violated the War Powers Act passed in 1973 over the veto of a Watergate-weakened President Nixon.
The contemporary "antiwar" sentiments engendered even more sweeping legislation than anything contemplated by the interwar isolationists. The War Powers Act professed to override the president's role as commander in chief unless Congress had exercised its prerogative to declare war. With the Boland Amendments, Congress tried to reverse the Reagan administration's support of the contras against Sandinistas in Nicaragua, setting the state for the Iran-contra debacle. And of course, out of fear President Nixon might bomb the likes of North Vietnamese tank columns that later crossed into South Vietnam, Congress prohibited the use of funds for military involvement there after Aug. 15, 1973.
The germ of all this was the notion that the U.S. was an overreaching force in world affairs, to be restrained in the name of peace. Where Sen. Gerald P. Nye saw the problem in World War I as the "merchants of death," Sen. J. William Fulbright saw the problem in Vietnam as "the arrogance of power." The United States should not play "world policeman." Every deployment was seen as a "slippery slope" to "another Vietnam."
Predictably, the principle of restraint was not uniformly applied. No one raised a peep about the War Powers Act and such as President Clinton sent troops to Haiti, the Balkans and points east and west. He actually fought a war in Serbia and Kosovo, albeit at 15,000 feet to avoid "body bags." Anyway, this action had a cloak of U.N. sanction, never a straightfoward assertion of U.S. interests.
With the plume of smoke wafting over New York City, it's hard any longer to believe that it's the U.S. that puts world peace at risk. This notion has been incredibly durable, resisting lessons such as boat people fleeing Vietnam and Cubans washing up on our shores. Also terrorist actions against our embassies and ships abroad and an earlier World Trade Center bombing, all of which presaged this month's attack. But now that we're preparing 6,000 body bags a brisk walk from where George Washington bade his troops farewell, it's clear to everyone that the world is full of evil forces the U.S. has to resist.
And we have some 6,000 funerals yet to conduct. I attended the memorial mass for Barbara Olson, who died in the Pentagon crash of American Airlines flight 77, calling her husband bravely to ask, "What do I tell the pilot to do?" In his homily, Father Franklyn Martin McAfee of St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., proclaimed that the terrorist attacks show that Satan is active in our world. How better to explain the horror?
There is reason to believe, thankfully, that our antiwar politicians are digesting this lesson as the isolationists did in 1941. The resolutions swept through Congress, and the applause for President Bush's joint-session speech seemed genuine enough. Congressional opposition to missile defense -- based partly on the idea that if the U.S. were kept vulnerable it wouldn't get uppity -- is melting away. A consensus for a bolder approach to the world may be dawning.
What remains is for one of our antiwar leaders to seize the Vandenberg opportunity. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had been a leading isolationist, for example opposing extension of the draft only months before Pearl Harbor. He renounced such views to become the Republican leader in forging the bipartisan foreign policy that prevailed from 1941 to 1968. Looking back on his own change of heart, he remarked that the Japanese surprise attack "drove most of us to the irresistible conclusion that world peace is indivisible. We learned that the oceans are no longer moats around our ramparts. We learned that mass destruction is a progressive science which defiles both time and space and reduces human flesh and blood to cruel impotence."
Pearl Harbor was NOT a surprise attack!
It was in fact the price willingly paid by FDR and his War Cabinet for the United States entry into WWII.
No, we are not.
There has been no formal Declaration Of War by Congress, and thus there is nothing exemplary about WTC 9/11.
Another Korea, another Vietnam, another Somalia.
We have already lost, though the formally-undeclared "war against terrorism" (ha ha) will cost the American people a great deal in their Constitional liberties.
Because Congress did not issue a formal Declaration, the "war" has already been lost.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.