Posted on 03/24/2003 4:44:19 PM PST by rhema
According to European "anti-war" protesters, the United States is a new Rome, seeking to dominate the world through sheer military power, bent on conquest of the oil-rich Middle East and making it part of the new American Empire. If President Bush is a new Caesar, some comparisons are in order.
American war-planners fretted about Saddam Hussein's plans to withdraw his troops into the cities, forcing U.S. troops into urban warfare that would mean a heavy toll in civilian casualties. The deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians would be a terrible thing, and the U.S. military is making every effort to minimize them.
A Caesar, in contrast, was overjoyed to find his enemies concentrated within cities. All he had to do was to lay siege and either starve them out or breech their walls. A common ancient tactic was to give a besieged city one opportunity to surrender, with the understanding that if it did not, when the city fell, every man, woman, and child would be put to the sword.
President Bush is planning to liberate the Iraqi people, establishing a democratic government and spending billions of dollars to rebuild their nation. Caesar would often "decimate" his defeated enemies: kill every 10th man.
Americans are rightfully squeamish about war, agonizing over moral fine points and feeling guilty about what may have to be done. Caesar waged war ruthlessly, with few qualms and no limits. His revenge knew no bounds. If terrorists from a particular tribe had somehow managed to knock down the Pantheon, the retaliatory carnage would have been total. One shudders to think what a Caesar would do with nuclear weapons.
Americans seek to build an international consensus, taking their case to the United Nations and a divided, largely pacifist Europe. Caesar's reaction to a veto from Gaul would likely go beyond irritation.
Much of the world is saying that they are more afraid of President Bush than of Saddam Hussein. This is greatly distressing for Americans to hear, but Caesar would be greatly pleased at those kinds of poll results. He would doubtless agree with Machiavelli, that latter-day master of classical statecraft, who observed that it is better for a ruler to be feared than to be loved.
In contrast to the Roman Empire, American policy—even when waging war—is shot through with moral considerations and ethical principles. These may sometimes get in the way of something so primal as fighting a war, but we should be thankful that our leaders operate under moral scrutiny and self-scrutiny. Rome was pagan, but America was constructed by Christians, who knew that there is a higher law than the state and who limited their leaders' power accordingly.
America is a nation "under God." This is in stark contrast to the Caesars, who claimed to be gods. The outlawed phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance is a bulwark to American liberty, signifying that America's government can never claim absolute power and that its policies must always be subject to a higher authority.
There is, however, one sense in which President Bush and Caesar are similar. Both are entitled to "bear the sword."
According to Romans 13, earthly rulers are authorized by God to protect their people. Not to regulate businesses or run the economy or "improve" people's lives. Rather, God uses the vocation of the ruler—even non-Christian rulers such as Caesar—to punish evildoers and to protect the innocent. This they do by "bearing the sword." The magistrates who use weapons against criminals and the military forces who use weapons against enemies of the nation are responsible before God to use their power rightly and not (as often happens) to protect the evildoers and punish the innocent.
Bearing the sword is the business of the state, not the church. Caesar has the sword, but the church's only weapon is the Word. Christians can indeed participate in the debates about going to war in their vocations as citizens, but the church, as such, is to concentrate on the kingdom of God.
Eight hundred years ago, the pope declared a Crusade, offering indulgences that supposedly would allow a soldier who died while fighting the Muslims to go straight to heaven. This Christian jihad, whose promise of salvation through homicide is exactly that of the terrorists today, arguably got us into this mess. Now the pope, having become more or less pacifist, has sent delegates to President Bush to urge him not to go to war.
But the church does not have authority over the state. Churches should indeed call the government to account when it acquiesces in gross moral evil (such as legalized abortion). But in the details of defense policy, security council resolutions, and military decision making, the church should render unto Caesar.
If we go in the same way the USSR went in to Afghanistan with terror and fire we are going to get the same result. The people will fight. Not as they are now, but with the desperation of those who have nothing to lose.
Prove to them that they have nothing to fear from you as long as they aren't shooting at you and they will surrender. Leaving the lights on and the water flowing doesn't help Saddam one bit. Cutting them off would not deprive him at all. But when we blow up his palace and leave the stuff that the ordinary Iraqi depends on a powerful message is sent. "Don't shoot at us and you have little to fear from us." The flip side being: "Mess with us and die."
It is lies and slander like these that give aid to the enemy. The Crusades were to open the Holy Land to pilgrims again and out the hands of, you guessed it, the muslims. For awhile it worked, but then France got involved, Louis the Pious and all that...
The rest of the world brought our hegemony upon themselves by their stupid, petty squabbles over the last century - not to mention their spawning of barbaric civic religions (Toynbee's term, not mine) like Communism and Islam.
They can grovel at our feet and thank whatever God they worship, that we are a *benevolent* Empire, and bent only on our own security and not their conquest - or they *would* be glowing in the dark right now.
And if our security demands confiscating their natural resources, too bad - such is the nature of empires; and that again is the price they pay for THEIR having caused this Empire to become forged out of necessity, during and after WW II. The hegemony about which they so complain now, is the heritage of the rest of the world, for having allowed Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and Stalin and... and, and, and, and and.
Yes, this is an Empire, it is the most formidable Empire in history, and the rest of the world can just deal with it. If they had any sense, they'd be grateful for our being here, and being the only remaining stabilizing force, to keep them from slaughtering each other over minor points of theology, or the tribal feud that their ancestors started over a chicken theft 800 years ago.
And in a final irony, despite the baleful howling of the rest of the incompetent, spineless, banally jealous world, anyone who doesn't like living under our dominion, can just come here and become a citizen, and become one of us, with a little effort! They can get into our military, they can get into our space program...
I *Love* living in this Empire. It's *fun* watching the Empire pound dictators like Saddam into the ground while the rest of the screeching, spineless world fails to act - thereby justifying not only our actions but our continued dominion over them, and their continuation of the exact state of incompetence and uselessness which produced WW II, and the rise of the American Empire. It's just unfortunate that to any extent we are paying with the lives of our young people, to continually rescue the rest of the world from its own incompetence - because the rest of the world - and I submit the French as an outsatanding example - continues to prove how undeserving it is of our sacrifices.
It is only because we restrain ourselves from doing what historically other empires have done, that we do not utterly destroy our adversaries - and considering the attitudes of those whom we continually and repeatedly rescue from their own stupidity, I pray continually that our restraint does not, in the end, turn out to have been a tragic mistake, on a grand historical scale.
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