You, Greybird, are a LOSER if you believe the lies of this article.
Posted on 10/01/2002 3:13:22 AM PDT by Greybird
When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie. Surveying our history, we see a clear pattern. Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war. The enormous losses of life, property, and liberty that Americans have sustained in wars have occurred in large part because of the public's unwarranted trust in what their leaders told them before leading them into war.
In 1898, President William McKinley, having been goaded by muscle-flexing advisers and jingoistic journalists to make war on Spain, sought divine guidance as to how he should deal with the Spanish possessions, especially the Philippines, that US forces had seized in what ambassador John Hay famously described as a "splendid little war."
Evidently, his prayer was answered, because the president later reported that he had heard "the voice of God," and "there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them."
In truth, McKinley's motivations had little if anything to do with uplifting the people whom William H. Taft, the first Governor-General of the Philippines, called "our little brown brothers," but much to do with the political and commercial ambitions of influential expansionists such as Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and their ilk. In short, the official apology for the brutal and unnecessary Philippine-American War was a mendacious gloss.
The Catholic Filipinos evidently did not yearn to be "Christianized" in the American style, at the point of a Springfield rifle, and they resisted the US imperialists as they had previously resisted the Spanish imperialists. The Philippine-American War, which officially ended on July 4, 1902, but actually dragged on for many years in some islands, cost the lives of more than 4,000 US troops, more than 20,000 Filipino fighters, and more than 220,000 Filipino civilians, many of whom perished in concentration camps eerily similar to the relocation camps into which US forces herded Vietnamese peasants some sixty years later.
When World War I began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson's sympathies clearly lay with the British. Nevertheless, he quickly proclaimed US neutrality and urged his fellow Americans to be impartial in both thought and deed. Wilson himself, however, leaned more and more toward the Allied side as the war proceeded. Still, he recognized that the great majority of Americans wanted no part of the fighting in Europe, and in 1916 he sought reelection successfully on the appealing slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War."
Soon after his second inauguration, however, he asked Congress for a declaration of war, which was approved, although six senators and fifty members of the House of Representatives had the wit or wisdom to vote against it. Wilson promised this war would be "the war to end all wars," but wars aplenty have taken place since the guns fell silent in 1918, leaving their unprecedented carnage -- nearly nine million dead and more than twenty million wounded, many of them hideously disfigured or crippled for life, as well as perhaps ten million civilians who died of starvation or disease as a result of the war's destruction of resources and its interruption of commerce.
And what did the United States or the world gain? Only a twenty-year reprieve before the war's smoldering embers burst into flame again.
After World War I, Americans felt betrayed, and they resolved never to make the same mistake again. Yet, just two decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the maneuvers by which he hoped to plunge the nation once again into the European cauldron. Unsuccessful in his naval provocations of the Germans in the Atlantic, he eventually pushed the Japanese to the wall by a series of hostile economic-warfare measures, issued clearly unacceptable ultimatums, and induced them to mount a desperate military attack, most devastatingly on the US forces he concentrated at Pearl Harbor.
Campaigning for reelection in Boston on October 30, 1940, FDR had sworn: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Well, Peleliu ain't Peoria. Roosevelt was lying when he made his declaration, just as he had lied repeatedly before and would lie repeatedly for the remainder of his life. (Stanford historian David M. Kennedy, careful not to speak too stridently, refers to FDR's "frequently cagey misrepresentations to the American public.")
Yet many, many Americans trusted this inveterate liar, sad to say, with their lives, and during the war more than 400,000 of them paid the ultimate price.
Among FDR's many political acolytes was a young congressman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who eventually and, for the world, unfortunately, clawed his way to the presidency. As chief executive, he had to deal with vital questions of war and peace, and like his beloved mentor, he relied heavily on lying to the public. In October 1964, seeking to gain election by portraying himself as the peace candidate (in contrast to the alleged mad bomber Barry Goldwater), LBJ told a crowd at Akron University: "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."
In 1965, however, shortly after the start of his elected term in office, Johnson exploited the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, itself based on a fictitious account of an attack on US naval forces off Vietnam, and initiated a huge buildup of US forces in Southeast Asia that would eventually commit more than 500,000 American "boys" to fight an "Asian boy's" war.
Some 58,000 US military personnel would lose their lives in the service of LBJ's vanity and political ambitions, not to speak of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians killed and wounded in the melee. Chalk up another catastrophe to a lying American president.
Now President George W. Bush is telling the American people that we stand in mortal peril of imminent attack by Iraqis or their agents armed with weapons of mass destruction. Having presented no credible evidence or compelling argument for his characterization of the alleged threat, he simply invites us to trust him, and therefore to support him as he undertakes what once would have been called naked aggression.
Well, David Hume long ago argued that just because every swan we've seen was white, we cannot be certain that no black swan exists. So Bush may be telling the truth. In the light of history, however, we would be making a long-odds bet to believe him.
Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of Crisis and Leviathan and numerous scholarly and popular articles on Congress.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
You, Greybird, are a LOSER if you believe the lies of this article.
Tell me please, if America had not gone abroad in WW II, where would every Jew in Europe now be?
Up in smoke, perhaps?
Where would Hitler now be?
Imperially enthroned, perhaps?
Have you completely forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001?!
America did not start this war, but she is damn sure gonna finish it.
But the price of not removing Saddam is the end of America, perhaps civilization as we know it.
Either way, its a high price, but we must choose what we are willing to pay, and live/die by the consequences.
Yep, I have noticed that, too...
Robert Higgs is a MAROOON!
I suppose Roosevelt also pushed the Japanese to rape Nanking in China and kill several hundred thousand Chinese (before we imposed export restrictions on the Japanese) and brutalize Indochina and take Koreans as sex slaves.
And to compare our current Republican President to the Democrat President Johnson! Johnson lied during the 1994 election about what he was planning to do in Vietnam, while Bush is pulling no punches in letting us know his intentions in regard to Saddam Hussein and Iraq before this election.
Maybe if it would distance itself from supporting evil, distance itself from critters like communists and Islamicists and critters like Hussein rather than acting as shields and apologists for them, then the peace crowd wouldn't come off so many parasitic, hateful liars.
Name one historical inaccuracy in this article. I dare you. Robert Higgs knows what he's talking about, he isn't even a "revisionist" to any notable degree, and this is his broader point: On the historical record, under both Republicans and Democrats as president, all have lied to get us into foreign wars, and this does not augur well for the current president's efforts.
You might dispute the assessment of the present threat, and whether it is one, but Higgs is not "lying."
Tell me please, if America had not gone abroad in WW II, where would every Jew in Europe now be? Up in smoke, perhaps?
Yes, that's exactly what happened to them. They went up in smoke. We could have bombed the railroads leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other death factories. We could have admitted refugees. We did neither. Our adventure saved NO Jews except a relative handful of skeletal survivors in the camps.
Don't YOU read history?
Have you completely forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001?!
The new "bloody shirt." I remember it so vividly, since you ask, that I want to know what this new adventure of Imperium will do anew to stop those who planned and supported those atrocities. And how that issue connects, unmistakably, with Iraq. The answer on what has been shown thus far -- and if unmistakable evidence existed, we'd have had it waved in our faces by now -- is, in both cases, NOTHING.
September 11, 2001.
“I suppose Roosevelt also pushed the Japanese to rape Nanking in China …”
No, but that is not the reason we went to war. We went to war because of Pearl Harbor.
American don’t go to war unless they perceive they that they are in immediate and present danger. They knew about the Rape of Nanking and did nothing but sympathize. They knew about what was happening to the European Jews and did nothing – but turn away those who tried to flee here. They knew about the sacking of Kuwait, but until oil prices were threatened there was little support.
We do indeed view war as a last resort. If we need a lie to bring us to war, that’s just the way it is.
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