Posted on 03/06/2003 5:13:01 AM PST by SJackson
"War is not the answer." So reads a sign posted at an entry to I-66 on the outskirts of Washington.
Not the answer to what?
The opposition to the forceful removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, should he fail to "voluntarily" disarm himself of weapons of mass destruction, falls back on bumper sticker thinking.
Well, what is the answer? The French like to say "more inspectors." But the inspections inside Iraq depend totally upon the threat of force by the United States and Britain. Without the military build up of U.S. forces in the region, Hussein has demonstrated that he will keep his weapons. He will do so even with sanctions.
So the French answer of more inspections rooting out Saddam's weapons depends entirely upon the willingness of the United States to commit men and arms to dismantling Iraq's regime should Hussein not comply. War, in the threat of force, certainly is a part of the answer.
Do the marchers and placard wavers think any inspections would work without that threat? The United States is taking a lot of heat and bearing a large economic burden to pressure Saddam to accept inspectors who themselves say they are incapable of disarming Saddam.
Imagine if President George W. Bush were to say, "OK. If the United Nations won't approve it, we won't invade Iraq. We will pull back our troops instead, and wait for inspections to work."
What would follow on that? Would inspectors actually disarm Iraq? Would the era of good feeling thus engendered by this peaceful act make Israel feel more secure? Would it encourage terrorists in the rest of the Middle East to stop their plotting and planning against the United States and Israel and Britain and others in the West? Would Saddam Hussein, no longer threatened by U.S. arms, extend an olive branch to Kuwait, stop harassing and brutalizing his own people? Would it diminish the likelihood of weapons of mass destruction getting into terrorists' hands? Would real peace be closer at hand?
Not likely. And yet, "war is not the answer," reads the placards and shout the protestors. This is not surprising. After all, Europeans have believed that a long time, long before President Bush.
A Good Answer
War was not the answer to the Southern secession from the United States 140 years ago.
European nations then were anti-war. They were aghast at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of casualties. For what? To preserve the union? God, no!
When U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams arrived in Britain in May of 1861, he was met by a solid phalanx of British opinion that "war is not the answer." He wrote back to U.S. Secretary of State William Seward - whom the Duke of Argyle described as "the very impersonation of all that is most violent and arrogant in the American character" - that Britain was "unfriendly to the Union," and that public opinion was "not exactly what we would wish for."
And it wasn't friendly in France either. The Jacques Chirac of that age, Napoleon III, in 1862 proposed that France, England and Russia join together on behalf of the Confederacy to get a six-month armistice.
Napoleon III had ulterior motives then, as Chirac may have now. He'd implanted a Hapsburg, Maximilian, as emperor in Mexico, in hopes of creating a puppet dictatorship there favorable to French interests. After Appomattox, it took Phil Sheridan with 50,000 veterans from the Civil War to get Napoleon to withdraw his soldiers, after which Mexicans reclaimed their sovereignty. War was not the answer, but again the threat of it was part of the solution.
Ultimately, Russia's tsar, of all people, withdrew his support from any measure aiding the Confederacy. In part it was a matter of self-interest. In the pursuit of power balance, he wanted his navy to have access to U.S. ports in California and New York during wintertime. It was the threat of war in Europe that led him to the North's side.
Later, President Lincoln raised the stakes for opposing the Union, through his Emancipation Proclamation after the Battle of Antietem. Further, King Cotton, so valuable to British textile mills, became supplanted during a European famine by King Corn, a northern product.
Would the world have been better off if Lincoln had not waged war, if he had given in at the start to the better angels of his own nature?
Some fanciful writers have imagined that had the South seceded peacefully it would have forsaken slavery and lived peacefully, ultimately reuniting with the North. What happened in South Africa suggests a different, less friendly outcome.
And if war was not the answer in the 1860s, America likely would not have been the power it became. Would it have been there at the time of World War I? Would it have been capable of supporting England and France and opposing Germany and Japan in World War II?
Those wars were not answers, either. But as the ancestors of slaves and children of Holocaust survivors know, an aversion to war can pave the way to a crueler despotism. Their pain doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker.
TJ attempted to go the UN route, too, but when it failed, he stood up for American sovereighty. (This from an "anti-war" president!)
There is a certain ambiguity about the dynamics that produced Southern secession and the Civil War, arising from Lincoln's promise not to touch the institution of slavery, which he first made to gain the nomination as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and repeated while campaigning for the office. Lincoln was, however, an unabashed proponent of very high protective tariffs and "internal improvements," both of which were favorable to the industrialized Northern states at the expense of the agrarian Southern ones. The South's leaders might well have calculated that, with the British and French behind them, the North would not dare to try to oppose secession by force of arms.
Never overlook the power of self-interest, especially when pondering the decisions of statesmen.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
Read his 1st inaugural speech, he made it plain that as long as the South handed over it's tariff revenues, the bandito would allow the south to go free otherwise.
Some fanciful writers have imagined that had the South seceded peacefully it would have forsaken slavery and lived peacefully, ultimately reuniting with the North. What happened in South Africa suggests a different, less friendly outcome.
I guess the writer doesn't know about the dozens of coutries that ended slavery peacefully. But then again, what are facts for? They tend to ruin a good story.
All wars are caused by economics. In the case of the ACW, it was $4,000,000,000 in slaves that were at issue.
Walt
Read his 1st inaugural speech, he made it plain that as long as the South handed over it's tariff revenues, the bandito would allow the south to go free otherwise.
Not in any common understanding of commonly used words.
"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."
-- A. Lincoln, 3/4/61
And it would hard to mistake this:
"South Carolina...cannot get out of this Union until she conquers this government. The revenues must and will be collected at her ports, and any resistance on her part will lead to war. At the close of that war we can tell with certainty whether she is in or out of the Union. While this government endures there can be no disunion...If the overt act on the part of South Carolina takes place on or after the 4th of March, 1861, then the duty of executing the laws will devolve upon Mr. Lincoln. The laws of the United States must be executed-- the President has no discretionary power on the subject -- his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Mr. Lincoln will perform that duty. Disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards. The Union is not, and cannot be dissolved until this government is overthrown by the traitors who have raised the disunion flag. Can they overthrow it? We think not."
--Illinois State Journal, November 14, 1860
Neo-rebs will tell any kind of lie.
Walt
Bingo! Money, money, money...MONEY! Got to have it, yeah...
He might have read this:
"During 1856 hundreds of would-be planters took up land grants in Nicaragua. In August, Pierre Soule himself arrived in Walker's capital and negotiated a loan for him from New Orleans bankers. The "grey- eyed man of destiny," as the press now described Walker, needed this kind of help. His revolution was in trouble. The other Central American countries had formed an alliance to overthrow him. They were backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom Walker had angered by siding with an anti-Vanderbilt faction in the Accessory Transit Company. The president of Nicaragua defected to the enemy, whereupon Walker installed himself as president in July 1856. The Pierce administration withdrew its diplomatic recognition. Realizing that southern backing now represented his only hope, Walker decided "to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves," as he later put it. On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua's 1824 emancipation edict and legalized slavery again.
This bold gamble succeeded in winning southern support. "No movement on the earth" was as important to the South as Walker's, proclaimed one newspaper. "In the name of the white race," said another, he "now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth." The commercial convention meeting at Savannah expressed enthusiasm for the "efforts being made to introduce civilization in the States of Central America, and to develop these rich and productive regions by the introduction of slave labor."
-- "Battle Cry of Freedom" pp.113-114 by James McPherson
I think you know all this, you'd just rather push Soviet style disinformation.
Walt
But President Lincoln always held out the hand of conciliation to the rebels.
Hon Secretary of War
Executive Mansion
Washington July 28, 1963
My Dear Sir,
A young son of the Senator Brown of Mississippi, not yet twenty, as I understand, was wounded, and made a prisoner at Gettysburg. His mother is sister of Mrs. P. R. Fendall, of this city. Mr. Fendall, on behalf of himself and family, asks that he and they may have charge of the boy, to cure him up, being responsible for his person and good behavior. Would it not be a grateful and graceful thing to let them have him?
Yours Truly,
A. Lincoln
And preserving the Union, which of course was done successfully.
Weep if you may, but we are better off for it today, as we would have not been a world power otherwise. Not to mention all of Europe would be speaking German.
And this affects you today because......????
It's called war; the goal is to win if you fight one. Maybe shelling Ft Sumter wasn't such a great idea after all.
I'm really sorry, but I fail to see how a dictator attempting to institute slavery renouces the succesful ending of slavery in dozens of countries.
William Walker was actually a "filibuster", a person who invades a country or aids in a revolution in order to gain money and power. Walker was a fruitcake liberal that passed himself off as a lawyer, doctor, editor, President of Lower California, and Emperor of Nicaragua.
Popularly known as scam artists today. Walker was financed by Accessory Transit Company, A New York firm owned by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who then bankrupted the two men who had betrayed him. In 1860 Walker led an invasion of the Bay Islands near Honduras. Walker was captured and shot by firing squad. The man was amiserable failure.
Push your Soviet style disinformation on a "moderated" forum.
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