By Robert Scheer, Twelve
AlterNet
The following is an excerpt from Robert Scheer's new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve, 2008).
War doesn't pay, nor does imperial ambition. That should be self-evident to anyone who has paid attention to the successful trajectory of the American experience, both politically and commercially, since the Republic's founding. It is a statement neither liberal nor conservative in orientation, and until recently it would have been accepted as a commonsense proposition by leading politicians of both political parties.
Although some leaders took us to war, they always claimed to do so reluctantly, as is reflected in the doubts expressed in their memoirs and those of their closest confidants. Lyndon Johnson, musing about the indefensibility of sacrificing even a single young American to die in Vietnam but sacrificing 59,000 of them in order to emerge victorious in his forthcoming election battle with Barry Goldwater, is all too typical. What that evidence reveals is just how intense is the political pressure to reject common sense when the specter of an enemy is raised. Those pressures have always been with us, and to the extent that they derive from national insecurities, political demagogues, economic avarice, overzealous patriotism, and religious or ideological fervor, they are a constant of the human experience in just about any given society.
The amazing thing about the American political experiment is that our system is the one most consciously designed to limit those risks of foreign military adventure, and for most of our history, it has worked out quite well. I don't intend to minimize the expansionist, indeed rapacious conquest of our own continent, or the occasional colonial adventures abroad, as in the Philippines and other outposts from Hawaii to Alaska, but in the main, with few lapses, the public remained properly suspicious of its leaders' intentions. The dominant assumption was the importance of avoiding foreign "entanglements," to use Thomas Jefferson's words of warning about the risks of intervening in the affairs of others. Indeed, that policy of nonintervention was thought by our nation's founders to be a basic demarcation between the politics of the old and new worlds.
By nonintervention, they did not intend indifference to events in the outside world or a narrow protectionist view of trade accompanied by a fortress American military posture. Such a stance, often described as isolationism, obviously is not only out of joint with our current, highly interconnected world, but it didn't make sense at the time of the nation's founding, even when the distance of oceans afforded far more secure borders than today. What nonintervention meant, as was commonly understood even on the tavern bar level, was don't go sticking your nose into other people's business, and certainly don't pick fights that you can't finish. That is a posture that has nothing to do with limiting charitable concern for others beyond your borders, missionary work abroad, humanitarian aid, and everything to do with avoiding the military expeditions that bankrupted the most pretentious and at times successful of empires. Not being like those empires was a driving force in the thinking of the nation's founders, who were in wide agreement on extreme caution as to military intervention.
That guiding idea of nonintervention -- developed by the colonists in rebellion, espoused to great effect by the brilliant pamphleteer Thomas Paine, and crystallized as a national treasure in the final speech to the nation of George Washington -- is as fresh and viable a construct as any of the great ideas that have guided our governance. Washington's Farewell Address, actually a carefully considered letter to the American people crafted in close consultation with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, is one of our great treasures, but although read each year in the U.S. Senate to mark Washington's legacy, it contains a caution largely ignored by those same senators as they gleefully approve massive spending to enable international meddling of every sort. Their failed responsibility to limit the president's declaration of war has become a farce that as much as anything mocks Congress' obligations as laid out in the Constitution.
Explaining why he, as our first president, followed "our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign World ... Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, on a respectably defensive posture," Washington shunned isolation, and instead held out a vision of peaceful international relations: "Harmony, liberal intercourse with all Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce but forcing nothing."
What more powerful though gentle warning could be offered against the instincts to the imperial adventures that have destroyed all great empires? Washington knew this record of imperial folly well, and he was well aware that his countrymen could fall as had others for that siren song of military power coupled with economic greed that had humbled the powers of Europe: "In offering you, my Countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend ... to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign Intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism ..."
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