Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Bipartisan body bags

Thaddeus Russell, whose ox-goring A Renegade History of the United States will be published next year (I've had the privilege of reading some early drafts, and I have only good things to say), sounds off at The Daily Beast on the bipartisan nature of hawkishness. Specifically, he points out that some of the more enthusiastic advocates of American imperialism have had solid liberal or progressive credentials.

The point of this, of course, is to gently chide his readers over any unrealistic expectations of peace reigning on Earth just because the White House and the Congress are in Democratic hands.

Should President Barack Obama continue his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it will be the liberal thing to do.

What too few Americans realize—especially the president’s anti-war supporters, who accuse him of betraying liberal or "progressive" values—is that if he accedes to General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan and intensifies the drone attacks in Pakistan, he will follow squarely in the footsteps of the great liberal statesmen he has cited as his role models. Though opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cheered loudly when Obama spoke reverentially in his campaign speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, those heroes of the president promoted and oversaw U.S. involvement in wars that killed, by great magnitudes, more Americans and foreign civilians than all the modern Republican military operations combined.

Left-of-center hawks even have a fine tradition of invoking the will of God as justification for carrying fire and sword hither and yon.
Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson declared that God had given American leaders—"Christ's Army," according to Wilson—the divine duty to "improve" the backward peoples of America and the world. Roosevelt and Wilson used that rationale to establish modern progressivism and American imperialism, both of which were part of what Roosevelt called "the long struggle for the uplift of humanity." They argued that greater government intervention, through social welfare and regulatory programs at home and military incursions abroad, would remake American slums and all the countries of the world into the Puritan ideal of a "city on a hill."
In fact, Russell emphasizes, many of the most fervent neoconservative sword-rattlers in the administration of George W. Bush invoked liberal leaders of the past as inspiration for their vision of intervention at home and abroad.

That's not to say that there's no tradition of anti-imperialism and advocacy for peace in American politics -- there is, to some extent, on both the right and the left. But those calling for a revival of the progressive tradition of past liberal presidential giants may not realize that, if they get what they ask for, body bags will certainly be involved.

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