A Passion for War & Expansion

Walter Karp's post-Vietnam judgment in The Politics of War, pointed out that overseas expansion at the turn of century "altered forever the political life of the American Republic." David Silbey's thoughtful account of the US invasion of the Philippines in 1899 (A War of Frontier & Empoire: The Philippine-American Wart, 1899-1902) picks up this sadly unfamiliar picce of our past when Filipinos, initially as rebels against Spanish rule, then as an army, and finally as a guerilla force, fought the American invaders. When the war finally ended, some 250,000 Filipinos were dead and 2500 American volunteers came home in flag-draped caskets, there to be forgotten by all save their families. Not even a war memorial for the dead in Washington!

Manifest Destiny aside, expanding abroad was then rather novel. After Hawaii was grabbed in 1893 by a union of commercial interests and missionaries, most American still opposed imperial adventures. But then they suddenly changed., "This was the quickest and most profound reversal of public opinion in bthe history of American foreign policy," wrote Stephen Kinzer in his worthwhile study, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.

Much like LBJ's misbegotten invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to Reagan's nasty proxy war against Nicaragua and El Savador and then on to the inexorable bloody failures in Vietnam and Iraq, our recent wars and military interventions all began with the pretense that humanitarian concerns demanded US ground troops. Both major political parties backed every war since 1898, and the subsequent war cries and triumphalist propapaganda in the press then (and especially after 9/ll found in far too many other media) and since had a largely uninformed and super-nationalistic population demanding that the "world's only superpower" conquer and "save" this or that country. Naturally, very few of the hawks in 1898-1902 and thereafter ever went to war themselves and some, like our frightened President and Vice-President, famously ducked out of a war in Southeast Asia they say they supported.

Like the incompetent , well-funded and thus still influential neocons today, hawkish backers of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine invasion then said, as did Senator Albert J. Beveridge on the Senate floor in 1902, that there were pressing and excellent reasons for the US to flex its muscles overseas, especially in non-white lands."It is racial," he said to the cheers of the mass circulation press, the war-loving Theodore Roosevelt --oh how he loved WWI until his own son was killed on the Western Front-- and even the once-pseudo pacifist William Jennings Bryant. "God," Beveridge went on,"has made us [English-speaking and Teutonic peoples] the master organizers of the world...He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world."

Could any of our bellicose neocons plus the secretive Cheney have put it any better?