War and More War

The origin of the US's addiction to economic and military intervention is very long indeed. Remember James Polk's ridiculous rationalization for attacking Mexico in 1846 (See Lincoln's angry denunciation, which I believe is rivalled by Sen. Robert Byrd's remarkable speech on the floor of the Senate excoriating the mad scheme to invade and occupy Iraq).

David Silbey's thoughtful new book "A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902) traces how the invasion of the Philppines led to the emergence of the US as a world power. Polk, a president thankfully long forgotten, and Manifest Destiny aside, most Americans were traditionally opposed to expansion abroad. Even after Hawaii was seized by a union of business interests and missionaries, there were few at home publicly supporting imperial adventures abroad. Then public opinion suddenly veered in "the quickest and most profound reversal of public opinion in the the history of American foreign policy," wrote Stephen Kinzer in his perceptive and recent "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."

At the turn of the century, other than the ineffectual Anti-Imperialist League (which included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, William James, Booker T. Washington and William Graham Sumner) the NY Post-like popular press of the time were hot for war. War cries were heard everywhere, from Theodore Roosevelt who loved war, that is, until his son was killed years later on the Western Front during WWI. A liitle more than 30 years after the Civil War's huge list of dead and crippled casualties, and only a few years after the devastaing depression of 1893 and domestic battles between exploited workingpeople and the powerful array of corporations and their government allies and their armed cadres (see, for example, the Haymarket tragedy and subsequent executions of strikers, not to mention the destruction of Indian tribes) the public now celebrated victory in Cuba and promptly ignored the Platt Amendment in 1903, which turned that island into an American protectorate and an ultimate haven for corporate exploiters and mobsters.

The invasion of the Philippines was a harbinger of things to come. Wilson's entry into WWI in support of imperial nations fighting other imperial nations led to US marines occupying Caribbean and Central American banana republics in the 20s and 30s and then on to the big show in Vietnam and Iraq -- and if you heed the neocon extremists, a follow-up attack on Iran, consequences be damned.

So why, then, did the US turn to overseas adventurism in 1898-1902? To be sure there always were dreams of vast economic benefits ahead. But there was more, even though the Philippine War led to some 250,000 dead Filipinos and perhaps 2500 dead US volunteers, their bodies shipped home in flag-bedecked coffins and then forgoten by all save their families. Sound familiar?

The war party and its sycophants easily carried the day. The Philippines were ripe for picking. Senator Albert J. Beveridge, the Dick Cheney of this time, believed fervently in America's right to use its military might whenever and wherever it wished. Beveridge added, "He [meaning his God, I presume] has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world."

Could any of our contemporary neocons and Vice-President put it any better?