For a year before Regime Change in Iraq, the excuse was mainly #16 (I was afraid he was about to hit me first. So I hit him first.), with a bit of #12 (Our enemies aren't human. They are (take your pick): savages, infidels, automatons controlled by a violent ideology, not the Chosen People, an inferior race (or inferior religion, or inferior culture).) and the President's backbone was kept stiff by #13 (God told me to do it; I am carrying out His work.)
Then, #16 slipped to #17 (I was afraid he would eventually hit me first. It was inevitable. So I hit him first. = Preventive War Doctrine). With the continual re-writing of history to conform to the current Party Line, we pretend that's what we always said.
Now, even #17 is looking silly, so, with agility and flexibility, we leap to the next most plausible excuse. It wasn't about mushroom clouds over American cities, it wasn't about oil, it was about liberation, a humanitarian crusade championed by bleeding-heart imperialists:
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
boondocksnet.com
This Kipling poem was first published in an American magazine in 1899. Americans were wavering in their support of our war against the Philippine patriots. Empire was a new idea to Americans, and we weren't yet sure we liked it. A lot of people were even saying that the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence could not be reconciled with Empire.
And there were stories coming back from the battleground, about how the Natives were a lot more sullen and wild than anticipated, and didn't seem at all appreciative of our efforts to bestow the boon of American Civilization on them. We had lifted the oppressive reign of the Papists, the bloody clerics who had been killing and stealing for centuries in the Philippines, and poisoning people's minds with an autocratic violent ideology. Yet we got no thanks for it, from the people we liberated. (All this sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?) So Kipling wrote his poem.
A few Americans, but not enough, wondered about ends and means, and exit plans:
On July 4, 1902, just days after the Senate completed a widely publicized investigation of U.S. army atrocities in the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the Philippine-American War was over. A bit premature, just like Bush. U.S. control of the Philippines was restricted to the northern islands, however, and new warfare began as the U.S. army tried to extend its control southward into other areas of the country.
The massacre of at least 600 Muslim men, women and children at Jolo: boondocksnet.com
Brigadier General "Hell Roaring Jake" W. Smith had earlier participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and he used the same tactics in Samar, Philippines. "I want no prisoners," he ordered a subordinate, saying all Filipino males over the age of 10 were to be killed, during U.S. Army "area sweeps". "I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me."
Mark Twain replied to Kipling, in 1900:
I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do.
I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
We have also pledged the power of this country to maintain and protect the abominable system established in the Philippines by the Friars.
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
America decided Kipling was right, and Twain was wrong, and we've been doing it ever since, and feeling good about it.
Just as, in the Philippines, we ended up using the "abominable system of the Friars" to help maintain our conquest, so, today, we find ourselves re-hiring Saddam's secret police, to work for us.
Americans are still using the same recycled excuses, and still ignoring Mark Twain's wisdom. And still closing their eyes, to the ugliness of our means, and the illusion of our ends. |
