[Chapter 1 from Against the State, first published 2014 by LewRockwell.com.]
The main aim of American foreign policy is to impose the will of our ruling elite on the rest of the world. In doing so, we have inflicted massive death and destruction, without moral justification. When she was Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright expressed the attitude of the American state elite with chilling clarity. On the 60 Minutes program, May 12, 1996, Lesley Stahl asked Albright about the economic sanctions the US was imposing on the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Stahl inquired, “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” and Albright replied “we think the price is worth it.”
Her blatant disregard for human life makes it all the more urgent that we address the question, when, if ever, is a society justified in going to war. One answer is pacifism — war is never justified. This position has much to be said for it, and it is certainly better than our present war-mongering policy. It was not, though, the view that Murray Rothbard adopted. The main problem with absolute pacifism comes out in Hilaire Belloc’s lines: “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight/ But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.” If someone directly attacks you, you may have no alternative to fighting back.
Fighting back — that is the key to Rothbard’s position. Unless we are subject to direct attack, war is not justified. The upshot is that war is almost never morally acceptable. Here Rothbard followed the just war tradition, developed by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and later thinkers such as Francisco Suarez and Hugo Grotius.
Cardinal Charles Journet, in his The Church of the Word Incarnate, remarked: “After reading this specification [of the conditions for a just war] we might well ask how many wars have been wholly just. Probably they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.” The great Catholic theologian and Murray Rothbard entirely agree on this point. For Rothbard,
There have been only two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just; not only that, the opposing side waged a war that was clearly and notably unjust. Why? Because we did not have to question whether a threat against our liberty and property was clear or present; in both of these wars, Americans were trying to rid themselves of an unwanted domination by another people. And in both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans. In each case, one side— “our side” if you will — was notably just, the other side — “their side” — unjust. To be specific, the two just wars in American history were the American Revolution, and the War for Southern Independence.
As if this were not enough to condemn war, we also need to take account of the new condition posed by nuclear weapons.
Pius XII condemned “aggressive wars” (using that term in a technical sense, to mean wars of reparation or punishment), and John XXIII condemned wars of reparation: “It is hard to imagine that in the atomic era war could be a fit means to restore violated rights.”
How does current American policy stack up against the traditional just war requirements, interpreted in Rothbard’s way? To say, “not very well” would be an understatement. Let’s first look at the Iraq War, which George Bush began in 2003. Why did the United States get involved?
One of the key reasons was pressure from a group that has come to exercise more and more influence on American foreign policy — the neocons. Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and a number of others were not satisfied with American foreign policy. They disclosed their plans in an important book by Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission, published in 2003.
These neocon authors said that foreign policy must avoid “realism.” The realists favored working within the balance-of-power tradition of European diplomacy. “This in turn led to the realists’ key recommendation: A state must limit itself to the protection of its ‘vital interests,’ lest it disrupt the balance of power.”
A foreign policy realist will not hesitate to ally, if conditions require it, with an undemocratic state, but this strikes at the heart of Kaplan and Kristol’s ideas. The key to their approach is that America should embark on a worldwide crusade for democracy. To do so, they claim, will result in a world at peace.
They contend that the “strategic value of democracy is reflected in a truth of international politics: Democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against one another.” Given this premise, isn’t the conclusion obvious? If only we establish democracy everywhere, the millennium is at hand.
Democracy should be spread worldwide, but one area is the most important for the neocons — the Middle East. Kaplan and Kristol hate all of the political systems of the Arab world, and they propose to replace them: “There is today not a single Arab state that qualifies as a democracy. ... But promoting democracy in the Middle East is not a matter of national egoism. It has become a matter of national well-being, even survival.”
In particular, the royalist government of Saudi Arabia must go. Why not replace it as an American ally with a democratic Iraq? “Iraq’s experience of liberal democratic rule in turn could increase the pressure already being felt by Teheran’s mullahs. . . . Iraq could even replace Saudi Arabia as the key American ally and source of oil in the region.”
America should therefore strike at Saddam Hussein — remember, they wrote before the invasion began. Incredibly, Kaplan and Kristol predicted that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. Then we could start preventive wars against other dictatorships.
In international law, in international practice and in American history, there is ample precedent for the doctrine of preemption. . . .The origins of this concept date back to the father of international law, Hugo Grotius, who in the seventeenth century wrote, “It is lawful to kill him who is preparing to kill.”
Of course, we know now that Bush and his administration lied about the “weapons of mass destruction.” No one was able to find them, and Bush later had the extreme but characteristic bad taste to lie about this. But an important point is often overlooked. Even if the stories about the weapons had been true, they would not have justified an American preventive war to get rid of them.
Why not? Oliver O’Donovan, one of the leading moral theologians in the Church of England, calls to our attention a vital point. If we take account of his insight, we can grasp immediately why the invasion of Iraq is an unjust war.
O’Donovan, a scholar of great learning, cites a passage from Hugo Grotius that makes clear how classical just war theory responds to our question:
Grotius allowed defensive war against inuria non facta, “wrong not perpetrated,” though with this strict qualification: The danger must be immediate ... those who accept fear of any sort as a justification for pre-emptive slaughter are themselves greatly deceived and deceive others.
As for “democratic peace theory,” international relations scholar Christopher Layne remarks,
The democratic peace theory is probably the most overhyped and undersupported “theory” ever to be concocted by American academics. In fact, it is not a theory at all. Rather it is a theology that suits the conceits of Wilsonian true believers — especially the neoconservatives who have been advocating American Empire since the early 1990s.
What has been the result of our efforts to bring to Iraq the “benefits” of democracy? There’s one thing Americans don’t talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It’s interesting because we live in an age of extreme multiculturalism and global concern. We adore international aid workers, go on mission trips abroad, weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh.
But when “we” cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence. There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003. Maybe a person
who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer. After all, most of the deaths resulted from “sectarian violence,” and who can stop crazed Islamic sects from killing each other. Better each other than us, right?
Well, it’s about time that we think about the numbers, even though the US military has decided that body counts are not worth their time. Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK. Yes, other estimates are lower, but you have to be impressed by what they have found. It seems very credible.
In Baghdad, where the US presence is most pronounced, nearly half of households report having lost a family member to a killing of some sort. Half the deaths are from gunshot wounds, one-fifth from car bombs, and one-tenth from aerial bombs. The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Aside from the astonishing detail, what jumps out at me is the number of dead who are neither Sunni nor Shia. It is also striking how the further geographically you move from US troop activity, the more peaceful the area is. Americans think they are bringing freedom to Iraq, but the data indicate that we are only bringing suffering and death.
If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again. It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma. It’s bad enough to lose a family member to some disease. But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb? That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.
So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the ten previous years.
The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area.
It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won’t we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation’s wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.
Such blindness is always inexcusable, but perhaps more understandable in a time when information was severely restricted, when technological limits actually prohibited us from knowing the whole truth at the time. What excuse do we have today? Our blindness is not technological but ideological. We are the good guys, right? Every nation believes that about itself, but freedom is well served by the few who dare to think critically.
The American project of bringing a free society to Iraq could not possibly have worked. Why not? Because a free society requires a free market, and the American regime of conquest was founded on socialist planning by the state.
So you thought that the US went into Iraq to uproot a dangerous dictator and establish democracy? Well, the US military has taken on a job a bit more difficult than that. It is trying to build an economy, which no state in the history of the world has been able to do without the assistance of a vibrant market.
Fallujah, Iraq, has no economy to speak of. The US bombed all that away a few years ago. It doesn’t have clean water. The place is filled with rubble. There is some electricity, for about four hours a day, but you can’t count on it nor even which four hours of the day it will be. You only need to think for a moment what your life would be like under those conditions.
The US military has taken responsibility for the rebuilding effort, as they have done all over Iraq, where 90 percent of projects have been delayed and delayed. But in Fallujah, the US is promising that by the fall, 80 percent of homes will have clean water. Most implausibly, the US is promising to bring wireless internet to everyone. Just don’t drink the water while you surf the web.
How much is this going to cost? Oh, a couple hundred million. Or maybe a few billion. We’ll let you know once it’s done.
Water distribution relies on electricity, and the US has somehow not been able to get the generating plants working right to make the electricity available. People buy their own generators, but those require gasoline. There is a shortage of gasoline owing to several factors: the masters of the universe who overthrew Saddam have not been able to process the oil from the ground and get it to market, and the gas that is available can only be sold at an ultra-low and controlled price. The US enforces these controls by arresting black-market gas dealers.
Now, there are general and specific problems with the central planning that the US is doing in Iraq. The general problem afflicts all socialist planning. Think of Stalin’s plan to bring electrification to the Ukraine, a “progressive” move not unlike Bush’s plan to modernize Iraq. It was one disaster after another, all backed by political despotism and death.
Why does socialist central planning not work? The means of production are not held privately, so there cannot be any exchange markets for them and therefore no exchange ratios established. That means there is no way to calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, there is no way to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative uses of resources. That means there is no economy in the literal sense of that term.
Let’s say there is only a limited amount of gasoline. Should it be used to fuel trucks to haul debris away, run construction equipment to put in power plants, or used to move building materials in for new schools and roads? There is no way to assess the relative merit of these choices. The same is true for every resource. What is the priority? It ends up being an arbitrary decision by the central planners. In this case, that arbitrariness ends up with Fallujah residents who can view home videos on Youtube but can’t get a drink of water without acquiring a deadly infection. The analogy with the Ukraine is unavoidable: electrification in the midst of famine.
The pricing problem, or the calculation problem, as Ludwig von Mises called it, will always and everywhere doom any attempt to centrally plan. It even makes it impossible to carry out projects from the first to the last stage of production, since every economic good requires many stages of production. After all, even with all of Stalin’s secret police and armies, there was nothing they could do to produce a decent crop of grain. The process of production is too complicated to be run by anything as stupid as a government bureaucracy.
The specific problems of martial-law central planning are tied to the way the US has chosen to do business. The government has contracted out most of its work to private corporations. Of the $18 billion that the US Congress has allocated since 2003, 90 percent has been farmed out to private contractors.
This may (or may not) increase efficiency but this strategy does not overcome the calculation problem. The question of what should be built and how much and by when (the core of the economic problem) is still made by the government, not by private enterprise. The contracting agency does not own or sell what it builds. It is there only to do what it is told and pick up the check.
So the “privatization” of construction in Iraq is not a step toward market economics, contrary to what the right says (in praise) or the left says (in condemnation). It only ends up adding another layer of problems, namely the problem of graft and corruption that comes from the decision-making process of who or what is going to get the money.
Mises wrote in 1920 that he could confidently predict the future of Soviet socialism:
There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods. All these concerns will be interrelated. Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings. It will never be able to determine whether a given good has not been kept for a superfluous length of time in the necessary processes of production, or whether work and material have not been wasted in its completion.
Despite these economic problems in the occupation of Iraq, and despite the horrendous costs of the Iraq War, don’t the neocons and the
American policymakers deserve credit for ousting the tyrannical government of Saddam Hussein? No, they don’t — they simply replaced a homegrown tyranny with a foreign one.
Query: what lesson has mass death, destruction, bloodshed, and all-around living hell taught the US government about its war in Iraq? Nothing. Or barely nothing. Or maybe just a little bit of something. In any case, it needs to learn that the US is not necessarily God on Earth, and that there is some limit to what rivers of blood can accomplish.
The following words are dated December 22, 2004, and appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
The audacious attack on a U.S. military base in Iraq yesterday that left at least 22 dead, including 15 U.S. soldiers, reignites a simmering debate over whether the large U.S. presence is becoming an impediment to progress toward a stable government there. ... [T]here has been growing sentiment among some senior military officials that the large U.S. presence in the country is helping fuel the insurgency it is intended to combat. These officials argue that U.S. troops might be undermining the legitimacy of the interim Iraqi government and creating the impression that an unpopular occupation will continue indefinitely.
Now, a comment like this can only astound anyone with a clear head about the Iraq war. This bloodshed began in 2003, and only after two years were a few hesitatingly suggesting the incredibly obvious. The War on Terror began even before 2003, a war that might as well have been designed to increase terrorism and confirm the view of those who have concluded that the US threatens the world.
But those who are shocked to read my paragraph above, who regard it as somehow controversial to suggest that the war is having the opposite effect of its supposed intent, to realize that the US presence is not a liberating force but a destabilizing one, to conclude that progress is being inhibited rather than furthered by the occupation, these people are sadly caught up in what can only be considered intellectual delusion.
And yet, this is precisely where the American establishment, particularly its conservative wing, finds itself. They have been unwilling to believe that displays of force will not cause the population to submit. They have blamed all war errors on too little bloodshed and destruction rather than too much. Their constant advice has been to kill more, destroy more, show ever more resolve, and be ever less squeamish about the innocents killed.
What historical parallels exist to those who believed that this war would liberate, pacify, and inspire a region to embrace liberty? One thinks of the Roman armies marching and killing in the name of civilization. And yet the parallel isn’t quite there, because Roman imperialism lacked an ideological basis that leads to fanaticism of the type on display here. A better parallel would be the Bolsheviks, who were convinced that the new dawn would arrive once the capitalist class and their offspring were wiped out.
It is true that many supporters of the Iraq War are simply power-mongering liars and sadists who appreciate how the war keeps them and their patrons at the controls. Other supporters come from the class of merchants who stand to benefit from reconstruction contracts and sales of war-related products (though it is becoming increasingly difficult to find private enterprises willing to take the risk in Iraq).
And yet, I continue to believe that what is at the root of all the problems is intellectual error. Something at the heart of American culture leads us to believe that everyone in the world would be pleased to be ruled by us. We seem to have great difficulty in sympathizing with the victims of US foreign policy. In addition, the whole of modern life seems to teach us that force is the answer to all problems. This is the basis of all domestic policy as recommended by both right and left. The Iraq War is nothing but an extension of this model.
The problem with this intellectual error is that it is constantly bumping into the reality of free will. All human beings everywhere in the world have within themselves the capacity for independent thought. They can decide on their own whether they want to obey their masters or take the risks inherent in revolt. They may pretend to obey, but then challenge authority when an opportunity presents itself. People can be very creative about finding ways around the most well-constructed central plan, outsmarting those with the biggest guns by doing the very thing that the powerful least expect.
There are many reasons why tyranny cannot last, but this is the core one. Of course there are degrees of tyranny. People will put up with a lot,as Jefferson observed, before they will take the risk of revolt, especially if that risk implies the certainty of death.
There are also different forms of tyranny. There is tyrannus in regimine, a home-grown despot who comes to power through (more or less) legitimate means and then begins to abuse that power and oppress people. If the tyrannus in regimine plays his cards right, he can pay off enough and protect enough interest groups to stabilize his rule. In terms of prudence, it might be better to put up with him than to overthrow him — at least this is what Jefferson taught.
The second kind is the tyrannus in titula. This is one who takes control through conquest or usurpation. In terms of degrees of legitimacy, this type is the most objectionable and the one most moral to resist, at least according the Western tradition of political thought from St. Thomas through Jefferson.
Rule by military conquest is the prime example of tyrannus in titula. It is completely consistent with Western principles to resist, precisely as many are doing in Iraq.
Far from hating our values and hating our freedoms, their resistance is actually a sign that they have embraced a prime value of ours (throwing off the usurper). Whether they are doing so to bring about an Islamic dictatorship, a secular strongman, a complete breakdown of the nation, or democratic freedom, we cannot know. But the principle that drives the resistance is a simple one: the tyrannus in titula is always subject to removal.
The main argument that war supporters use to justify what is going on runs this way: military occupation and martial law are awful, but far worse would be rule by Saddam. The first answer simply observes that choices should not be so constrained, any more than Poland should have to choose between being ruled by Hitler or Stalin. A third option of freedom itself should never be ruled out. A second answer observes that a tyrannus in regimine has more legitimacy by its very nature than a tyrannus in titula, which will always be resisted.
It should not require such an explanation to demonstrate that people are naturally disinclined to appreciate rule by foreign masters. Even Bush once granted this: “They’re not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.”
Robert Higgs has subjected the “humanitarian” case for the Iraq War, unfortunately professed by some self-styled libertarians, to withering scrutiny.
According to the argument Higgs rejects, the justification of the Iraq War does not rest on the supposed presence of WMD. Humanitarian considerations supported the overthrow of the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. True enough, the American invasion has killed innocent people.
But their deaths have been accidental, and these must be weighed against those who would have suffered and died had Saddam’s government continued in power.
Higgs rejects completely this sort of moral calculation.
In the present case, making such a judgment with anything approaching well-grounded assurance calls for powers that none of us possess.
How does anybody know, for example, what the future harms caused to innocent parties by Saddam or his henchmen would have been, or that those harms, somehow properly weighted and discounted, would be greater than the harms caused by the U.S. armed forces in the invasion of Iraq?
If these calculations cannot be carried out, how can we determine the morally proper course of action? One thing we can know is that we ourselves should not directly kill or injure the innocent; but this is just what the U.S. has done in Iraq.
Scattering cluster bomblets about areas inhabited by civilians ... was inexcusable: doing so was in no sense necessary to oust Saddam’s government. Nor was the use of very high-explosive bombs (two thousand pounds and bigger) in densely populated urban areas a means one can defend morally.
How can defenders of the Iraq War maintain that these deaths were accidental?
When U.S. forces employ aerial and artillery bombardment — with huge high-explosive bombs, large rockets and shells, including cluster munitions — as their principal technique of waging war, especially in densely inhabited areas, they know with absolute certainty that many innocent people will be killed. To proceed with such bombardment, therefore, is to choose to inflict these deaths.
If the humanitarian argument fails, the claim that Iraq threatened America fares even worse. Who can seriously believe that a nation long subjected to a devastating blockade and bombing posed a danger to America? In the months that preceded the invasion, much was made of Saddam’s supposed plans to obtain nuclear weapons. Of course we now know that the intelligence reports that alleged such plans were false. But even if they had been true, an Iraq with nuclear arms was a minor matter.
[N]otwithstanding the tens of thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads and their sophisticated delivery vehicles kept in constant readiness, the United States was not “blackmailed” by the USSR. Odd that the United States should quake at the prospect of a single Iraqi softball of fissionable material.
After Higgs disposes of the threadbare arguments in favor of the Iraq War, Higgs asks a fundamental question: why should we believe that the Bush administration sincerely intended them? Not only the Iraq War but also the entire “war on terrorism” seems a made-up affair, designed to frighten the American public into support for a foreign policy of military aggression.
Higgs uses a simple and telling argument to show that the campaign against terror is bogus. If we really were in danger, isn’t the government doing far too little to protect us?
If semi-organized gangs of suicidal maniacs numbering in the thousands are out to kill us all, the government ought not to be fiddling with kindergarten subsidies and the preservation of the slightly spotted southeastern screech owl. It ought to get serious.
Fortunately, the difficulties America encountered in making Iraq safe for democracy have slowed the neocons from putting all of their plans for war into effect immediately. But let’s not forget about the war in Afghanistan. Here again America got into a war that could have easily been avoided, in order to promote “regime change.” John Quigley has a good discussion of the main issues in his book The Ruses for War. Supporters of the war said that we “had” to invade in order to seize Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks on America. Quigley shows that this view rests on dubious assumptions. First, when the United
States demanded that Afghanistan surrender bin Laden, it ignored customary procedures of international law.
The normal international procedure for the surrender of a suspect is extradition. The government that seeks surrender provides information to show probable cause that the person sought committed a crime. A court in the country from which extradition is requested hears the evidence in open court and decides whether there is sufficient evidence that the accused person committed the crime in question. In requesting evidence, the Taliban was thus adhering to accepted international standards.
Instead, the United States demanded that the Taliban surrender bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders without the customary procedures; when the Taliban did not comply invasion followed. The Taliban said it was willing to negotiate over the conditions for surrender of the suspects, but the US would not discuss its ultimatum. If the Taliban was not sincere, this could soon have been determined, but the US would not wait. As Quigley aptly notes, military force is supposed to be the last resort in a crisis, not the first.
In response, supporters of the war will say that the Taliban regime harbored al Qaeda. But this does not answer our question. Why is the United States justified in doing more than directly attacking the group that assaulted it? From the fact that al Qaeda had bases in Afghanistan, it does not follow that the Taliban forces aimed to aggress against America. Weren’t they largely oriented inward, aiming to establish their peculiar vision of an Islamic society? At most, the United States would seem to be justified in measures against Taliban forces that came to the military assistance of al Qaeda.
Even if you accept the mistaken claim that the evils of the Taliban regime justified an American crusade against it, the results for the people of Afghanistan have been terrible.
The US media portrayed the Afghan operation as an extension of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. US war propaganda picked up the theme and ran with it. An astute observation from Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com:
It’s interesting, too, how the rhetoric of the Afghan “liberators” and their Western supporters so closely resembles that of the Soviets at the time of the Russian invasion. The Russians claimed that they were liberating women, bringing education, and Western enlightenment to Afghanistan’s medieval darkness: they, too, claimed to be agents of modernity.
If you read Antiwar.com you would have seen the following and please note the contrast with the silly network spin that the liberation of Afghanistan is all about rock music, shaved chins, and short dresses.
Reports the Times:
Northern Alliance forces have threatened to massacre up to 6,000 foreigners fighting with the Taliban in the besieged province of Kunduz. Local fighters would be given a chance to surrender, but Alliance commanders said they had given their troops explicit orders to shoot every foreign fundamentalist — including a handful of British Muslims — among the enemy ranks.
We learn from this Scottish story that:
A leading Afghan refugee has called on Britain and America to save his homeland from the “rapists and gangsters who have stormed to power in his home country. Mohammad Narveen Asif, who fled Afghanistan two years ago for refuge in Glasgow, voiced concern that one evil has gone and another evil has come to take its place.” ... “I think almost every Afghan is happy to see women throwing off the burqa and the Taliban driven out, but the country has now fallen to a bunch of rapists and gangsters.”
Another Times story reports that the Northern Alliance trapped 700 Taliban men in a school and crushed them with tanks. “Three days later Red Cross workers were still in the ruins taking out bodies.”
Finally, it appears that the US campaign in Afghanistan has effectively restored some of the most feared warlords, including known communist murderers, anti-Western Islamic maniacs, and even bin Laden supporters.
Unfortunately, American policymakers have not learned the bitter lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan — did you really expect them to? America seems intent on bringing down the government of Iran. Our sanctions policy carries with it a grave risk of war. Ron Paul, the greatest Congressional champion of liberty, has stated the essentials:
I would like to express my concerns over the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 and my opposition to it being brought to the Floor for a vote. Let us be clear on one critical matter: the sanctions against Iran mandated by this legislation are definite steps toward a US attack on Iran. They will also, if actually applied, severely disrupt global trade and undermine the US economy, thereby harming our national security.
I am surprised and disturbed that the committee viewed this aggressive legislation to be so bipartisan and uncontroversial that a recorded vote was not even called.
Some may argue that we are pursuing sanctions so as to avoid war with Iran, but recent history teaches us otherwise. For how many years were sanctions placed on Iraq while we were told they were necessary to avoid war? Thousands of innocent Iraqis suffered and died under US sanctions and still the US invaded, further destroying the country. Are we safer after spending a trillion dollars or more to destroy Iraq and then rebuild it?
These new sanctions against Iran increasingly target other countries that seek to trade with Iran. The legislation will severely punish foreign companies or foreign subsidiaries of US companies if they do not submit to the US trade embargo on Iran. Some 15 years after the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 failed to bring Iran to its knees, it is now to be US foreign policy to threaten foreign countries and companies.
During this mark-up one of my colleagues argued that if Mercedes-Benz wants to sell trucks to Iran, they should not be allowed to do business in the United States. Does anyone believe this is a good idea? I wonder how the Americans working at the Mercedes-Benz factory in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama would feel about banning Mercedes from the United States. Or perhaps we might ask the 7,600 Americans who work in the BMW factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina how they would feel. Should the American consumer be denied the right to purchase these products? Is the United States really prepared to take such aggressive and radical action against its NATO ally Germany?
Likewise, the application of the sanctions in this legislation would have a dramatic impact on US commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia and China, who both do business with Iran. It would impose strong sanctions on these countries and would prohibit foreign business leaders — and their spouses and children — from entering the United States. Do we want to start a trade war — or worse — with Russia and China?
The Iran Threat Reduction Act authorizes what will no doubt be massive amounts of US taxpayer money to undermine the Iranian government and foment another “Green Revolution” there. We will establish and prop up certain factions over others, send them enormous amounts of money, and attempt to fix any resulting elections so that our preferred candidates win. Considering the disturbing aftermath of our “democracy promotion” operations in places like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, where radical forces have apparently come out on top, it may be fair to conclude that such actions actually undermine US national security rather than bolster it.
Sanctions do not work. They are precursors to war and usually lead to war. They undermine our economy and our national security. They result in terrible, unnecessary suffering among the civilian population in the target countries and rarely even inconvenience their leaders. We must change our foreign policy from one of interventionism and confrontation to cooperation and diplomacy. This race to war against Iran is foolhardy and dangerous. As with the war on Iraq, the arguments for further aggression and war on Iran are based on manipulations and untruths. We need to learn our lesson and reject this legislation and the push for war.
Obama threatens Iran but this is not enough for him. He helped unseat the government of Libya. Following the US-lobbied UN authorization of military murder in Libya, the death-dealing regime of Colonel Gaddafi said immediately that it would stop all killing. That put Obama’s war on hold, for a little while. The crazy Colonel has learned a thing or two about American foreign policy. If you pretend to favor the stated goals of the empire and comply with its stated dictates, you can otherwise do what every government in the world is structured to do: stay in power at all costs.
Gaddafi learned this lesson about a decade ago, when, with much fanfare, he announced that he would stop his nuclear weapons program and join the war on terror. The US then decided to rank him and his regime among the world’s good guys, and proceeded to hold him up as an example of wise statesmanship. Then he proceeded to dig in more deeply and tighten his despotic control over his citizens, all with the implied blessing of the US.
But this time it may not work. For weeks, American officials decried Gaddafi’s bloody attacks on his people, but does the US really have a
problem with dictatorship of his sort? This fact is unknown to Americans, but in the Middle East, and in Arab nations in particular, American commercial interests are regarded as a force for liberation but not the US government. The US has been the key to the power of Middle East dictatorships for decades, among which are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen. I leave aside the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians to liberate them.
So it is something of a joke that the US would push a war against Libya in order to save that country from dictatorship. More likely, the real issue here is the same one that inspired the wars against Iraq: the ownership and control of the oil. And even if freedom were the driving motivation, when in modern history has war ever actually brought that to people? All war by nation-states today ends in massive civilian deaths, destruction of infrastructure, political upheaval without end (see Afghanistan and Iraq), vast expense, and bitterness all around.
The Obama administration also seems determined to bring North Korea into line, by any means necessary. The US, which occupies countries all around poverty-stricken North Korea, is not only demonizing its alleged aggressiveness, it is making fun of its leader. It reminds me of the treatment of Saddam Hussein and other targeted enemies of the empire. But this whole business is more serious than that. Clearly the empire is targeting China, just as it did in Libya over oil. The US seeks to encircle China and make it bow down before the hegemon. The increasing prosperity and freedom of China threatens the empire’s self-image.
Readers might raise an objection here. Even if current foreign policy, under the guidance of the neocons, is as bad as we say it is, can the neo-cons’ misdeeds be used to condemn American foreign policy altogether? Maybe the neocons are an aberration.
The historical record doesn’t support this optimistic position. As Ron Paul has noted, “Neo-conservatism has been around for decades and, strangely, has connections to past generations as far back as Machiavelli. Modern-day neo-conservatism was introduced to us in the 1960s. It entails both a detailed strategy as well as a philosophy of government. The ideas of Teddy Roosevelt, and certainly Woodrow Wilson, were quite similar to many of the views of present-day neocons. Neocon spokesman Max Boot brags that what he advocates is “hard Wilsonianism.” In many
ways, there’s nothing “neo” about their views, and certainly nothing conservative. Yet they have been able to co-opt the conservative movement by advertising themselves as a new or modern form of conservatism.”
Following Ron Paul’s lead, let’s look at the first attempt to “make the world safe for democracy.” When World War I broke out in Europe in August 1914, President Woodrow Wilson first called for Americans to be neutral in “thought as well as in action.” But his heart wasn’t in it. Britain, from the onset of war in 1914, had imposed a tight blockade on Germany; by preventing food from being imported into the country, the British brought starvation and malnutrition to large masses of the German people. As Senator Robert LaFollette pointed out, a food blockade violated international law and struck at America’s rights as a neutral power. Even the British sometimes recognized the essential issue: According to Thomas Fleming in his excellent book The Illusion of Victory, “LaFollette cited an admission by Lord Salisbury, one of England’s most prominent statesmen, that food for the civilian population was never contraband — a principle that the English were callously ignoring in their blockade of Germany.”
German submarine warfare was a desperate response to the British starvation blockade — a blockade so effective that it threatened to force the Germans out of the war. But Wilson declined except in very restrained terms to challenge the British. In complete contrast, he held Germany to the strictest accountability.
But maybe Wilson’s very unneutral “neutrality” was justifiable. British propaganda claimed that Germany was bent on world domination. If this was true, wasn’t a victory of Britain and her allies in America’s interest? But in fact the European War was no more than a power struggle. Contrary to Wilson and his Svengali-like adviser, Edward Mandell House, the First World War was not a struggle by the “democratic” countries, led by the British Empire, to stop autocratic Germany’s bid for world control.
America, according to Wilson, had a mission to bring democracy to the world:
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to hang in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we
will fight for the things we have always carried in our hearts — for democracy ... for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free America is privileged to spend her blood and her might
for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
Wilson wasn’t the only major force pressing America to enter World War I. The Morgan bank constantly aimed to subordinate the interests of the United States to British Empire. After the onset of World War I, “the Morgans played a substantial role in bringing the United States into the war on Britain’s side, and, as head [i.e., most influential figure] of the Fed, Benjamin Strong obligingly doubled the money supply to finance America’s role in the war effort.”
Wilson, though extremely pro-British, began the process of replacing Britain with America as the dominant world power. Throughout the twentieth century, we see this constant pattern: America has used democratic rhetoric to impose American world domination. Let’s look at one more example, the Cold War. (If we remember the Korean and Vietnam Wars, it wasn’t so “cold.”) The Cold War was sold to us as a battle against World Communism, which was hell-bent on overthrowing all non-Communist governments and subjecting the world to rule from Moscow. America, as always the champion of democracy, would save the world from the dire fate the Reds had in store for it.
Murray Rothbard pointed out the basic problem with this account. The “war” that the Communists waged against us was ideological. Though Communists might preach revolution, Soviet foreign policy posed no direct threat to America. Rothbard expressed this point in his customary trenchant way:
But the Communists might stoop to violent revolution in America? Perhaps. But does anyone in his right mind believe that America faces the clear and present danger of overt, violent destruction by our tiny handful of domestic Communists?
But the Communists have behind them a military base in the Soviet Union? Right, and that is why we should be happy that the Soviet Communists realize the futility of nuclear war, and call for peace. Khrushchev and his successors have, frankly and honestly, been making their position unmistakably clear: they hope for internal adoption of communism in the U.S. and other countries, but they renounce any international, inter-state, war. This is what they mean by “peace,” and this is what “peace” has always meant: absence of inter-state conflict. Why, then, must we simply assume that the men in the Kremlin are lying and that they don’t want peace? Any rational person should prefer peace in the nuclear age. Let the ideological “war” with communism proceed, but let us also conclude military peace. Why, then, should we fear and hate the concept of “peaceful coexistence”? There is no basis on which to oppose it unless we think that freedom and free enterprise are ideologically inferior and could not survive an ideological debate with communism.
Why, then, did America wage the Cold War if it wasn’t necessary to do so? We can find the answer in what is sometimes wrongly viewed as a protest against militarism, Eisenhower’s farewell speech.
Eisenhower’s farewell speech was a long and nearly hysterical argument for the Cold War. He presented it as more than a military policy against Russia, but rather as a grand metaphysical struggle that should take over our minds and souls, as bizarre as that must sound to the current generation.
His words were Wilsonian, even messianic. The job of US military policy is to “foster progress in human achievement” and enhance “dignity and integrity” the world over. That’s a rather expansive role for government by any standard. But he went further. An enemy stands in the way of achieving this dream, and this enemy is “global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.” This great struggle “commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings.”
Because some crusty apparatchiks are imposing every manner of economic control over Russia and a few satellites, US foreign policy must absorb the whole of our beings? So much for limited government.
The rhetoric had to be hysterical to overcome a few obvious problems. Russia is a faraway country and the notion of an invasion was about as likely as one from Mars. Russia, an authoritarian state operating under the ideological cover of Communism, had only a few years earlier been declared our valiant ally in the struggle against Japan and Germany.
But Americans woke up one day to find that the line had suddenly changed: now Russia was the enemy to be defeated. In fact, the Russian government — already in deep economic trouble as a socialist regime — was bankrupted by World War II and dealing with incredible internal problems. The Soviets couldn’t begin to manage the world of Eastern Europe that had been given as a prize for being the ally of the United States during the war. It was for this reason that Nikita Khruschev began the first great period of liberalization that would end in the eventual unraveling of this nonviable state. The U.S. not only failed to encourage this liberalization, but pretended it wasn’t happening so as to build up a new form of socialism at home.
Indeed, the entire Cold War ideology was invented by Harry Truman and his advisers in 1948 as: (1) a political trick to keep from losing more congressional backing, (2) a way to circumvent political pressure for postwar disarmament, and (3) a method to maintain US industrial dependence on government spending, particularly with regard to American corporations operating overseas.
It was an unprecedented form of peacetime socialism, designed to appeal to big business, and Eisenhower became its spokesman. Savvy libertarians knew exactly what was going on and supported Cold War opponent Robert Taft for the Republican nomination in 1952. But the nomination was effectively stolen by Eisenhower, with massive establishment backing. He repaid his backers with his support and expansion of Truman’s program.
It’s true that his farewell speech warned against “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and this is the part that people remember. But Eisenhower himself entrenched this very machinery in American life, virtually inventing the peacetime armaments industry and imposing military regimentation on the country. His approach was fundamentally un-American; or, another way to put it, he redefined what it meant to be an American. Instead of a free people, he forged a program for the permanent militarization of the country.
The evidence for this militarization begins with massive increases in military spending. As a percent of total budget outlays, military spending went from 30 percent in 1950 to 70 percent in 1957. This was the largest
peacetime buildup in American history. During a dramatic economic expansion, the president worked to maintain a high military spending level as a percentage of the rising GDP — establishing the modern precedent that military socialism is integral to the economic life of the country. Spending rose in absolute terms every year he was president, from $358 billion in 1952 to $585 billion in the last budget for which he bore responsibility in 1962, a whopping 63.4 percent increase during the Eisenhower years.
His buildup was not limited to the arms sector; it penetrated every aspect of civilian life. Our schools were made to feature scary and abusive drills to practice what children should do if the Russians should drop bombs on their heads. An entire generation was raised with irrational fears of mythical threats.
Then there was the catastrophic Interstate Highway System, which was not built to make your trip to the beach go faster. Its purpose was to permit the military to move troops quickly. There were also cockamamie schemes of driving nuclear bombs around on those highways to prevent the commies from keeping track of them.
Eisenhower was influenced in funding this amazing boondoggle by his experience in 1919 with the Transcontinental Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, which drove military trucks from one coast to the other. Another influence was Hitler’s project of building cross-country roads, again to move troops. The Interstate Highway System led to huge population upheavals and continues to distort commercial demographics in every town in the United States.
Given all this, the notion that Eisenhower was worried about the military-industrial complex is preposterous. He was devoted to it.
You might at this point raise a question. Even if American foreign policy since 1917 has been the ideologically-driven disaster portrayed here, why is this an argument for anarchism? Wouldn’t it be enough if America abandoned its global crusade to promote democracy? After all, in the nineteenth century America followed the policy, set by Washington and Jefferson, of avoiding involvement in European power politics. If we returned to that policy today, wouldn’t that be enough? Why do we need to get rid of the state entirely?
It’s certainly true that Wilson and his successors broke with traditional American foreign policy. In his Farewell Address, George Washington said,
Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise of us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships and enmities.
Thomas Jefferson confirmed and extended Washington’s view of foreign affairs in his First Inaugural, supporting “peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
The Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed this policy of non-intervention. In his message to Congress on Dec. 2, 1823, James Monroe stated:
Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the quarrels which have so agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.
American foreign policy was indeed non-interventionist in the early years of the Republic, but only so far as Europe was concerned. Otherwise, America from the outset pursued an expansionist course. Oddly enough, one leading neocon, Robert Kagan, used this point in an effort to find historical precedents for neocon warmongering. In his book Dangerous Nation, Kagan gives a lengthy account of American expansion across the continent. In support of the constant hunger of Americans for land, he shows, the United States government was often quite willing to challenge the powers of Europe forcibly. He complains that diplomatic historians have wrongly separated this saga of expansion from their accounts of foreign policy. These historians classify expansion across the American continent as a domestic affair, and by doing so they can claim that American foreign policy was isolationist. But they pass over the fact that the domestic expansion involved conflicts with foreign powers. If they took account of this, they would have to abandon their thesis of American isolation.
Although Kagan wrongly projects recent efforts to make the world safe for democracy onto America’s past, he is right that America has
always grabbed territory, often at the expense of the lives and property rights of Indians. To say, “we need to return to the foreign policy of the Founders” won’t solve our problem. Even if we did this, we would still be violating the just war principles that Rothbard has set out. And let’s not forget the War of 1812, in part motivated by the wish to conquer Canada, and the Mexican War, aptly called in a recent book A Wicked War.
This book isn’t a history of American foreign policy, but we can’t pass by with just a mention the greatest of all nineteenth-century violations of just war principles; the War Between the States. It is clear that Lincoln’s decision to use force against the Southern states that had seceded did not meet the just war criteria. States under the Constitution had the legal right to secede. As Kevin Gutzman points out in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, to understand the meaning of the Constitution we need to look at the intentions of the delegates to the ratifying conventions. These delegates, after all, were the people whose votes established the Constitution as legally binding. Gutzman concentrates on the Virginia convention, and he places great stress on one point.
The Virginia delegates looked on the new Constitution with great skepticism, fearing that it would become a tool for the federal government to crush the states. To placate opponents such as Patrick Henry, the leaders of the pro-ratification forces, who included Governor Edmund Randolph, the proposer of the nationalist Virginia Plan at Philadelphia, had to make a concession. They had to agree that the powers of the new Congress were limited to those “expressly delegated” in the Constitution. The delegates repudiated in advance any move by the new authorities to expand their powers beyond this. Further, they wrote into their ratification statement the right to withdraw from the new government, if it exceeded its proper powers.
Gutzman contends that because this understanding was part of Virginia’s instrument of ratification, no stronger central government can claim Virginia’s authorization. And since it would be senseless to think that the Constitution gives the federal government more power over some states than others, the Virginia restrictions apply to all the states.
This is the Jeffersonian view of the Constitution. Gutzman’s great contribution is to show that the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the key statements of the Jeffersonian position, restated
the understanding of the Virginia ratifying convention. Contrary to the Federalist opponents of the Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison did not act as innovators in 1798; and their position cannot be dismissed as merely one of several competing interpretations. It was firmly based on the legally valid Virginia ratification instrument.
Gutzman summarizes his main contention in this way:
Most history and legal textbooks say that Jefferson and Madison invented the idea of state sovereignty. But … they only argued for what the founders had already understood to be true about the sovereign states from the beginning, even if some of the founders (the nationalist and monarchist wings) wanted to change that understanding.
What was the reason for Lincoln’s policy? It was not, as popular mythology has it, to end slavery. Lincoln was ready to support a Constitutional Amendment that guaranteed to preserve slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo points out in Lincoln Unmasked that Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his First Inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was here characteristically lying; nothing in the Constitution before this amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery.
So much is well established, but DiLorenzo adds a surprising touch. Far from viewing the Corwin Amendment with grudging consent, Lincoln was in fact its behind-the-scenes promoter.
As soon as he was elected, but before his inauguration, Lincoln “instructed [Secretary of State] Seward to introduce [the amendment] in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield.” … In addition, Lincoln instructed Seward to get through Congress a law that would make the various “personal liberty laws” that existed in some Northern states illegal. (Such state laws nullified the Federal Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to apprehend runaway slaves.)
The key to Lincoln’s policy toward the states that had seceded may be found in a passage of his First Inaugural, delivered on March 4, 1861. Here he said that he would not initiate force against the departed states, even though in his view they had acted illegally in seceding. His
seemingly conciliatory policy was belied by a qualification. He said that he would not use force, except to the extent necessary to collect the duties and imposts.
In his First Inaugural, Lincoln said:
The power confided in me [Lincoln] will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.
The government of the United States depended at that time for its revenue principally on tariffs. These operated to the disadvantage of the South, a largely agricultural area, which had to pay high prices for imports. Tariffs redistributed wealth from the South to the North.
Another development which began to divide the North and South was that the political power of the North allowed it to keep a vast majority of the tariff revenue and use it for “internal improvements,” such as building harbors and canals, which was, in effect, a corporate welfare program.
Northern interests added to Southern misery by using the tariff explicitly for industrial protection, culminating in the Morrill Tariff, passed by the Senate in February 1861, after a number of states had already seceded, and avidly promoted by Lincoln. By seceding, the South threatened this entire system. By instituting a free-trade zone — or at least by drastically undercutting Northern tariffs — the South could divert the bulk of international trade to Southern ports; Northern business would be struck a severe blow and the federal government would be compelled to seek an alternative system of revenue. Lincoln, a firm believer in tariffs, was determined to prevent this from happening. Thus he insisted that the duties and imposts would be collected.
As the great nineteenth-century abolitionist and libertarian Lysander Spooner pointed out, the primary motive of Lincoln and the war party was to preserve and consolidate Northern control of the Southern economy. The Southern states could not be allowed to evade the tariff, a key element of the mercantilist American system that Lincoln favored.
Spooner wrote that the war “erupted for a purely pecuniary consideration,” and not for any moral reason. He labeled the economic life-blood of the Republican Party, Northern bankers, manufacturers, and railroad corporations, “lenders of blood money.” ... To Spooner the Northern financiers of the war who had lent money to the Lincoln government did so not for “any love of liberty or justice,” but for the control of [Southern] markets’ through “tariff extortion.” … Spooner interpreted the crushing of the Southern secessionists … as suggesting that Southerners should “Submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have your peace.”
America has never adhered to the strict requirements of the just war tradition; but we need now to answer an important question. Why does the government keep acting in this unjust way? Wars are after all destructive; why then engage in them?
In his great book Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs has supplied an important part of the answer. The state grows during wartime and other “emergencies”; and when peace or normality returns, government does not shrink to its former size. Business groups that might have been expected to defend free enterprise in fact cooperate with the government in order to advance their own interests. Higgs notes:
Within three decades, from the outbreak of World War I in Europe to the end of World War II, the American people endured three great national emergencies, during each of which the federal government imposed unprecedented taxation and economic controls on the population. Rather than resisting the government’s impositions or working to overthrow them, they [business interests] looked for ways to adapt to them, positioning themselves so that the government policies would provide a tax advantage, channel a subsidy their way, or hobble their competitors.
The policy that Charles Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace” serves the ends of the elite who increase their own power and wealth through making the State larger.
Before we turn from the State and its war system, we need to confront one more objection. We have claimed that the American State has constantly involved us in unjust wars. Not even going back to non-intervention will solve the problem: the State systematically grows in power and can’t be contained, so long as it remains a State. But, the objection
goes, aren’t some wars just? How could we reasonably have stayed out of World War II? Only a large-scale State could wage war against Nazi Germany. Without powerful governments, the world would have been at the mercy of Hitler.
Rothbard of course was well aware of this objection. He followed A.J.P Taylor in thinking that Hitler had not planned a world war. Instead, the war came about as the result of a series of diplomatic blunders. More, generally, he said:
It is about time that Americans learn: that Bad Guys (Nazis or Communists) may not necessarily want or desire war, or be out to “conquer” the world (their hope for “conquest” may be strictly ideological and not military at all); that Bad Guys may also fear the possibility of our use of our enormous military might and aggressive posture to attack them; that both the Bad Guys and Good Guys may have common interests which make negotiation possible (e.g., that neither wants to be annihilated by nuclear weapons); that no organization is a “monolith,” and that “agents” are often simply ideological allies who can and do split with their supposed “masters”; and that, finally, we may learn the most profound lesson of all: that the domestic policy of a government is often no index whatever to its foreign policy.
We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson: that “democracies” ipso facto will never embark on war, and that “dictatorships” are always prone to engage in war. Much as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may, once and for all, be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth.
But what if Rothbard was wrong? What if the Nazis did aim at world conquest? There was still no valid reason for America to enter World War II before the Pearl Harbor attack. If this is right, the objection to our case against the war system fails. The great libertarian Garet Garrett illustrates our point. He thought that the Nazis posed a threat to us, but that we should respond with a policy of watchful waiting.
In an editorial for the Saturday Evening Post of July 6, 1940, Garrett said:
A new and frightful power has appeared, an offensive power moved by an unappeasable earth hunger, conscious of no right but the right of might. It does not threaten this country with invasion: at least, not yet. It does threaten the Western Hemisphere by economic and political designs in the Latin American countries, and this is, for us, an ominous fact. But the larger aspect of what has happened is that the world is in a state of unbalance.
Garrett’s decisive move was to deny that an adequate response to Hitler required military aid to the Allies. Just the opposite, America should make its borders secure from attack:
In the whole world ... there is one people able to create a defensive power equal to the new power of frightful aggression that has destroyed the basis of international peace and civility. We are that people ... we are the most nearly self-contained nation of modern times, an empire entire, possessing of our own in plenty practically every essential thing. . . .Our productive power is equal to that of all Europe, and may be increased, so far as we know, without limit. Finally, as we lie between two oceans, our geographical advantages in the military sense are such as to give us great natural odds against any aggressor.
Defenders of American intervention in the war might answer Garrett in this way: “Maybe America can do as you say. But why should we retreat to a Fortress America? If, as you concede, Germany menaces us, why should we not aid those already struggling against the Third Reich and its Führer?”
Garrett fully anticipated this objection, and in his response he showed himself a better economist than his critics. If America sent arms to other countries, wouldn’t this weaken our own forces? Interventionists thought only of the benefits that aid would help secure, but they ignored the fact that stripping America of its arms weakened us, especially so because America had not yet built up secure defenses. In sum, Garrett, unlike his critics, was fully alive to the concept of opportunity cost.
If it should turn out that to strip this country of armaments and send them to Europe at a moment when our existing power of defense was pitifully inadequate ... had been a tragic blunder ... then the leader who had done it might wish that his page in the book of fame might refuse to receive ink, for it would be written of him that in his passionate zeal to save civilization in Europe he had forgotten his own country.
But we must overcome a final objection. What about Pearl Harbor? Didn’t the Japanese attack us? If so, weren’t we engaged after this in a just war of defense? These questions depend on a naïve view of the facts. As the distinguished UCLA diplomatic historian and political scientist Marc Trachtenberg has pointed out, Roosevelt wanted to enter the war in Europe. But how was he to do so? Hitler, knowing that the American president viewed him as an enemy, carefully avoided clashes with American ships, despite an aggressive American naval policy directed against Germany.
For this reason, Trachtenberg thinks, Roosevelt looked to Japan. He imposed an embargo on oil exports, posing a mortal threat to the Japanese economy. Wasn’t this a provocative move designed to induce the desperate Japanese to attack the United States?
How, though, would a Japanese attack involve us in war with Germany? Many historians have seen in this question a decisive objection to the “back door to war” thesis. Trachtenberg has a brilliant response to this powerful objection. It rests, he holds, on a false assumption. Once America and Japan were at war, why would the decision for war with Germany rest only with Hitler? Wouldn’t Roosevelt have then been able to overcome isolationist resistance and secure from Congress a declaration of war against Germany?
The Axis alliance ... came to be seen as much tighter than it actually was. And it was in large part for that reason that Pearl Harbor was widely blamed on the Axis as a whole. Indeed, many people throughout the country ... were convinced at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that the Japanese were “Hitler’s puppets.” And Roosevelt, of course, would not have been unaware of something this basic. He might well have reached the conclusion that Germany would not be able to stay out of a U.S.-Japanese war, no matter what decision Hitler made. And what this means is that a back-door strategy, if that is what it was, might well have been workable in that political context.
Trachtenberg’s argument receives further support from the fact that following the attack on Pearl Harbor, not even the America First Committee thought that there was a realistic chance of separating war with Japan and war with Germany. It mounted no campaign to confine the war to Asia, and the Committee disbanded on December 11, the day that Germany declared war on the United States.
We can go further. As usual, Robert Higgs gets at the essence of things:
Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief ... that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.”
In his efforts to involve the United States in war with the Axis, Roosevelt had the aid of British intelligence. Thomas Mahl, in his important book Desperate Deception, has greatly clarified the scope and nature of British activities designed to involve America in war: The single most striking example of the effectiveness of the British effort is this. Before the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was established, a presidential directive in July 1941 set up a preliminary group called The Coordinator of Information (COI). Not only was this group, which devised the plans for the OSS, organized because British Intelligence had asked for it; its head was a British agent. Colonel Charles Howard “Dick” Ellis, an assistant to the principal British intelligence agent in America, Sir William Stephenson, “actually ran [William] Donovan’s COI office and produced the blueprint for the American OSS.”
I won’t describe in detail the vast range of episodes which Mahl discusses. Rather let’s look at two additional examples of British influence. The first relates to the crucial US election of November 1940. In order to win the war, Britain needed the support of the United States as a fighting ally. But, if the Republicans ran a strong non-interventionist campaign, not even the tricks of Franklin Roosevelt would be able to get America into the war. “The first peacetime draft law in American history, Burke-
Wadsworth, and the Destroyer Deal would not have received Roosevelt’s endorsement had a genuine opposition candidate stood ready to make it a political issue in the 1940 election.”
To secure the British goal, then, the Republican candidate had to be solidly in the interventionist camp. How could this be achieved? Mahl answers his question by pointing to something very unexpected at the time: the unexpected surge of support for Wendell Willkie in the months before the Republican convention, and at the convention itself.
The stampede toward Willkie, the quintessential dark horse candidate, puzzled informed contemporaries. H.L. Mencken “wrote, after watching the nomination: ‘I am thoroughly convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person.’” Mahl has a more down-to-earth explanation. The boom for Willkie was plotted with heavy British support; the banker Thomas W. Lamont played a key role in the effort.
In any event, once nominated Willkie enabled the British strategy to carry on without fundamental challenge from the Republican candidate. Mahl cites in this connection a telling remark of Walter Lippmann, himself an ally of British intelligence: “Second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise and nomination of Wendell Willkie was the decisive event, perhaps providential, which made it possible to rally the free world when it was almost conquered.” Willkie was if anything more interventionist than Roosevelt; non-interventionist voters in 1940 were in effect shut out of the presidential election.
Another key issue also involves the paralysis of isolationist opposition to British plans. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a protégé of the isolationist William Borah, ranked among the foremost non-interventionists during the 1930s. He executed a sudden reversal in July 1940 and supported the crucial Lend-Lease Bill in March 1941.
Mahl attributes the change of heart to the influence of Mitzi Sims, Vandenberg’s mistress, who had strong ties to British intelligence, and of another woman, Betty Thorpe Pack (“Cynthia”), also romantically linked with him. Mahl admits he cannot prove that Vandenberg’s relationship with those women changed the senator’s views; but his conjecture certainly helps us understand Vandenberg’s otherwise inexplicable behavior.
Throughout American history, we have shown, America did not follow the rules of the just war tradition in getting involved in war. But, as Rothbard explained, the just war rules did not stop there. Besides the limits on when war is justified, Rothbard also emphasized restrictions on the conduct of war. In his essay “Just War” in Secession, State, and Liberty, he says:
Specifically, the classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt: (1) above all, don’t target civilians. If you must fight, let the rulers and their loyal or hired retainers slug it out, but keep civilians on both sides out of it, as much as possible. The growth of democracy, the identification of citizens with the State, conscription, and the idea of a “nation in arms,” all whittled away this excellent tenet of international law.
(2) Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations. In the modern corruption of international law that has prevailed since 1914, “neutrality” has been treated as somehow deeply immoral. Nowadays, if countries A and B get into a fight, it becomes every nation’s moral obligation to figure out, quickly, which country is the “bad guy,” and then if, say, A is condemned as the bad guy, to rush in and pummel A in defense of the alleged good guy B.
Classical international law, which should be brought back as quickly as possible, was virtually the opposite. In a theory which tried to limit war, neutrality was considered not only justifiable but a positive virtue. In the old days, “he kept us out of war” was high tribute to a president or political leader; but now, all the pundits and professors condemn any president who “stands idly by” while “people are being killed” in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, or the hot spot of the day. In the old days, “standing idly by” was considered a mark of high statesmanship. Not only that: neutral states had “rights” which were mainly upheld, since every war-ring country knew that someday it too would be neutral. A warring state could not interfere with neutral shipping to an enemy state; neutrals could ship to such an enemy with impunity all goods except “contra-band,” which was strictly defined as arms and ammunition, period. Wars were kept limited in those days, and neutrality was extolled.
Judged by these standards, American policy also falls short. Let’s look at just two examples, both unfortunately horrendous. General Sherman
deliberately targeted civilians during the War Between the States. He continued this policy in campaigns after the war against the Indians, often with genocidal results. Tom DiLorenzo points out that Sherman said the following about the Plains Indians shortly after the war:
“It is one of those irreconcilable conflicts that will end only in one way, one or the other must be exterminated. . . . We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Sherman had given [General Phillip] Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary. . . . Sherman would cover the political and media front and maintained personal deniability. “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year,” wrote Sherman. “They all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”
Sherman said this about Southerners:
To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. . . . Until we can repopulate
Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. (emphasis added)
Here you have a clear statement that Sherman’s goal was to commit genocide against the people of Georgia. Remember that his famous “march” was not met by any serious military resistance other than a few cavalry skirmishes. It was almost entirely a campaign of death and destruction of civilians and their property. And he wanted to “repopulate” the state with fine New England stock such as himself, the son of a New England lawyer of Puritan descent.”
Atrocities against civilians continued in the twentieth century. During World War II, the United States directly targeted civilians through massive terror bombing. The atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is of course the most notorious example of this; amazingly, some supporters of the State’s war system still defend it. They say that the atomic assault saved lives. Without the bombing, America would have launched a massive invasion of Japan that would have cost even more lives than those lost in the bombing.
This argument doesn’t work. Even if atomic bombs cost fewer lives than an invasion would have done, why are bombing and an invasion
the only alternatives? Why did we have to conquer Japan at all? In 1945, Japan no longer posed a threat to us. We should have been willing to negotiate a settlement with the Japanese, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender.
In 1956, Oxford University was going to grant an honorary degree to ex-President Truman. Elizabeth Anscombe, who was a famous Oxford philosopher and taught at Somerville College, was outraged. She wrote a pamphlet, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” that protested against the award. She attracted a lot of notice in the newspapers, but the Oxford faculty voted to go ahead with the degree.
She lost the vote, but her argument against Truman’s policy was a good one. She wrote:
I do not dispute it. Given the conditions, that [an invasion costly in lives] was probably averted by that action. But what were the conditions? The unlimited objective. Given certain conditions, drastic measures appear needed; but should this very fact not make us take a close look at the supposed necessities of the present state of things? If we do not, but instead insist that extreme circumstances demand extreme responses, we are in danger of adopting the maxim that “every fool can be as much of a knave as suits him.”
In other words, you can’t justify an atrocity by claiming that without it, a goal of yours would require even more costly measures. Instead, you should abandon the goal. Of course those leaders of the warfare state were unwilling to do this.
[Chapter 1 from Against the State, first published 2014 by LewRockwell.com.]
