Memorial Day: “Is It Worth It? You Tell Me”

As we have expressed several times before, one of our main goals for this blog is to present different revisionist viewpoints on a whole host of issues. While we do not seek to become an alternative political blog, our focus on history inevitably puts us on the path towards discussing current events. As Shakespeare famously wrote, “What's past is prologue”.

What follows is a Memorial Day message from Scott Smith, a revisionist with strong anti-interventionist beliefs, which primarily focuses on the dangers of American imperial and aggressive foreign policy. While the Inconvenient History blog crew may not agree with the entire text of Smith's piece, it is well worth keeping his thoughts in mind today when one stops to remember the sacrifice of so many young American lives.

Here is SCOTT's MEMORIAL DAY rant:

In our infinite post-World War II hubris, we CHOSE to go to war in Iraq merely because Saddam was an embarassment to the CIA and to the Bush dynasty, and even to the Clintons. (Remember that Hillary voted for widening the war, as would have Obama if he had actually been in the Senate at the time).

The global “War on Terrah” was an excellent Pavlovian means to make the country feel good, even though we really couldn't afford to throw away that kind of (borrowed) money (along with unaccounted death and disability benefits that will be paid to veterans and their beneficiaries for decades to come). Not only were Saddam, Al Qaeda, and now Iran or Pakistan, NOT congruent issues, even if they were, this doesn't have anything to do with WMDs or keeping anyone safe, let alone “Free” (whatever that means).

More Americans have already died from our own crusades since 9/11 alone than were killed from 9/11, or were ever supposedly at risk from imagined terrorist attacks. And the borders remain open to basically anyone who wants to illegally enter and work for almost nothing. Our stupid little Fallujah campaigns in foreign countries do not alter this reality in any way. Fortunately our own domestic Muslims are not as radicalized as foreigners are who live in ghettos like Gaza.

Let's count to ten for a minute. We have only ourselves to blame if others hate us, and we should at least have the courage to accept that. If bringing the “West Bank” into our Madison Avenue and Wall Street society, or the 9/11 attacks themselves, is in any remotely possible way “Blowback,” then maybe we should think twice about becoming what we seek to destroy. This is rationality and not what Junior Bush called “letting the Terrorists win,” as he called down the War on Terrah from the heavens.

So if there ever really were a risk of domestic terrorist attacks, they would be happening right now, not in comic books but in our own shopping malls–and only all the more so with so much ill-will that Americans have generated internationally for as long as I can remember, but particularly during the last Bush/Cheney crusade. Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, the War on Terrah has about as much to do with keeping people safe and free as UFO watchers do. Perhaps we should give credit to Bush and Cheney (and now to Obama's watch) that there have been no alien abductions (that we know of). You can also give them credit that there have been no further 1908 Siberian meteor strikes.

Yes, there are a lot of America-haters on foreign soil, but beardy weirdies burning American flags are not the same thing as suicide bombers stalking every Main Street, USA fire hydrant. And even if this were so, impressive and satisfying Shock & Awe or Surge military campaigns would not help the situation, although this makes Americans feel good about themselves, and rally behind their leaders, of course.

Terrorism is a foreign policy mantra that Reagan adopted when the Soviet Evil Empire first started showing signs of crumbling, and the entrenched military-industrial-complex was looking for ways to re-brand itself after what was soon billed academically as “the end of history,” the end of what Neoconservatives call “World War III,” better known as the Cold War (1948-91).

So the bipartisan thinktanks got busy early in the Reagan years and experimented with silly ideas like sending Marines to Beirut to give the locals enlightenment and indoor plumbing–in between actively helping Israel napalm civilian refugees (or use white phosporous to terrorize “dense urban targets,” as happened recently in Gaza). Even if this got any thoughtful reporting in the corporate media as anything other than Interventionist “spin,” establishment foreign policy wonks are decisively dominated by the Israel-first lobby, and they know how to pluck Evangelical “values” chords with the electorate. Both parties know who they work for when the soft-money dollars roll in. I don't know if our problem is arrogance or corruption so much as ethical cowardice.

Okay, then, so as far as the WWII cemeteries and the SACRIFICES that are touted here, I'm less impressed with the Greatest Generation and its accomplishments than Tom Brokaw is. I greet them nicely at Walmart but basically they were used–as World War II was really just another dirty war that we (or the leaders we elected) CHOSE to get involved in, even though our country was not in any real danger from submarines, and the conflicts in Europe and Asia were long and deep. And complicated.

Our rank and file Napoleons didn't understand these conflicts any better than Woodrow Wilson's Ivy League bankers understood the asassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, or Texas oilmen understood the toppling of the Tsar. We should stick to what we do know–which unfortunately isn't minding our own business. We Americans are corrupt global gendarmes who make very bad situations even worse. That is what we sacrifice so enthusiastically for.

Maybe this isn't part of the High School History curriculum, so here is the Cliff Notes version of what got left out:

When the country was neutral and he was taking credit for keeping the peace in his Fireside Chats on the radio, President Franklin Roosevelt had issued secret orders to have the U.S. Navy shoot all German ships on sight–and hopefully to sink them, thus causing an incident or provoking a foreign retaliatory response that would rally the American people for world war and wholesale intervention in foreign conflicts.

So while feigning neutrality, American ships escorted British and Soviet arms convoys, which made a lot of money for American bankers and businessmen who had skirted and undermined neutrality laws until they were openly invalidated by the Lend-Lease Act, which was the “Unsordid Act” (as Churchill called it) of undeclared war that predated Pearl Harbor and heralded Roosevelt's third term.

FDR had already understood by 1937 at the latest, when he started adopting a covertly bellicose foreign policy against “Aggressors,” that having a hand in another Great War really was the only politically-acceptable way out of the economic Depression. The Supreme Court was increasingly ruling against New Deal programs, which had not ended unemployment, and Conservatives then and now believe that no economic growth can come from Government–unless you are bailing out banks or building swords out of plowshares (either in war itself or by building imperial military bases to underwrite global investments).

But how to be a successful warmonger and pontificate to the voters about warmongers at the same time? This was quite an art, to which Churchill and Roosevelt should get the full credit due for their Machiavellian statecraft. German ships were under strict orders to avoid any encounters with American warships and did their best not to be shot at by them on sight. Hitler had learned from the Kaiser's mistakes, but the Japanese had less experience with people who want to “Make the World Safe for Democracy” and took the bait.

Alarmed by Washington's oil embargo of Japan, which discredited the Japanese diplomats seeking compromise in Washington, and with the Imperial Japanese Army already bogged down in China, the Imperial Japanese Navy came to the fore and proactively sneak-attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at its Pearl Harbor base in a misguided attempt to cripple blockades enforced against Japan by the American and British blue-water navies. That was a huge miscalculation on the Japanese admiralty's part about what constituted American naval power. Nevertheless, in Japanese eyes, Allied fleets were WMDs that were just as scary as Dick Cheney's cartoonish specter of post-9/11 mushroom clouds–or the Hollywood horror spectacle of Hitler's tiny U-Boat fleet.

Hatred against Japs, however, was visceral. Even though Occidental empires already had a long and sometimes barbarous history of the colonial exploitation of China, the Washington establishment and “Christian missionary businessmen” like Time magazine's Henry Luce did not like it, they said, that Japan was involved in the brutal colonial exploitation of China (meaning to the exclusion of American market-share). However, the liberal crusaders and Internationalists themselves had few qualms in sending Spam, aviation fuel, boots, trucks, and plenty of munitions and technology to Stalin, even before Pearl Harbor. Even the transfer of atomic secrets to the Soviets went almost unnoticed during the war, and not until the Soviets and Red Chinese themselves became the Evil Empires to gird against–once Germany and Japan were obliterated and then turned into modern satrapies which were fully integrated into the postwar “Bretton-Woods” global investment system.

The point is that America was effectively in World War II long before Pearl Harbor; this just made a good 9/11 kind of incident to raise a hue-and-cry to discredit the Isolationist movement and to uncritically rally the dopey masses for overt global crusading, which is still the case today. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack and a tactical surprise, but it was prompted by Roosevelt's clandestinely aggressive and relentlessly calculating foreign policy strategy, which was an open secret for anyone in the know at the time, just like FDR's disability was not mentioned in public. Arrogance almost seems like an understatement–and that was the Good War, not the dirty little ones in places without indoor plumbing.

Also not figured into the do-gooder Hubris is that not only U.S. soldiers' lives are wasted to keep the stock market pumped up, but also millions of foreign lives are ruined or lost because of “Coalition” air strikes and hardships to noncombatants that our crusades, bombardments, and blockades directly cause. I don't see how this makes them Free or keeps me Free. The British medical journal Lancet and others have conservatively documented or estimated up to a million dead Iraqi children directly due to Clinton's economic sanctions against Iraq. When asked about this, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright shook her head and said “it's worth it.”

It is “worth it” to Americans because that is how they think. They don't know any better. Flag-waving and Israeli occupation of what is called the Holy Land are all Americans care about in foreign policy.

Our leaders are a little bit more sophisticated geopolitically, however, and see the key to continued “American” global hegemony in light of not only Israeli security and expansionism but also controlling access to Middle Eastern oil reserves. As the 21st century wears on, overpopulated industrializing countries like India and China are going to be very dependent upon what petroleum Washington says that they can buy in global “free-markets,” especially if they should decide not to buy our junk bonds some day, which is what underwrites our trillions of dollars in national debt, the interest for which our taxpayers dutifully make payments on. Clinton, Bush, Obama–all were and are essentially on the same page here with what “Neoconservative” Commentary publisher Norman Podhoretz calls “World War IV” (1973- ).

American leaders all need “the tail wagging the dog” with Israel-first jingoistic campaigns in foreign countries. Obama does not represent Change in this respect any more than Bush or McCain, or Clinton. Obama is merely going to shift the focus from the unpopular Iraqi theater to Afghanistan, or maybe to some other quagmire like Iran or Pakistan. Yellow Journalism will play its role as the corporate-media always does.

With or without some rudimentary WMDs, however, any country or countries that supply a huge percentage of the world's oil demands are going to have some vestigial influence and they are not going to think exactly what we want them to think, or do exactly what we tell their puppet leaders to do, no matter how many National Guard units we can send over there–and whether the Washington establishment or the Israel Lobby finds this intolerable or not. Imperial Rome bit off more than it could chew, and to think otherwise is the folly of Rome at its most arrogant. Interventionism is not crusading to “make the world safe for Democracy.” What it really means is Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

Rather than American taxpayers paying interest on debt from things like feel-good military campaigns and bank bailouts, what we should be doing instead is investing our tax dollars to short-circuit “oil imperialism” and get off of fossil fuels entirely. We can start thinking about genuine national interests for a change–and stop obsessing about Biblical mythology supposedly playing out in the Middle East. U.S. Troops should be used in guarding our own borders, not trying to impose Hollywood cultural values onto other people that have good cause not to like us and our corrupt credit card consumption way of life.

And the last thing that we should ever be doing is giving arms to foreign fanatics and regimes that we will never understand. Sure, Saddam was useful for payback in fighting the Iranians after they had their Islamic revolution and captured our embassy–and Osama bin Laden was useful when fighting the Russians during the Cold War. This is classic imperial strategy or the Long War on-the-cheap, but the “Islamofascist” factions never liked us any better for it, even if Washington had other plans and other illusions.

And why should these peoples like us anyway? For every Marshall Plan and Starbucks franchise that goes into developing a foreign oil reserve or a foreign military base, there is the CIA, collateral damage, and Blowback. Terrorists as an existential threat don't even hold a candle to Red Army divisions perched on their side of the Iron Curtain established by the Yalta and Potsdam Treaties after World War II–or the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles. But whether the security threats coming from submarines, Japs, or Terrorists is real or phony, the simple fact is that imperial burdens bear enormous accounted and unaccounted costs–and they involve dirty, shadowy hands (even if nobody wants to admit this). After WWII the USA inherited the British Empire and its legacy of dropping mustard gas on colonial Iraqi rebels and imposing starvation blockades in war and peace. Is it worth it? You tell me.

End of rant. Happy holiday.

~Scott Smith