Iraq war parallels 1812 war

"The more things change, the more they remain the same."
--Alphonse Karr, 19th century French satirical writer

The parallels between the War of 1812 and the Iraq war are striking, leading to the conclusion that nothing really changes about public affairs. The lies that President Madison told in 1812 to war with Britain are paralleled by the lies that President Bush told in 2003 to war with Iraq.
Samuel Eliot Morison, hardly a radical historian, noted in “The Oxford History of the American People” that Madison, in asking Congress for a declaration of war, said that the Royal Navy was blockading the U.S. coast. It was not.
Madison also greatly exaggerated the extent of British impressment of American seamen as one of his declared reasons for the war. Indeed, for five years it was the French under Napoleon who “treated American shipping harshly and arbitrarily,” Morison writes. “Almost every mail…brought news of fresh seizures and scuttlings of American vessels by French port authorities, warships and privateers.”
The Bush lies and malfeasances were manifold: tales of weapons of mass destruction, the specter of mushroom clouds, a nonexistent al-Qaida connection, cherry-picked intelligence, a blindsided Congress and pretended diplomacy.
Both wars were totally unnecessary as indeed most of the 100 U.S. wars and incursions have been. (Can you name any justifiable U.S. wars other than the American Revolution and World War II?)
Morison called the War of 1812 “futile and unnecessary.” He noted that: “Eight senators, a large majority of congressman from the New England states, and a majority in both houses from New York, New Jersey and Maryland voted against the declaration of war.”
Today the war in Iraq is absolutely unjustified. Morison called Madison “stubborn to the point of stupidity.” No “point of stupidity” about Bush. He is stupid and stubborn. He refuses to admit publically let alone to himself that he made a grievous mistake.
Madison had his yammering war hawks: Rep. Henry Clay of Kentucky and Rep. John Calhoun of South Carolina. But Rep. John Randolph of Virginia, one of the few remaining Jeffersonian Republican faithfuls who repudiated the war, saw through the war hawks.
He scorned their “cant of patriotism.” He excoriated their chanting “like the whippoorwill” with “one monotonous tone: Canada! Canada! Canada!” (The war hawks coveted the fertile lands and forests of Canada.)
Bush has his warhawks: the twin rebarbatives, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And Bush also had Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, carryovers from the Bush I administration, who lusted for war with Iraq long before 9/11.
Which brings these reflections to John Lowell, political writer in Madison’s day. (Yes, the Lowells of Boston, “the home of the bean and the cod, / Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots / And the Cabots talk only to God.”)
Admittedly, Lowell was a Federalist, antagonistic to Jeffersonian Republicans. But historian Morison writes that the War of 1812 “was far from popular in the United States. Not only Federalists but old-school Republicans were against it.”
Lowell’s best-known work was “Mr. Madison’s War.” Less well-known is his furious attack in 1812 on Madison’s war in a 61-page lawyer’s brief published in Boston by “a New-England Farmer.” It bore the ponderous title:
“Mr. Madison’s war: a dispassionate inquiry into the reasons alleged by Mr. Madison for declaring an offensive and ruinous war against Great Britain together with some suggestions as to a peaceable and constitutional mode of averting that dreadful calamity.”
Madison engages in “pretty rhetorik” (sic) to justify an unjust war. So did Bush and his nefarious minions about Iraq. Lowell called it “a French war not an American war.” Lowell called Madison “the man who is alone responsible for this war.” The Iraq war is Bush’s war.
“The (Madison) men have abused their trust by plunging us into an unjust war which might and ought to have been avoided,” Lowell wrote. So too did the Bush crew by lying the nation into war in Iraq.
“Every war is supposed to have some definite object,” Lowell rightly wrote. “That object ought to be a legitimate and honest one, otherwise the war is unjust.”
Lowell described the Madison manifesto for war as “a tissue of exaggeration,” deceiving the people. He wrote that Madison made “unfounded suggestions” while having documents in his possession showing that they were unfounded. Bush did the same.
The colonies were united in the Revolutionary War but not on the 1812 war. Rather, Lowell wrote, Madison’s men were “inflated with the ambition of conquest.” So was Bush.
Sparks Tribune, April 27, 2006