War! War! War! War!

I should welcome almost any war for I think this country needs one.
Teddy Roosevelt in letter to a friend, 1897
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again.
Eugene O’Neill

You don’t have to be pacifist or a Quaker to be outraged by perpetual U.S. wars staining the pages of history. America is a warfare state.
Howard Zinn in his classic, “A People’s History of the United States,” underlines this warmongering: “It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base and rights of intervention.
“It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had ‘opened’ Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats…It had sent troops to Peking to assert Western supremacy in China and kept them there for more than 30 years.”
America insisted on an open door policy in China but a closed door policy in Latin America. It maintained those closed doors with interventions under the bogus Monroe Doctrine.
“It engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the ‘independent’ state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal,” Zinn writes. “It sent 5,000 Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution and kept them there for seven years.
“It intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1916 for the fourth time and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for 19 years. Between 1900 and 1933 the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once and in Honduras seven times.”
In an intervation that few Americans know about, the nation sent soldiers to Vladivostok and Archangel seeking to overturn the Russian Revolution of 1917. That was the real beginning of the Cold War.
President Wilson, seeking “to make the world safe for democracy,” entered World War I after German submarines sank merchant ships with some Americans aboard.
But Richard Hofstadter in “The American Political Tradition” labeled the casus belli a “rationalization of the flimsiest sort.” The Brits too had been intruding on the rights of American citizens on the high seas but that was OK because they were allies.
World War II was one of the few just American wars. But it was soon followed by the unjust Korean War.
In 1958 America dispatched Marines to Lebanon to “stabilize” it and to watch over Mideast oil. In 1961 American-backed forces invaded Cuba. Next up: Vietnam.
“From 1962 to 1972 the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country--and failed,” Zinn writes.
In 1970 America launched an air war on Cambodia. Next: Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama and in the Gulf War in Iraq.
The sainted Carter maintained a huge War Machine. Reagan in 1982 sent Marines to intervene in a Lebanonese civil war.
Clinton ordered bombing of Baghdad on a shaky pretense. In Operation Monica, Clinton called for air strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. He waged war in Yugoslavia.
U.S. troops are bogged down today in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan in the next 18 months, bringing the total to 58,000. It’s goal: the hopeless task of conquering Afghanistan.
We heard that story before: how more troops were absolutely necessary in Vietnam. But that story ended in abject failure. It should have. The United States had no business being there.
The same scenario is unfolding in Afghanistan. It will end the same way: abject failure. The country is simply unconquerable. The ostensible reason for being there was to capture Osama bin Laden. But that is no justification for war.
The nation never learns. Yet it preaches peace and goodwill throughout the world--unless nations are socialistic, back the Palestinians and are on the evil empire list.
Many members of Congress know better. But they do not dare oppose wars. They know that they will be called unpatriotic and disloyal, soft on terrorism and betrayer of U.S. soldiers.
This brief survey is hardly definitive about all U.S. wars and interventions. But it is overwhelming proof of a nation at permanent war.
President-elect Obama is hardly reassuring when he says that still more soldiers must be poured into the Afghanistan quagmire.
It’s doubtful that America will ever have a political leader with the vision and boldness to say what Macbeth said to Macduff: “Hold, enough!”