Chapter XXII: Why Democratic Nations Are Naturally Desirous Of Peace, And Democratic Armies Of War 11- 9-2010 (part 2)

 Our imperialism is not the product of a pacific temper. That we were not good at imperialism, that we did in fits and starts can be seen in reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. No longer will we send the Army in to Mexico as we sent Pershing in 1916, nor will send a Smedley Butler with his Marines into Central America.

Maybe our military knows it has a symbiotic relationship with the civilian world. It had that relationship in the 19th Century when West Point turned out engineers who ended up building our railroads. (I only now noticed that de Tocqueville wrote before the railroad era.) I think that describes McClellan's career before the Civil War, and maybe a few others. I do not think Sandhurst, or other European military academies ever had West Point's reputation as an engineering school. When I watch A Few Good Men, I worry over the speech given by Jack Nicholson about people like him standing guard over us. His character does not see a symbiotic relationship, but one where the civilian side serves the military. I think too many people see this speech as idealistic and noble rather than frighteningly un-American. Probably less well-known today is Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May. Both exhibit behaviors Americans condemn in their military officers.

As for stopping and starting war, de Tocqueville hit the nail on the head. Americans have started two wars — The Mexican War and The Iraq War — while others we have been dragged into by spectacular circumstances. British ships taking our sailors; South Carolina firing on Fort Sumter; and The Mine blowing up led us into wars. Then there were the German provocations in WWI and the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. Political manipulations like the Tonkin Gulf and Iraq's WMD were needed for Vietnam and the Iraq invasion. 

Stopping most American wars have been easy. We demanded unconditional surrender.  We started with this in the Civil War and continued through Nagasaki. We need to unlearn that lesson and the idea of a moral crusade where anything short of eradicating evil is a defeat. 

So long as we become more prudent about starting wars, we will have fewer problems. I think every critic of the Iraqi invasion was proven right, and those who called them anti-American were proven wrong. De Tocqueville noted a danger of war:

Again, if war has some peculiar advantages for democratic nations, on the other hand it exposes them to certain dangers which aristocracies have no cause to dread to an equal extent. I shall only point out two of these. Although war gratifies the army, it embarrasses and often exasperates that countless multitude of men whose minor passions every day require peace in order to be satisfied. Thus there is some risk of its causing, under another form, the disturbance it is intended to prevent. No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. Not indeed that after every victory it is to be apprehended that the victorious generals will possess themselves by force of the supreme power, after the manner of Sylla and Caesar: the danger is of another kind. War does not always give over democratic communities to military government, but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. If it lead not to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom of the science.

Chapter XXII: Why Democratic Nations Are Naturally Desirous Of Peace, And Democratic Armies Of War

I met in my pre-trial detention a meth dealer convicted for violating The Patriot act.  I thought the federal government told us that law only applied to terrorists and not domestic crime. Cowed people will easily accept security over freedom. 

I worry over the state of the American mind. We may never be so easily bamboozled that we will accept a government that promises security over freedom. The Tea Party talks much about freedom, but want to restrict the freedom of some. We glorify the military that is by nature about obedience and order than freedom. For our social problems we respond with criminal laws and warehouse people in prisons where they can learn obedience through fear of authority.

I suggest we stop the hustle and bustle, the sloganeering, the sheer blast of politics. Prudence has no room to function in our overheated political atmosphere. Time is needed to ask several questions about goals and who benefits from this atmosphere of haste. It may be that I will emerge from prison to a military government, and it may be that we will have righted our course as a democratic nation. You will have a hand in making this choice. I have removed myself from any role but observer.

sch