On Feb. 8, 2004, George W. Bush proudly proclaimed to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” “I am a war president.” Like an 8-year-old playing with toy soldiers, Bush, an Air National Guard dropout, looked at war with vicarious enthusiasm. Contrast the attitude of the nation’s “peace presidents” - supreme commanders who led the nation to victory in the greatest wars the country faced: men who had experienced the grim reality of battle and wanted no part of it.
Ulysses S. Grant condemned war as “the most destructive and unsavory activity of mankind.” Surveying the carnage at Fort Donelson during the Civil War, he told an aide, “this work is part of the devil that is left in us.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, another former general, was equally outspoken: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility and stupidity…. War settles nothing.”
Both Grant and Eisenhower were elected with expectations that they would put a victorious end to conflicts in which the country was then engaged. Both presidents did end the fighting. But not in ways that their bellicose supporters anticipated.
In Grant’s case, the frontier was ablaze, and it was widely assumed that the general-in-chief who had bested Robert E. Lee would make quick work of the Plains Indians who were slowing the nation’s westward expansion. That bet was misplaced. Grant admired the integrity and lifestyle of Native Americans and ordered an end to the slaughter. He reined in Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan (who seemed bent on annihilation), dispatched a brace of “humanitarian generals” to the West, provided aid and comfort to entice the tribes onto reservations, and replaced corrupt Indian agents with Quakers. “Grant’s peace policy” - as it is called by historians - brought peace to Great Plains without racial genocide.
Twice more Grant faced down the hawks clamoring for war - first with Great Britain, then with Spain. British-American relations had not recovered from the Civil War for several reasons: Irish-American expatriates were conducting cross-border raids into Ontario; conflicting claims to fishing rights in the North Atlantic often resulted in bloodshed; a boundary dispute in the Pacific Northwest lay unresolved; and the unpaid claims from Union shipping losses continued to fester.
Grant rejected the possibility of a military solution, and with the cooperation of the Gladstone government in Britain, he submitted the issues to arbitration. This marked a breakthrough in the settlement of international disputes and paved the way for the Anglo-American accord that survives to this day.
The issue with Spain involved Cuba. Portions of the island were in revolt against Spanish rule, and American public opinion demanded intervention on the side of the rebels. Grant not only refused, but deployed the Navy to prevent American freebooters from joining the conflict.
In 1952, Eisenhower was elected with the expectation he would win the war in Korea. After the election Ike went to Korea, measured the situation firsthand, and concluded the war was unwinnable. Without hesitation he negotiated an armistice. After Eisenhower made peace in Korea, not one American serviceman was killed in combat during the next eight years.
Like Grant, Eisenhower believed the United States should never go to war unless national survival was at stake. He resisted calls for preventive war against China and Russia, reached out to the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death and slashed the Defense Department budget. He declined to take military action to defend the Chinese offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, stepped aside when Hungary exploded in 1956 and refused to deploy American forces in situations that might lead to combat without Congressional authorization.
When the National Security Council - Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Vice President Richard Nixon and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff - unanimously recommended the use of nuclear weapons at Dien Bien Phu to rescue the beleaguered French garrison, Eisenhower summarily rejected the proposal. “You boys must be crazy,” he told Robert Cutler, the national security adviser. “We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than 10 years. My God.”
In 1956, when Britain, France and Israel colluded to invade Egypt, Eisenhower forced them to withdraw, toppling Anthony Eden’s government in London and threatening financial reprisals against Israel. That repudiation of what Ike called “old fashioned gunboat diplomacy” not only kept the peace but enhanced American prestige throughout the world.
George Bush and the neocons have no monopoly on glorifying military adventure. Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of state, caused General Colin Powell a case of near cardiac arrest when she asked at a meeting of the National Security Council, “Why do we have an Army if we are not willing to use it?”
War is not an instrument of policy. It is an act of desperation. “Any course short of national humiliation or national destruction is better than war,” Grant told Prince Kung of China in 1879. “War itself is so great a calamity that it should only be invoked when there is no way of saving a nation from a greater [one].”
Jean Edward Smith, the John Marshall Professor of political science at Marshall University, in Huntington, W. Va.
© 2007 The New York Times
War is the greatest of crimes and this crew needs to face charges if we are to prevent needless wars in the future.
JP, I don’t think you get it. The US military-industrial complex WANTS wars in the future. As we have seen, fabrication of reasons (WMDs, etc) to wage an unnecessary war is not beyond them.
I continue to be gob smacked at main stream media’s nonchalant unconcerned acceptance at Bush’s sheer mediocrity and incompetence…..
Even in the presence of a foreign monarch, he’s got to F*#k it up…..
Bush seems to be setting a new media approved standard of bumbling protocol and presidential speciousness…..
simonhhh,
The corporate media is doing its best to help Bush redefine the role of President as a bumbling and amiable figurehead. There is the dark implication behind this that the real issues are too complicated and too important for the people to contemplate, and the role of the people in their vote is simply to choose the next figurehead, more for entertainment purposes than anything else.
And this is the kind of democracy we need to spread around the world at the point of a gun, or a missile, and if the natives don’t immediately accept and embrace it, we will have to annihilate them for their own good, goshdarnit!
kivals May 9th, 2007 12:58 pm
“There is the dark implication behind this that the real issues are too complicated and too important for the people to contemplate”
The issues facing average Americans is too horrific and disturbing, it is easier to dis-associate and or stay in denial…..
Bush’s amiable bumbling incompetent almost likable character is hiding a much more sinister, beguiling and venal cravenness….coupled with a complicated sociopath personality disorder and dry drunk syndrome….
Similar to Cheney this Bush individual would be frightening and unsettling to be around….Most media types possibly go along with this madness out of fear of setting them off or losing their jobs….
After 6 years, what a disturbing outcome for Americans to untangle this God awful mess….
“Any course short of national humiliation or national destruction is better than war.”
Now we have both “national humiliation or national destruction” and war.
Could be that the military industrial complex was trying to find a reason to keep the war-time economy alive after the demise of the Soviet Union?
If true, they hit upon a “great” opportunity with the “war on” terror. Because, unlike the collapse of a superpower which has a finite beginning/ending, the “war on” terror has neither a beginning nor end. No exit condition.
I asked someone (a Baby Boomer) who supported the war once about this and whether there even exists, just theoretically, an exit condition. His repsonse: until we kill the last of them or until Christ returns. Well, there’s no “due date” on the latter condition. So I pressed him on the former. How do we know when we’ve killed the last terrorist? Doesn’t killing produce, itself, more would-be martyrs and terrorists? Who’s going to tell us when we’ve finally got the last of them? Needless to say, my conversational partner increasingly couldn’t answer my questions.
And so I’ll put in a plug here for Godfrey Reggio’s “qatsi” trilogy. Specifically, the definition of the word Naqoyqatsi (http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/naqoyqatsi.php):
Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy’ kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. 1. A life of killing each other 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.
Shane is dead on . As long as the recruitment offices are ” open for business ” and dumb American enlistees ” buy the pitch ” then the MI complex ideology , “war on terror” will befuddle all non-thinking Americans and prevail indefinitely.
As a Viet Vet, I can assure you that anyone who has ever “been there”–if sane and stable–must, by evolution, become anti-war.
Dr. Zimmerman,
Don’t you remember how the propagandists for the military-industrial complex were doing their best to demonize China before 9/11? China was to be the next great threat that would require ever greater expenditures. But Osama stepped into that role and in a way that allowed Bush, Cheney, and their criminal gang to convince themselves they could confuse Osama with Saddam (they are both swarthy Arabs after all) to the extent the American public would support the armed robbery of the millenium. Gosh, they must have been salivating thinking of $10 trillion of oil, and so close to the surface!
Do most of the CommonDreams readers know that Noam Chomsky and other in the know often refer to the NYT as the “according to government officials” paper?
That’s because many of the NYTime’s sources are unnamed U.S. gov’t officials. That paper has a sordid history of repeating the lies of those in power without any questions.
I don’t know much about U.S. history, so correct me if I’m wrong. I have the impression that the overwhelming numbers of U.S. presidents have either started a war, been in a war, or have served in the military. To elect someone with military experience as president is a military coup accomplished by public vote. This is not a healthy sign for a society, and that’s why you now find yourselves where you are.
“Saila May 10th, 2007 1:53 am
“I don’t know much about U.S. history, so correct me if I’m wrong. I have the impression that the overwhelming numbers of U.S. presidents have either started a war, been in a war, or have served in the military. To elect someone with military experience as president is a military coup accomplished by public vote. This is not a healthy sign for a society, and that’s why you now find yourselves where you are.”
Excuse me!? U.S. Grant was a Union General during the US Civil War. Eisenhower was a US General, and Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, during WW II. Both, as result, were anti-war — as the article makes clear.
Bush, et al., by contrast, have never worn a uniform (except for Bush — but not anywhere near war), let alone experienced war. Cheney, as example, supported US involvement in Viet Nam — while he himself got 5 deferments from serving in the military because he had “other priorities”. Bush supported it also — but never got closer to actually fighting there than serving on a Senate campaign in Alabama.
Perle, Wolfowitz — all the neo-con[artists] — none of them ever wore a uniform; and, in fact, their contempt for the military couldn’t be more obvious.
Bush, et al., are all for war — so long as everyone but themselves are doing the fighting and dying in them. The term for them is: chickenhawks.
Rumsfeld was in the service, but he didn’t see action (either).
I didn’t like Eisenhower when he was President! But, after George W Bush a lot of the ones I didn’t like are looking like gems (including Carter)! It’s obvious Eisenhower was extremely intelligent when it came to war. War should never be indulged in until all other options have failed. That was what was wrong with the Iraq war from the very beginning. Bush did not explore other options. It was obvious to even the untrained eye (myself) that he wanted to go to war. All I can say is I hope the American public has learned a valuable lesson from his machinations leading up to the war. Bush and his cronies are trying to do the same thing when it comes to Iran! They would just love to start another war and have the whole middle east in flames!
“Grant’s peace policy” - as it is called by historians - brought peace to Great Plains without racial genocide.
What the author means is that Grant figured out how to subjegate the natives and steal their land without killing them all.
Elohi Gadugi Journal
“Welcome to Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.”
Governor George W. Bush, Jr.