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As hobbies go, being a history buff is cheap, harmless and often entertaining -- especially when you're looking for parallels. With a U.S. war against Iraq becoming more likely, one starts looking for similar situations in the past.
That the U.S. would like broad support for the action is
no surprise. Often we hear from jingo types that the U.S.
should go its own way, without paying much attention to
world opinion.
But that's not the American way. The first sentence of
the Declaration of Independence explains that it was issued
because a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
requires that they [the American people] should declare the
causes which impel them to the Separation.
If it was important to respect the Opinions of
Mankind
in 1776, it should still be important -- after
all, the world is much more connected now than it was
then.
But that's about as far as we can stretch that parallel, and we'd better look elsewhere -- perhaps 1940 and 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, when Americans were anything but united about going to war against the Axis.
War was raging in Europe then, but the United States was
officially neutral, and there was a great deal of domestic
opposition to American involvement. After all, the
expenditure of American blood and treasure in the 1914-1918
War to End all Wars
had been for naught.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did all he could -- and more than the Constitution allowed -- to aid Great Britain, since he saw Nazi Germany as an abiding threat to American values and interests.
But there were many Americans who opposed Roosevelt's assistance to Britain, and they organized the Committee to Defend America First.
To quote from a history at hand (The Glory and the
Dream, a Narrative History of America 1932-1972
by
William Manchester), In less than six months they had
60,000 members. Every isolationist on Capitol Hill was
enrolled. Novelist Kathleen Norris became the movement's
chief propagandist, Charles Lindbergh its most popular
speaker, and [Sears, Roebuck chairman Robert A.] Wood,
Henry Ford, Robert Young ... its financial sponsors.
America First's war chest seemed inexhaustible. At one
point it ran full-page advertisements attacking Roosevelt's
foreign policy in sixty newspapers and then repeated the ad
in another seventy-nine. Joseph P. Kennedy, Alice
Longworth, and John Foster Dulles made it respectable.
Rally after rally was held in Madison Square Garden and in
Chicago ...
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. That meant
America was united to fight Japan -- which FDR considered
less of a threat than Nazi Germany. To cite Manchester
again: The outrage at Pearl couldn't be blamed on Nazis.
Emotional as the Congress was, it would probably balk at
involvement in a two-front war. Even if it went along with
a war declaration against the European Axis, the country
would be divided again, and morale, now so high, would
dive.
As matters developed, FDR didn't need to persuade
America to go to war against Germany. On Dec. 11, 1941,
Adolf Hitler did something unusual. He actually honored a
promise; specifically, an assurance to the Japanese
ambassador that If Japan should go to war with the
United States, Germany, for her part, would immediately
take the necessary steps.
With the German declaration
of War against the United States, our Congress had little
choice but to reciprocate.
America was finally in the war against the enemy that
FDR wanted to fight. Saddam Hussein may be worse than
Hitler,
in the words of George Bush the Elder, but
Hussein is certainly smarter than Hitler. Just think how
much simpler matters would be today if Iraq had declared
war on the United States in solidarity with Al Qaeda after
the U.S. responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Today we have Americans pretty well united against the enemy that attacked our country, Al Qaeda, with little opposition to military action in Afghanistan, the nation that sheltered Osama bin Laden.
And we're pretty well divided on going to war against Iraq, even though we have a president who sees that nation, rather than the people who attacked us, as the greatest threat to our country.
The parallels can be extended -- both GWB and FDR were governors of big states before assuming the presidency, both have strong American establishment bloodlines, and both were regarded as shallow playboys during their early years of adulthood.
As someone who fears what we could be getting ourselves
into, I'd love to say George Bush, you're no Franklin
Roosevelt, and 2003 is very different from 1941.
But
that judgment will be for the history buffs of the future,
not columnists of the present.
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