Today's headline says that Pres. George W. Bush would like to expand the military.
He's having his problems in Iraq, insurgent suicide bombings having interrupted our plan to bring democracy first to Iraq and then to the region. As examples of planting the flag of democracy go, the beach-head we've established is none to secure. We risk being driven south to Pusan, our backs to the sea, as in Korea in 1951. Only then we had Gen. Douglas MacArthur to save our bacon by making his famous sweeping left hook, more famous even than Gen. Schwarzkopf's in the 1991 P.G. war, also against Saddam's Iraq.
I don't see any running room for a left hook in Baghdad, do you?
Early in Pres. Bush's presidency, I read of him reading one of the good recent biographies of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt. TR inherited the presidency after Pres. William McKinley was assassinated in 1900. TR had already, as a student of Clausewitz on war and Adm. Mahan on the need for great powers to have large navies, along with coaling stations around the world to fuel them, sent Adm. Dewey to Manila Bay to pick off the Philippines from the moribund Spanish Empire and keep it from the rightful owners, the Filipinos themselves. At that time, 1898, the world was divided into two hemispheres, those who counted and those who did not. You didn't count if your skin wasn't quite white enough to match that of the British (lots of colonies), the French (ditto), the Germans (one or two in Africa and the Pacific, and nosing around for more), the Dutch (South Africa, Indonesia, the Spice Islands), the Portuguese (the Congo, rubber, gold, etc.), and now the Americans. We were picking up where those others were running out of gas.
So in 1898, with the acquisition of the Philippines, we became an empire. That's a nation that projects its power abroad by military mean by acquiring colonies. We went from former colony to colonizer. Not everyone thought this a good idea. Mark Twain, one of the great readers of the American character and our better ideals, along with our worst (see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) was born in the South but "skedaddled" (his word) West, to San Francisco and the Gold Country when the Civil War came to his neighborhood around Hannibal, Missouri. Twain didn't object to attacking Spain, as Spain had been behaving very badly in Cuba, an Island we'd long had our eye on with a view to making it ours. Spain had set up the world's early concentration camps and was starving and otherwise executing Cuban civilians. Twain did object to our later acquiring the Philippines, after liberating them from Spain. Stanley Karnow's great book, In Our Image, recounts the tale. His son, I was interested to see, is a new judge in San Francisco. What Stanley Karnow does to a greater extent, and better, than any historian I can call to mind, is to state the misconceptions each side in a conflict had about the other, and the mistakes they make on the basis of wrong ideas and mis-information. History is too often presented as the inevitable process of going from here to there as though ordained by God, when the fact is that we muddle along, like the British, who are said to have acquired their great empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. It started as a commercial venture in India that turned into the need to control the natives, hence local company-run government, and ultimately a world-wide empire. See Niall Ferguson's Empire. Ferguson, incidentally, doesn't think empire all bad. The entire nation of France, for example, is a composite of local native people from Brittany, Alsace, Provence, etc., melded into one Rocky-Road mixture complete with nuts. Britain likewise is a composite of people. Need I remind you of the United States? The Louisiana Purchase? The War Against Mexico? Where we picked up Texas, New Mexico, Arizona? California? Oregon? Wiped out the Indians? Yup, we were an empire before we knew it.
Pres. Eisenhower, in a famous speech, warned that all money spent on aircraft carriers, bombers, and other military, was a theft from some school-kid who needed a new school. We don't get that money back. We were supposed to have Iraq pay for our effort to liberate the Iraqis from their poison-gas spewing Saddam Hussein, but we haven't seen a dime, and we don't count the price of war against this years budget. We sort of de-emphasize the cost of war as being the hidden price of being a great country.
I read recently that the United States spends more on war and war preparation (military budgets) than the rest of the world combined. If other countries spend one or two percent of their gross national product on defense, we spend five times that amount. Something like that. A lot, in other words.
Why do we do this? Because we're the top dog at the moment. This is the real reason we can't leave Iraq without something that looks like victory. When you are in the empire business, which we are, big time, you either win or the air goes out of your balloon and the other dogs, the ones always nipping at your heels, go for your throat.
No one elected us to be leader of the free world, the west, as it was called during the Cold War, but, since Britain and France were bled white by WWI and WWII, and Russia lost 25 million people in WWII, we were the last man standing after a brutal fight. The war wasn't fought on our territory. We had farms, factories, and Wall Street. We funded the recovery of Europe with Marshall Plan money. We led the world in standing up to Stalin. So we earned our place as leader of the free world. We're not going to retreat from the responsibility of carrying out our program of serving as the example of what a free people can do, and spreading the word, by soft power and hard.
This is why Bush cannot leave Baghdad with egg his face, and must expand the military to help wipe the egg off. Because otherwise the nations of the Mid-East will see that we're only a paper tiger which cannot, or will not, respond with force when other nations thumb their noses at us.
Bush's problem is that he led us into the wrong war in the wrong place, or if you disagree with that, he didn't insist on better preparations for the aftermath of the toppling of the government. With a military like ours, the bigger challenge was the recovery, not the toppling. We've tripped up on the recovery. See Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Knopf, 2006) and many other volumes recounting our faulty march to war. Suffice it to say that GW is no TR.
Pres. Bush, incidentally, has reportedly admitted, contrary to his usual bluster, that we're not, in fact, winning in Iraq. But we're not losing either.
In war, you don't want to be going sideways for very long, as going sideways means not winning, and when you, as a great imperial power, or wannabe power, choose the time and place for war, you don't want to be seen as not winning. This is Bush's, and America's problem, at the moment.
The bigger question is "What kind of a nation are we?" followed by, "What kind of a nation do we want to be?"
Do we want to emulate the British Empire? Does George W want to be Queen Victoria?
What has become of the British Empire? The Dutch? The Spanish? The Belgian? The German? The French?
There's a reason that George Lucas's Star Wars series of film stories has the underdog such as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, the space Gypsy, fighting the empire.
And why Pres. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union "the Evil Empire." Empires exert power over people who didn't ask to be ruled by a foreign empire. The empire is always the bad guy to the freedom-loving local native people who are in constant danger of being wiped out, like the Indians, here and abroad.
We should think twice about our role as Emperor of the world. Some latter day Jesus Christ is liable to come along and knock us off our arrogant perch.