"But the President knows more than we do and we must trust his wisdom about the war in Iraq. Plus, this President is a born-again believer!"
Have you heard that refrain in recent months, especially those of you in the conservative evangelical Christian community to which I belong? Those of us in that community need to confront an unsettling question: Have we been misled? Misled by the cheerleading, ratings- and advertiser-conscious mainstream media, by warmongering conservative and "Christian" talk radio programs – and by our fellow conservative and Christian, George W. Bush.
Too bad our pulpits have not blazed with a holy, articulate, prophetic fire on this, one of the great issues of our generation – and, rest assured, our children's generation. Nonetheless, we as individual Christians have a responsibility to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves" regardless of the shortcomings of our ecclesiastical leadership. Wisdom includes knowing our history, that by God's grace we might craft a better future. And our history tells us that American presidents have often deceived, dissembled, and lied in order to drag their people into wars they would not have fought had they known the facts.
The current one and his lieutenants have done so with such frequency it is hard to keep track of their errors. Syndicated conservative columnist Eric Margolis lists a few: the administration's claiming Iraq had "drones of death," mobile germ laboratories, a stash of Scud missiles, a pipeline to al-Qaida and "poison camps," chemical munitions bunkers, smallpox or anthrax to unleash on America – and that it attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in order to develop its secret nuclear program.
The President himself promised on the eve of war that the Iraqi "regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Upon such falsehoods were we, the people of America, persuaded to support the sacrifice of our young people's blood, our nation's treasure, and the slaughter of uncounted Iraqi soldiers and civilians.
But it is an old habit, as predictable as the next July heat wave in Texas. Whether it was Franklin D. Roosevelt engineering a brutal program of provocation against Japan in order to get at Hitler and the Nazis; Lyndon Johnson contriving his Gulf of Tonkin incident to get at the North Vietnamese; or Bill Clinton proclaiming ethnic genocide and mass graves in Serbia to get Monica Lewinsky off the front page – when a United States president decides he wants a war, he usually gets one.
Thomas Fleming's devastating new blockbuster The Illusion of Victory, America in World War I, presents a (previous) textbook case of how a devout, well-intentioned, Southern president can, with enough time and resources, drag his trusting people into just about anything.
How did President Woodrow Wilson and his minions spur a prosperous, once-noninterventionist American public into supporting America's plunge into the Europeans' Great War? By sometimes speaking, persuasively, and sometimes not speaking, withholding crucial information.
To begin with, they fostered the image of America as a peace-loving neutral. Yet while the U.S. leadership pilloried the Germans for creating a maritime war zone around Britain, it scarcely protested the much more sinister British food blockade of Germany. Perhaps this was because the titans of American industry were reaping a financial bonanza with their colossal sales of weapons and munitions to Allied belligerents Britain, France, and Russia. These banks and corporations assayed their payday could grow even richer if America itself were in the war. So declared one prominent member of the New York Stock Exchange to his customers. He wrote them, "The popular view is that stocks would have a quick clear sharp reaction immediately on the outbreak of hostilities. They then would enjoy an old fashioned bull market such as followed the outbreak of war with Spain in 1898."
Wilson & Co. promoted tales of German atrocities in Belgium, where the barbarous "Huns" supposedly hacked off the hands of young men, the body parts of young women, and raped the female population en masse. Famed attorney Clarence Darrow, among others, conducted independent research and found these claims false.
They propagated stories of German U-boat submarines committing mass murder in the sinking of British ocean liners such as the Falaba and the Lusitania. Censored from these reports were facts such as the Germans running full-page ads in New York City newspapers beseeching Americans against boarding such ships, because they were steaming into a war zone. War zone or not, why were passenger ships a danger to the Germans? Because the cargo was not all human. It was also, in the case of the Lusitania, over four million rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells – destined for use against German soldiers. The British government knew this, but the passengers did not – including the 128 Americans who died.
They cried how the barbarity of these incidents was heightened by the Germans breaking their word not to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. Yet Wilson and his subordinates virtually ignored the criminal continuation of the British naval blockade of the entire German nation. How vicious was that blockade? Esteemed U.S. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin denounced it as "starving to death the old men, the women and the children, the sick and the maimed of Germany."
Wilson concluded his thunderous herald to war before Congress with a ringing call to fight for the liberation of the world's peoples, "the right of nations, great and small . . . the world must be made safe for democracy."
His admonitions fell somewhat short of consistency, since at that moment, indigenous peoples across the globe were keeling under the burden of British "democracy," a democracy elected by the Maxim gun and its 20th century descendants, and in no wise intended for millions of Irish, millions more Egyptians, tens of millions of Indians, even millions of Britain's own citizens.
In the end, this armada of falsehood garnered Woodrow Wilson nearly everything he pushed, bullied, and intimidated to get – and almost nothing he hoped would come from it. America proved the winning balance against Germany, but we lost over 100,000 men killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded and maimed, and the vice grips of central government control twisted tighter on our country. Wilson's misguided utopian notions crashed to earth with the U.S. Senate's rejection of his proposed League of Nations. Broken in spirit, a stroke mentally and physically incapacitated him for much of the rest of his term in office. Bitterness poisoned his few remaining years of life. And we now know that the slaughter and hatred of World War I led straight to World War II, the worst calamity in history.
Indeed, George W. Bush and his lieutenants, like other administrations before them, do know more than we – and that renders them all the more culpable for the consequences they have engineered for us and our children.
August 8, 2003
John J. Dwyer (send him mail) is chairman of history at Coram Deo Academy near Dallas, Texas. He is author of the historical novels Stonewall and Robert E. Lee, and the upcoming historical narrative The War Between the States, America's Uncivil War. He also is the former editor and publisher of The Dallas/Fort Worth Heritage newspaper.
