War Criminal Wants More Wars

by Gregory Bresiger

At a recent business conference luncheon the attendees were served a huge portion of "globaloney."

"We’re going to have to create institutions inside failing states like Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone," said former US General Wesley Clark, who had also served as Supreme Allied Commander of Nato.

General Clark, a possible US Senate candidate, wants Americans to be missionaries who remake various nations of the world. But he is rather fuzzy about this nation building he and others practiced in the 1990s. He cannot exactly define the extent of the additional military and economic leadership that the US should provide today, but he urges America to be more active in the world and set up institutions for the struggling countries of the world.

"I don’t know what these institutions will be. They’re not military problems. They’re not police problems," General Clark told a recent meeting of the conference division of Institutional Investor. "They’re not economic problems. They’re not political problems. They’re combinations of all that."

And the US must solve these problems, said General Clark, who never seems to doubt that the US has the answers for cultures that most Americans don’t understand. General Clark, in his comments, reminds one of General Maxwell Taylor, a famous adviser to the Kennedy Administration, and a charter member the "Best and the Brightest" crowd of the early 1960s. They were the ones who led America into the disastrous Vietnam War. Taylor depicted, "South Vietnam as not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate for American soldiers." Of course, that was before the tens of thousands of Americans died in that tragic war along with many more thousands of Vietnamese.

Today General Clark displays the same sort of Kennedy Administration New Frontier arrogance, a belief that American power and values should guide the world. This kind of thinking dates back at least to the administration of Woodrow Wilson, a liberal icon of the last century along with FDR and Kennedy. Wilson was another American president who pursued a policy of "missionary diplomacy," which meant the frequent use of force to bring to heel the "heathens" who happened to resist the imposition of American values.

General Clark is arguing in favor of these Wilsonian/New Frontier ideas. He believes that the United States’ prestige in the world is huge so our nation can and must provide direction, institutions and anything else for struggling nations. The problem is, General Clark says, our nation hasn’t been doing nearly enough up until this point. Like Wilson arguing for an America establishing, "a just democracy throughout the world," which meant that Wilson reversed our traditions of no entangling alliances, General Clark now insists that America must live up to its responsibilities. Soon we will likely hear General Clark, or one of his friends, say that they have to, "get the country moving again."

The ghosts of Senator Robert Taft and the great revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes must be stirring after this renewed call for a Pax Americana from a former American military leader and would be pol. Barnes and Taft were a few of the leaders who warned in the 1930s and 1940s that the US risked becoming endlessly embroiled in wars, wars that would distort America’s classical liberal values, if it turned away from non-interventionism and attempted to save the world. Said Taft, "We’ll have our fingers in every pie."

These critics of a Pax Americana predicted it would lead to "an endless war for an endless peace." They warned America would end up turning its back on its anti-militarist traditions. Many of these critics had been embittered by the World War I crusade of President Woodrow Wilson, who, in justifying U.S. intervention, had promised a war to end war, a kooky, let’s just give the drunk one more drink, idea.

General Clark doesn’t think it is a crazy policy. He thinks the United States succeeded with the idea under the Clinton administration and with George Bush’s New World Order. The United States had foreign policy "successes" in Haiti, Bosnia, in the Gulf War and in Africa in the 1990s. China was brought into the World Trade Organization, Nafta was ratified and several former enemies were brought into Nato. (The latter, General Clark never mentioned, increases the possibility of war between a new Nato member and Russia.)

Given these successes, General Clark added, the U.S. must do more in the world. That’s because the world loves Americans, he says. In fact, according to General Clark, the world looks to Americans as a kind of benevolent big brother who gently must straighten it out.

"People abroad love the United States in a way you never see over here," General Clark said. "Over there they like us. They love us. They love what we stand for. And they want to be like us. Sometimes they want us to help them and sometimes they want us to tell them what to do."

Apparently, General Clark hasn’t been in Europe lately. Or the Middle East, where the US has taken on the responsibility of accomplishing something that is well nigh unachievable.

How General Clark, who spent some 38 years in the military, came to these conclusions of America’s popularity was not disclosed. Nevertheless, he is sure that "American engagement" – what those few Americans who still believe in the "no entangling alliances" warnings of George Washington would call a "Pax Americana" – is the correct policy and should not be ended but the policy should be expanded.

That means, among other things, a bigger military-industrial complex and more diplomats, he said. He wants to spend more money on "the foreign policy establishment. He complained that about cutbacks of career service State Department employees. And General Clark also, unsurprisingly, complained that America’s armed forces just aren’t big enough.

"Our military is desperately under funded. Our people have done a great job in this past decade, but they have done it with 30% to 40% less resources than they had during the Cold War," according to General Clark.

There is an irony in the America is great so she must be more "engaged" thesis, an irony that would appear to confirm the warnings of the Robert Taft Cold War critics of the 1940s. Although the general was whooping it up for the policies of the 1990s, he now calls for a great expansion of them. If they were such a success, if America brought peace to so many places in the world, why can’t America now cutback? And why, as General Clark was patting himself on the back, did he also tells this conference that, "This country, despite its dominance, has never been more vulnerable to events abroad than it is today."

How can that be? The US triumphed over the Soviet Union as predicted many years before by Ludwig von Mises (Not only a prophet who is not honored by most Americans, but a prophet little known by them). After decades of Cold War and counter revolutionary policies, of involvement in almost every civil war, why must the United States now become more involved? And is there any limit to the leviathan?

There is.

Globaloney gave the American leviathan a huge bellyache in Vietnam. Before history repeats with tragic consequences, before America enters into another quagmire commitment and before America, urged on by the scions of Woodrow Wilson and the New Frontier, the Wesley Clarks of our nation, it is important to remember the words of a laissez-faire critic of a 19^th century empire:

"War is monster, whose appetite grows so fast that by what it feeds on that it is quite impossible beforehand to measure its capacity for consumption, and the only safe way is to be provided with far more than at any given time seems likely required for its support."

Gregory Bresiger, [send him mail] a business writer and editor, lives in Kew Gardens, New York. He has written for LewRockwell.com, Mises.org and The Journal of Libertarian Studies. He is presently working on a paper on the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson.

Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com

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