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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Forget WWII or Vietnam. The real comparison for an invasion of Iraq is the Spanish-American War, when an aimless U.S. presidency and a lazy media looked for redemption.
Feb 21, 2003 | As we head into the inevitable war with Iraq, almost everyone, apropos of Santayana's famous dictum about repeating history, is searching for an analogy. Hawks reference World War II, and cast Saddam as the tin-plate Hitler we must defeat in order to save the world from his aggressive designs. Doves view Iraq as another Vietnam, a quagmire that will result in tragic casualties, both civilian and military, will drain our treasury and bog us down in occupation for years to come. At least as far as the provocation goes, there is, however, a third and possibly more apt analogy. The Iraqi war could be our very own version of the Spanish-American War of 1898 -- the conflict that United States ambassador to England John Hay called "a splendid little war."
Once again we are led by a man whose presidency is adrift. Once again we have a country in deep economic hardship. Once again we have a compliant media that stands to benefit from war. (Ignore the caterwauling about the expense of covering war. War is the very best way to attract an audience and establish your brand.) And once again we have a war that seems to be conceived less in terms of policy than in terms of aesthetics.
The Spanish-America War, like the imminent war in Iraq, had its origins not in any direct threat to American security or in treaty obligations to allies or even in some affront to American honor, but in a desire to project a new sense of the country's power and responsibility -- in historian Frank Friedel's words, "to see the United States function like a great nation." Though the world of the late 19th century was not, like ours, dominated by a single superpower, America possessed an abiding faith in her own moral superiority to every other regnant nation, just as it does today. This was (and is) not entirely without justification. At the time, America was certainly more idealistic than Germany, France, England, Japan or Spain. She believed in the values of democracy and equality even if she didn't always believe in their actual exercise -- Third World nations would need a lot of help -- and she increasingly saw her role as international cop, enforcing what other nations were too craven to enforce.
To this crusading impulse was added a sense of restlessness. In the years just before the Spanish-American War, America was suffering from the most devastating depression in the country's history to that date, and recovery was long in coming. More, with the frontier having been settled in their time, as with the end of the Cold War in ours, there was among Americans little sense of direction or national purpose. William McKinley, an undistinguished governor from Ohio who became the frontman for powerful Republican business interests, was elected to the presidency in 1896 not because he projected any grand vision but because he promoted high tariffs, which were the Republican economic panacea then much as tax cuts are now. Still, a year into McKinley's first term, high tariffs had neither roused national passions nor cured the depression. The nation was rudderless, and Republicans were already predicting electoral defeat.
As Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, commented, "This country needs a war."
McKinley, unlike George W. Bush, wasn't exactly the most promising candidate to give them one. Belying his rugged, square-jawed appearance, he was a natural equivocator, a political weathervane, and he was certainly no warmonger. Despite the fact that Spain held dominion over Cuba less than 100 miles from our shores, despite the fact that there had been an ongoing Cuban revolution for more than a decade and with it chaos, despite the fact that there were reports of terrible cruelty and carnage at the hands of the Spanish authorities, and despite the fact that the Spanish had inflicted a series of indignities on America by firing on her ships and even ultimately insulting McKinley himself, the president counseled patience. While warning that he would have to "intervene with force" if the situation in Cuba didn't improve, he pressed Spain for concessions, and Spain, like Saddam, reluctantly consented to most of them as a way of delaying sterner action. Spain even declared an armistice to drag negotiations with America into the Cuban rainy season when a military invasion would have been inadvisable. All of this was enough to convince Europe that America had not yet exhausted every diplomatic option.
