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Morris Hart

We've read a good deal lately about how Americans have reacted so strongly toward the guerilla activities in Iraq, and more specifically to the graphically publicized executions of two American civilians. We all want retribution for the unwarranted summary beheadings of the two men, as well as for the other deaths the guerillas/insurgents have added to our losses. It's readily understandable. But, I'd like to take a slightly different tack on this situation and see what you think about it. It'll take me a minute to get there.

In the late eighteenth century, the young United States tried to maintain a mind-your-own-business mentality. Later in the first half of nineteenth century, we drifted a bit. For instance, I could not have supported the Mexican War or, in a related domestic vein, the wholesale killing and "relocation" of the American Indians. Yet, except for those two situations, we pretty much stayed on course.

After Emperor Lincoln took over, our diplomatic thinking began to reverse its non-interventionist course. Domestically, ‘Honest Abe” brought about the American Dark Age with his War Between the States and his successors' “Reconstruction” of the defeated South (sound familiar?). The systematic destruction of the Constitution begun under Lincoln picked up afterwards, thereby facilitating the demise of our laissez-faire foreign policy. I won't go into our reasons for entering into the Spanish-American War; our subsequent involvement in the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba; World War One and its continuation, World War Two; the interim actions in Haiti, China and Central America; then Korea; Cuba; the Dominican Republic; Vietnam; Grenada; Panama; Eastern Europe; Sudan; Haiti, again, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure I've left some out, but you likely see my point. In the nineteenth century the United States went from almost no foreign adventures (unless attacked) to maintaining virtually continuous military involvement throughout the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Some will say that this accelerating adventurism mirrored our fiscal and military ability to take a more belligerent stand, yet Washington's good advice to beware of foreign entanglements still echoed in the minds of our elected officials. Then, with the arrival of the Lincoln Mercantilist Revolution, our government became increasingly centralized and began growing and flexing its muscles. Once it had essentially dispensed with the restrictions of the Constitution, it found it could use its wars and rumors of war to divert the citizens' attention from the government's domestic activities of further consolidating its power. This it accomplished, in large part, by means of the forced passage of the fourteenth amendment and questionable passage of the sixteenth. We should never forget that every war ever fought was for economic reasons--or for the power that those economics would support—never, regardless of rhetoric, to the contrary.

Even should a people be freed of a Hitler clone, few would welcome into their country an invading military to kill its citizens, blow up, burn and destroy its homes, businesses and infrastructure, devastate its banks and money and place its citizens in a state of destitute subservience. An Iraqi might also include the imprisonment, sometimes random, and gross mistreatment of many of its people--in prison or on the street (and, I might add, the very foolish setting aside of the Geneva Convention.) Our government has visited upon the Iraqi people a destruction and occupation similar to, or (given our current ability to destroy) worse than that which Lincoln and his successors laid upon the people of the Confederate States of America.

So, how do you imagine we would react today if an army, one that worshipped differently, one that had a different morality and set of ethics were to invade the US and behave toward us as we've treated Iraq and its people? Would it concern us if corporations associated with the invader and its allies began harvesting our treasures and resources? Were we to suffer such indignities, I can imagine selected invaders being treated quite harshly by some of our own folks. In fact, some of our good ol' boys might prove more effective at taking heads than the Iraqis.

Now, not for a minute do I suggest we should condone these atrocities. Rather, I hope we will hunt down and punish severely those who have executed these Americans. Yet, I would also suggest that our government put those unfortunate men in a position where it should have expected a reaction of this nature, particularly if our decision-makers really had known the enemy. Do these incidents reflect, once again, on the quality of our intelligence or on our government's inability to protect American citizens—even those directly or indirectly working for the government, itself? It would seem the government can't safeguard its citizens even when the ratio of “protector” to “protected” far, far exceeds the ratio that exists here in the “Homeland”--but that's the subject of another discussion.

While I shall always defend those whom the government sends in harm's way, even when they are sent to further the government's secret agenda, I suggest that we should, for a moment, divert our attention from those Iraqi evil-doers and look a moment to our own government. Perhaps we should endeavor to extract from them the real reasons American blood and treasure continue to pour into the Iraqi sand.

A US Navy veteran, Morris Hart has lived and worked outside the United States for over eleven years, principally in Japan and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict, and in Saudi Arabia and in the Republic of Ireland as an educator. Politically conservative, he would like to see the United States return to constitutional government.

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