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America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition

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The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus. War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “phony soldiers.”) It is unappreciated today that an earlier American culture was anti-militarist. In his classic study The Civilian and the Military: A ...

The Failed Legacy of Interventionism

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Last week, the New Hampshire Union Leader went on the attack against Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s foreign-policy views, making the standard pro-empire, pro-intervention arguments that unfortunately have come to characterize the modern-day conservative movement. (Paul’s response to the editorial is here.) Nastily referring to Paul as a “libertarian darling,” the paper implied that the United States should continue serving as the world’s international policeman, intervening and meddling in countries all over the world. Ridiculing the notion that the United States should go to war only in self-defense, the Union Leader suggested that that the United States should even be willing to go to war to “contain ambitions” of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The paper harked back to interventionists’ favorite war, World War II, mocking the vast majority of American people who ...

Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners?

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What is the common term for ordering soldiers to kill vast numbers of innocent people? A war crime. But not when it is done on the command of the U.S. president. Killing innocent foreigners seems to be a perk of the modern presidency — akin to the band’s playing “Hail to the Chief” when he enters the room. Bush is revving up the war threats against Iran. Seymour Hersh reported in the current issue of the New Yorker that the administration is advancing plans to bomb many targets in Iran. British newspapers have confirmed that the Pentagon has a list of thousands of bombing targets. Hardly anyone claims that Iran poses a threat to the United States. Yet few people in Washington seem to dispute the president’s right to attack Iran. It is as if the presidential whim is sufficient to justify blasting ...