[Mb-civic] History Lesson

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

History Debunks Bush Myth
By Jim Lobe 
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=4171
December 18, 2004
U.S. President George W. Bush is not known for his 
love either of books or of history. 
Nonetheless, he has frequently been compared to two 
former presidents who were both avid readers and even 
writers of history – Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. 
Both former leaders also figure large in the historical 
imagination of some of Bush's key cabinet officials and 
supporters. 
Likewise, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 
Vice President Dick Cheney have extolled "TR" as a model of 
presidential leadership and nationalism. "Aggressive fighting 
for the right is the noblest sport the world affords," goes one 
of Roosevelt's pithier proverbs (along with "Walk softly and 
carry a big stick"), which is engraved on a bronze plaque that 
sits proudly on the desk of Rumsfeld's Pentagon office. 
Indeed, the "national greatness" thesis propounded by 
the neoconservative founders of the Project for the New 
American Century (PNAC), whose charter members in 1997 
included Rumsfeld, Cheney, and more than half a dozen 
others who would occupy top foreign-policy posts in the 
Bush administration, derives directly from Roosevelt and his 
"imperialist" associates of the late 1800s. 
While TR has been held up as one key historical 
model for Bush, a second predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, 
whose entry into the First World War was justified as a 
"crusade to make the world safe for democracy," has been 
cited as another. 
Indeed, the allegedly pacifying, as well as freedom-
loving, impact of democracy, according to the "Bush 
Doctrine," has become the after-the-fact justification for his 
invasion of Iraq and the "Greater Middle East Initiative." 
To the administration's neoconservative boosters, 
Bush represents a synthesis of the wisdom of the two 
presidents – the Republican realist and the Democratic 
idealist – who are among the most beloved in the generally 
hazy historical memory of the nation. 
But according to the The Folly of Empire, a book 
published this fall by John Judis, this interpretation of 
history is nonsense. 
Judis, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment 
for International Peace and a veteran journalist who, rare 
among the breed, has actually studied U.S. history and the 
ideas that have animated it, agrees that both Roosevelt and 
Wilson, like Bush, were very interested in spreading U.S. 
influence and ideals to other countries. 
But unlike Bush, he argues, both predecessors 
learned from their experience that doing so unilaterally and 
through the use of force was destined to fail. 
Those lessons were also learned exceptionally well by 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt one generation later, and, with 
occasional but predictably disastrous deviations – such as 
the Vietnam War – generally followed by post-Second World 
War presidents to the great benefit of the United States, 
according to Judis. 
The problem today, in his view, is that the 
accumulated wisdom of those precepts has been cast aside 
by the unilateralist and coercive trajectory of Bush's foreign 
policy after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 
Judis' analysis, which usefully covers the religious 
antecedents of the sense of "mission" that has characterized 
much of American foreign policy thinking since the 
Mayflower discharged its Puritan cargo at Plymouth Rock 
nearly 400 years ago, focuses in particular on two more-or-
less forgotten guerrilla wars that deeply affected his two main 
president-protagonists. 
In Roosevelt's case, the bloody insurgency against the 
U.S. occupation in the Philippines that followed the 1898 
Spanish-American War soured his youthful war spirit, which 
was itself based largely on the theories of Teutonic and 
Anglo-Saxon racial superiority widely held by U.S. and 
European elites at the time. 
Promoting those ideas – and the notion that 
Washington had a moral responsibility to spread "civilization" 
to the darker races – was a small, somewhat incestuous 
group of Anglophile "imperialists" who bear an uncanny 
resemblance to the neoconservatives and their nationalist 
fellow travelers of today. 
The group consisted of influential lawmakers, defense 
officials, authors, journalists and essayists, including 
Roosevelt himself, who, working with sympathetic media 
magnates, prepared the ground for war with Spain as the 
first step toward making the United States a global player on 
a par with or even exceeding Europe's imperial powers. 
To these war boosters, the idea that Cubans and 
Filipinos would welcome U.S. troops as "liberators" rather 
than "occupiers" was gospel. 
Washington's swift victory over Spain confirmed to 
them – and indeed much of the nation – that Washington 
could indeed work its will on the world at a relatively small 
price. But as Roosevelt presided over the fierce nationalist 
insurgency and the rising cost in U.S. and Filipino lives, he 
and the public appeared to lose their appetite for the "noblest 
sport." 
By 1907, TR had determined the United States would 
have to give independence to the islands "much sooner than I 
think advisable from their own standpoint." 
He called the Philippines "our heel of Achilles" in the 
face of rising Japanese power, saw that the U.S. position in 
Asia could only be protected through cooperative action with 
its allies there, and pulled Washington's defense perimeter 
back to Hawaii. 
By 1910, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize for 
concluding the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt was actively 
promoting a "League of Peace" based on international 
agreements and a "world movement" for civilization. The 
Roosevelt of 1910 was a very different man from the youthful 
warrior whose aphorisms are beloved by the war hawks of 
today. 
Wilson's own religious roots and sense of mission 
were even stronger than Roosevelt's, according to Judis, but 
it was his 1913 intervention against Gen. Victoriano Huerta 
in Mexico that tempered his conviction that Washington's 
role, as he had applauded it in the Philippines, was to teach 
Latin Americans "to elect good men." 
After expecting that Marines landing in Tampico 
would be greeted as liberators, Wilson found instead all of 
Mexico united in a nationalist backlash. He asked Argentina, 
Brazil, and Chile to negotiate a face-saving solution. 
The lesson was conveyed to war secretary, Lindley 
Garrison, who had urged that U.S. forces march on Mexico 
City. "There are in my judgment," wrote Wilson, "no 
conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us 
to direct by force or by threat of force the internal processes 
of what is profound revolution, a revolution as profound as 
that which occurred in France." 
The experience was to inform his belief in self-
determination, even for those whom Roosevelt believed to be 
inferior peoples, set the stage for the Fourteen Points that 
Wilson brought to Versailles after the First World War, and 
confirm that unilateral U.S. action was not only morally 
questionable, but counterproductive at a practical level. 
And although Wilson failed to bring the country into 
the League of Nations due to personal inflexibility and a 
devastating stroke, he had set the ideological stage on which 
25 years later Franklin Roosevelt would found a new 
multilateral order designed in major part to dismantle the 
imperialism of the previous century. 
"[Theodore] Roosevelt quietly abandoned the project of 
[U.S.] imperial expansion that he had advocated as a young 
assistant secretary of the navy, but Wilson had made explicit 
what was merely implicit in Roosevelt's actions," according to 
Judis. 
"Americans would differ over the next decades as to 
how zealously they should attempt to dismantle other 
nations' empires, but no president for the remainder of the 
twentieth century would advocate the growth of an American 
empire." 
The 21st century, of course, has so far taken a 
different course.



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