Well, At Least President Bush Is Trying to Go To War the Right Way

Watching -- and listening -- to the chorus of voices opposing George Bush's call for war on Iraq has stirred ironic thoughts in this historian's mind. No one seems to be aware that he is the first president in our history to try to persuade the American people to wage war by appealing to their heads rather than their instincts.

Let's start with World War II. Merlo Pusey, in 1941 an editorial writer for the Washington Post and later a distinguished biographer, wanted to see America join the struggle against Fascism and Nazism. "Inevitably we had to get into the war," he later said. "I just wish we had done it honestly and openly in our Constitutional way of doing things instead of...by the back door. I think Roosevelt had a moral responsibility for leadership. If he had been less of a politician and more of a statesman, he would have taken a stand instead of trying to do it covertly."

Most historians know what Pusey is complaining about. FDR got elected in 1940 by promising he would never send Americans to fight in a foreign war -- while Army and Navy staffers were concocting a plan to invade Europe in 1943 with five million men. Unable to persuade the Germans to give him an incident that would trigger a declaration of war, he cut off Japan's oil, provoking Tokyo into an attack. He never dreamt they would have the skill and daring to assault Pearl Harbor. He expected the war to start in or around the Philippines. He ordered the admiral in command there to send an armed schooner, the Lanikai, with a mixed Filipino-American crew, into the sea lanes off Asia. When the Lanikai returned to Cavite on hearing a radio flash about Pearl Harbor, the admiral said to her young commander: "I never expected to see you again!" All in all the president's performance was a far cry from the Constitutional way of going to war that the idealistic Pusey wanted.

When we look closely at World War I, things do not get much better. Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out Of War." Five months later, on April 2, 1917, the president went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war. Why? Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in a zone around the British Isles and in the waters off France and Italy's Mediterranean coasts and had sunk four American ships bringing war materiel to England. Wilson called the German decision "a war against mankind" and talked grandiloquently of the heinous violation of American rights and of joining the struggle to make the world safe for democracy. He did not say a word about the British blockade of Germany, against which he had made only a few feeble objections, which London ignored. By 1917 the blockade was causing death rates among German children and the elderly to soar from mass malnutrition.

Today most historians agree that the "right" to ship war materiel to Great Britain never existed. In the 1930s, Congress passed (by huge majorities) a Neutrality Act forbidding trade with belligerints, and Wilson's putative heir, Franklin Roosevelt, signed it. We also do not think there is anything wrong with "unrestricted" submarine warfare -- meaning a submarine firing its torpedoes without warning. That was how the United States Navy's submarines fought in World War II. The grand total of Americans killed by submarines in 32 months of war before April 2 was 197 -- with the Lusitania's 128 accounting for the bulk of that number. That is hardly a war against mankind. As for a war to make the world safe for democracy -- our chief ally, Great Britain, at that time ruled an empire of 440,000,000 people of whom about five percent had a vote. Not by chance did a young woman protestor outside the Capitol wave a sign at Wilson as he arrived to make his speech. It read: "IS THIS THE UNITED STATES OF GREAT BRITAIN?"

Wilson said nothing to the American people about the real reasons for his decision to go to war. He had decided it was the only way he could become an influential player in the peace negotiations. Thanks to British propaganda and their iron control of all cable traffic from Europe, the president and everyone else in his administration were under the illusion that the war was as good as won and there would be no need to send a single soldier to Europe. Also unmentioned was a message from the American ambassador to London, warning that the English were within a few weeks of running out of money. That meant J.P. Morgan and other American banks were going to be left holding hundreds of millions of unpaid war loans -- a catastrophe for the American economy.

Next there are the wars started while passive presidents sat around doing next to nothing. In this category are the War of 1812 and the Spanish American War. The first was initiated by "War Hawks" in Congress, who had decided to do something about the British habit of boarding American merchant ships, occasionally flogging recalcitrant captains, and selecting supposedly English born sailors for their men of war. This had been going on for a decade. An examination of the War Hawks rhetoric makes it clear that they were primarily motivated by the idea of conquering Canada and making themselves and their constituents rich on endless acres of open land. President James Madison simply drifted with this illusionary tide.

As for the Spanish American War, even after someone sank the USS Maine in Havana harbor, President William McKinley resisted going to war. Congress did the orating and declaring and William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer provided reams of spurious facts about the hateful Spaniards in Cuba. We now know the entire affair was a manufactured frenzy, with the Cuban rebels led by Jose Marti (who hated the United States) among the most eager manipulators.

The Mexican War was started by a far more aggressive president. James Polk took office with orders from Andrew Jackson, still the de factor ruler of the Democratic Pary, to acquire Texas and make it an American state. When Texas joined the Union, Mexico threatened war. Polk sent envoys to Mexico City with bags of money but Yanqui hatred was so intense south of the border, no politician dared to accept a dollar. So Polk ordered the United States Army to advance to the Rio Grande. The Mexicans claimed the Texas border should be the Nueces River. The advance to the Rio Grande all but guaranteed a clash between patrolling cavalry. The moment American blood was spilled, Polk asked for and got a declaration of war. On the floor of Congress, Representative Abraham Lincoln made a series of speeches, trying to prove Polk was a warmonger. His reward was an abrupt end to his congressional career.

Thirteen years later, President Lincoln found himself in the tightest imaginable spot. Eight southern states had seceded and formed a confederacy. They had taken over all federal facilities in the South except Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor and Fort Pickens in Florida. Lincoln toyed with giving up both places, in return for a promise by Virginia to stay in the Union. His secretary of state, William Seward, was an enthusiastic proponent of this idea. Seward was ready to concede almost anything to avoid a fratricidal war. But from the Midwest and New England Lincoln was hearing ominous sounds from the anti-slavery wing of the new Republican Party. If he did not stand up to the slavocrats, he was going to be a one-term president. Lincoln decided to ignore southern warnings and try to reprovision Fort Sumter. It was almost a certainty that the ship would be fired on. In fact, before the ship even appeared, the news inspired southern hotheads to start their cannonade on Sumter. The heinous act of firing on Old Glory was what the anti-slavery men needed to trigger huge rallies calling for war. No one, including Lincoln, dreamt it would last four years and kill over a million young Americans.

Would Lincoln have gotten anywhere, calling for a constitutional debate instead of triggering hostilities at Sumter? It would have been a long shot. He was a minority president, elected with only 40 percent of the vote. The bottom line is: he did not try it.

In 20th Century wars, Korea and the Gulf offered Presidents Harry Truman and George H.W. Bush no time to give much thought to the Constitution. They were confronted with a raw exercise of hostile power -- the Communist invasion of South Korea and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They made a decision to fight and persuaded the American people to approve it. It now becomes clear, however, that Mr. Truman erred in not asking for a declaration of war against North Korea. The decision to call the war a "police action" left it and the United States in a Constitutional limbo. A declaration of war might, among other things, have made the Chinese Communists more reluctant to intervene.

Finally we have Lyndon Johnson's decision to turn the police action in Vietnam into an all out war. Here, too, the picture is blurred because we were already fighting an undeclared war in that embattled country. True to his devotion to FDR, Johnson manufactured an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats supposedly attacked an American destroyer, to give him a pretext for escalation. Here, too, the Constitution was in limbo.

So we come to President George W. Bush, calling for war against Iraq. He has presented cogent arguments to America and the United Nations, depicting Saddam Hussein's regime as a menace to the free world's oil supplies and to our ally in the Middle East, Israel. What has he gotten for his earnest efforts? Anti-war protestors making a hero out Saddam Hussein, one of the most vicious dictators on the planet; the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church urging their flock to pray for peace; New York Times columnist Bob Herbert accusing him of spending "billions for bombs and pennies for kids" in need of education; Paris, Berlin and Moscow lining up against a war that might damage their profitable business relationships with Saddam. In the light of past presidential performances, one must simultaneously admire George W. Bush for trying to go to war the constitutional way -- and worry that he may be making a grave mistake. History seems to be telling us honesty is not the best presidential policy. But Bush 43 does not seem intimidated by history's so called lessons, as he demonstrated by gaining rather than losing seats in the midterm elections. Maybe he can be the first president to go to war the right way.