By Edwin Cooney
As President Obama administers our national affairs this fall, his most nagging crisis -- tactically, economically, politically and morally -- may well be the war in Afghanistan.
Already, some of those who once patriotically advocated that war in response to 9/11 (including Conservative columnist and author George Will, among others) are now having second, third, and fourth thoughts. Of course, today’s Commander-in-Chief is no longer one of their own political faith, but should that matter? Answer: sure, it matters – even though it shouldn’t.
One of our great American myths is that successful wars make heroes out of presidents. The record, however, looks something like this:
George Washington fought the Revolution as a general not as president,
Andrew Jackson will always be the hero of the Battle of New Orleans while his presidency is subject to critical review.
Abraham Lincoln perhaps came closest to being a presidential war hero, but John Wilkes Booth put an end to that possibility.
William McKinley never reaped any kudos from the 1898 Spanish-American War nor did he seek to do so. (“A full dinner pail” was Bill McKinley’s bid for re-election in 1900 rather than a slogan boasting of “imperial America”.)
Teddy Roosevelt, of course, made political capital of his Spanish-American war experience while running for election as president in 1904, but he was a private citizen, not a president, when he gained and claimed his fame.
President Woodrow Wilson was a political, physical, and emotional wreck after his return from the World War I Paris Peace Conference. (The president would only be a hero to the idealistic once the U.S. Senate defeated our participation in Wilson’s League of Nations).
FDR died before World War II ended thus barring him from enjoying presidential war hero status.
Like Jackson before him, Ike was a military hero rather than a presidential war hero.
Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford all had their fingers burned in Vietnam. President Ronald Reagan found no glory in Beirut, Nicaragua, Granada, or even over Tripoli in 1986. If George Herbert Walker Bush was a presidential war hero after Desert Storm, somebody forgot to tell Pat Buchanan who challenged and critically damaged his 1992 re-election effort. Finally, if young President Bush is a presidential war hero after Iraq, somehow this observer has missed it.
Of course, every wife and mother, every student of history, every citizen, every member of the clergy, and, above all, every soldier wonders why we go to war in the first place.
As Commander-in-Chief under the United States Constitution, the President is responsible for administering a war once it begins, but a declaration of war is the responsibility of Congress.
On our collective behalf, the United States Government has coordinated, funded and led some fifteen foreign wars since George Washington became our first Commander-in-Chief on Thursday, April 30, 1789. Only five of those wars (the War of 1812-15, the Mexican War of 1846-48, the 1898 Spanish-American conflict over the Independence of Cuba, World War I from 1917 to 1918, and World War II from 1941 to 1945) have been declared by Congress. The major reason for that is that modern weapons are so swift and deadly that both the timing and the administration of any foreign conflict can mean millions of lives endangered or lost rather than merely thousands. Thus the intensity, length, and swiftness of wars suddenly beginning or ending appear to be best suited to executive rather than legislative determination.
More to the point, although historians and political scientists offer economics, politics and militarism as the causes of war, I regard these intellectual reasons for war as secondary. The ultimate reason we go to most wars is really very simple. The answer is fear. Fear, as I see it, makes us angry and it is the frightened and angry nation -- not the contented one -- that goes to war.
On that long ago Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt contentedly sat at his desk enjoying his stamp collection. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., however, when Secretary of State Cordell Hull phoned to report that at 12:53 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Japanese air squadrons had begun dropping bombs on our naval base at Pearl Harbor Hawaii, FDR became an angry rather than a contented man. America, shaken by bombs delivered by “the nation of the rising sun,” abandoned its reluctance to become involved in war and became an aroused society.
President Obama thus inherits the worrisome war in Afghanistan as surely as President Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Johnson. However, as I see it, the Afghanistan war will only be truly President Obama’s war when he endorses it through fear and fear’s child — anger.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment