ZGram - 11/27/2002 - "The Oval Office Liars Club"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 27, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

With credits to the San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 2002:

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San Francisco Chronicle
November 24, 2002

The Oval Office Liars' Club

By Robert Higgs*

When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie. 
Surveying our history, we see a clear pattern. Since the end of the 
nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public 
about their motives and their intentions in going to war. The 
enormous losses of life, property, and liberty that Americans have 
sustained in wars have occurred in large part because of the public's 
unwarranted trust in what their leaders told them before leading them 
into war.

In 1898, President William McKinley, having been goaded by 
muscle-flexing advisers and jingoistic journalists to make war on 
Spain, sought divine guidance as to how he should deal with the 
Spanish possessions, especially the Philippines, that U.S. forces had 
seized in what ambassador John Hay famously described as a "splendid 
little war." Evidently, his prayer was answered, because the 
president later reported that he had heard "the voice of God," and 
"there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate 
the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them."

In truth, McKinley's motivations had little if anything to do with 
uplifting the people whom William H. Taft, the first Governor-General 
of the Philippines, called "our little brown brothers," but much to 
do with the political and commercial ambitions of influential 
expansionists such as Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, 
Henry Cabot Lodge, and their ilk. In short, the official apology for 
the brutal and unnecessary Philippine-American War was a mendacious 
gloss.

The Catholic Filipinos evidently did not yearn to be "Christianized" 
in the American style, at the point of a Springfield rifle, and they 
resisted the U.S. imperialists as they had previously resisted the 
Spanish imperialists. The Philippine-American War, which officially 
ended on July 4, 1902, but actually dragged on for many years in some 
islands, cost the lives of more than 4,000 U.S. troops, more than 
20,000 Filipino fighters, and more than 220,000 Filipino civilians, 
many of whom perished in concentration camps eerily similar to the 
relocation camps into which U.S. forces herded Vietnamese peasants 
some sixty years later.

When World War I began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson's sympathies 
clearly lay with the British. Nevertheless, he quickly proclaimed 
U.S. neutrality and urged his fellow Americans to be impartial in 
both thought and deed. Wilson himself, however, leaned more and more 
toward the Allied side as the war proceeded. Still, he recognized 
that the great majority of Americans wanted no part of the fighting 
in Europe, and in 1916 he sought reelection successfully on the 
appealing slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War."

Soon after his second inauguration, however, he asked Congress for a 
declaration of war, which was approved, although six senators and 
fifty members of the House of Representatives had the wit or wisdom 
to vote against it. Wilson promised this war would be "the war to end 
all wars," but wars aplenty have taken place since the guns fell 
silent in 1918, leaving their unprecedented carnage-nearly nine 
million dead and more than twenty million wounded, many of them 
hideously disfigured or crippled for life, as well as perhaps ten 
million civilians who died of starvation or disease as a result of 
the war's destruction of resources and its interruption of commerce. 
And what did the United States or the world gain? Only a twenty-year 
reprieve before the war's smoldering embers burst into flame again.

After World War I, Americans felt betrayed, and they resolved never 
to make the same mistake again. Yet, just two decades later, 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the maneuvers by which he hoped 
to plunge the nation once again into the European cauldron. 
Unsuccessful in his naval provocations of the Germans in the 
Atlantic, he eventually pushed the Japanese to the wall by a series 
of hostile economic-warfare measures, issued clearly unacceptable 
ultimatums, and induced them to mount a desperate military attack, 
most devastatingly on the U.S. forces he concentrated at Pearl Harbor.

Campaigning for reelection in Boston on October 30, 1940, FDR had 
sworn: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: 
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Well, 
Peleliu ain't Peoria. Roosevelt was lying when he made his 
declaration, just as he had lied repeatedly before and would lie 
repeatedly for the remainder of his life. (Stanford historian David 
M. Kennedy, careful not to speak too stridently, refers to FDR's 
"frequently cagey misrepresentations to the American public.") Yet 
many, many Americans trusted this inveterate liar, sad to say, with 
their lives, and during the war more than 400,000 of them paid the 
ultimate price.

Among FDR's many political acolytes was a young congressman, Lyndon 
Baines Johnson, who eventually and, for the world, unfortunately, 
clawed his way to the presidency. As chief executive, he had to deal 
with vital questions of war and peace, and like his beloved mentor, 
he relied heavily on lying to the public. In October 1964, seeking to 
gain election by portraying himself as the peace candidate (in 
contrast to the alleged mad bomber Barry Goldwater), LBJ told a crowd 
at Akron University: "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 
10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing 
for themselves."

In 1965, however, shortly after the start of his elected term in 
office, Johnson exploited the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, itself based 
on a fictitious account of an attack on U.S. naval forces off 
Vietnam, and initiated a huge buildup of U.S. forces in Southeast 
Asia that would eventually commit more than 500,000 American "boys" 
to fight an "Asian boy's" war. Some 58,000 U.S. military personnel 
would lose their lives in the service of LBJ's vanity and political 
ambitions, not to speak of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, 
and Laotians killed and wounded in the melee. Chalk up another 
catastrophe to a lying American president.

Now President George W. Bush is telling the American people that we 
stand in mortal peril of imminent attack by Iraqis or their agents 
armed with weapons of mass destruction. Having presented no credible 
evidence or compelling argument for his characterization of the 
alleged threat, he simply invites us to trust him, and therefore to 
support him as he undertakes what once would have been called naked 
aggression. Well, David Hume long ago argued that just because every 
swan we've seen was white, we cannot be certain that no black swan 
exists. So Bush may be telling the truth. In the light of history, 
however, we would be making a long-odds bet to believe him.

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