There are actual reasons that nations go to war, and then there are the excuses. The excuses are used because, except when war is resorted to for self-defense, the true reasons for war are rarely such that a nation would be proud to announce them. Those reasons of course include land grabs and a host of related imperialist motivations, such as access to markets, natural resources, military bases, or the labor of a nation’s people. To admit to such reasons would make the aggressor nation look bad – both to the world and, more important, to its own people.

There are many reasons why it is very important to governments that their actions, especially their decisions to go to war, appear virtuous to their nation’s citizens. In democracies, that is necessary in order to get re-elected. But any form of government feels the need to appear virtuous to its own people. People are much more likely to protest or rebel against a government that they consider illegitimate. Furthermore, appeal to “patriotism” is one of the surest means of convincing a nation’s young men and women to fight and risk their lives for it. Who would want to risk their life for a war that s/he considered to be rooted in a land grab, profiteering, or imperialism?

The history of the United States of America, contrary to the claims of its nationalists and militarists that it is the greatest force for good in the world, has been little or no different in that respect. Our nation has been involved in a multitude of wars and various covert actions since its founding in 1776. For most of those wars and covert actions, its excuses have been far different from its real motivations – whether conscious or not.

I strongly believe that it is important that Americans understand the real motivations for its nation’s wars, rather than passively accept the excuses that they’re offered. One major reason that I feel this way is that if Americans understood the real reasons for their nation’s wars, wars would become politically much less feasible than they are now. That is why I so hate the “national security” excuse for withholding information from us, the American people. National security, bullshit! The reason for withholding such information from us is almost always something totally different. It is to blind us to the real reasons for war, so that we will accept them or actively fight in them.

So why do I have such strong feelings against war? I wasn’t always like this. I was brought up to believe, like most Americans, that the wars our country fights in are almost always necessary and morally justified. But I have always been very interested in history, and the more I read the more I realize that my past feelings about American wars were based more on the propaganda I was fed than on actual facts.

I have come to realize that beyond the horrible costs in human lives (both our and theirs) and treasure, most of our nation’s wars have been fought primarily for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many. This cannot continue. Given world-wide crises such as widespread poverty and hunger, resource depletion and global warming, future life on our planet seems marginally sustainable even without war. We must work together to solve our problems. Otherwise world civilization as we know it will meet its final catastrophe.


UNITED STATES EXCUSES FOR WARS

Our excuses for war can be divided into three major eras: Pre-Cold War; Cold War; and the “War against Terror”. Prior to the Cold War, we usually didn’t have a consistent enemy, so we had to come up with a different reason for each war or covert action that we engaged in. During the Cold War, it was much easier to come up with an excuse. All we had to do was claim that a nation was “Communist” or “socialist” or even merely likely to be taken over by Communists. No further justification was needed. A similar principle applies to our “War on Terror”. All we have to do to justify a war or any other belligerent action against a nation is claim that the nation harbors terrorists.


Pre-Cold War military actions

The Indian Wars
When European colonists first made contact with Native North Americans, it is estimated that the population of Native North Americans was anywhere between about one million and twelve million. By 1900 their numbers had dwindled to about 237 thousand.

Some date the first hostile encounter between the European colonists and the Native North Americans to 1636. Much of the period between then and December 1890 was characterized by intermittent warfare and lesser hostilities, as the European-Americans spread throughout the continent and the population of Native Americans was pushed Westwards, confined to reservations, and decimated – due to inferior weaponry and high susceptibility to European diseases, especially smallpox. This history is summed up on the book jacket of “North American Indian Wars”, by Richard H. Dillon:


I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out to say that the major motivation for these wars on the part of the European-American colonists prior to 1776, and the United States of America after 1776, was the desire for land. Of course, the new Americans had to put some favorable spin on this. They did so mainly by justifying their aggression on the basis that the Native Americans were “savages”, “uncivilized”, etc. Guenter Lewy describes what happened in similar terms, using somewhat different language:


I would highly recommend “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee – An Indian History of the American West”, by Dee Brown. In the last chapter of her book, Brown describes the last major battle of the Indian wars. In late December 1890, the Indians surrendered at Wounded Knee, and the American Colonel told them to disarm. They did so, but the Americans demanded a weapons search. There may have been some miscommunication, and then there followed an altercation between one of the Indian Chiefs and the soldiers. A gun went off, and then a massacre followed:


The Mexican War
Like the Indian wars, the Mexican-American War was all about land. First there was a dispute over where the Texas border with Mexico lay. The United States claimed it to be the Rio Grande, while Mexico claimed it to be the Nueces River. The United States also wanted portions of California, and in November of 1845 sent a secret representative to Mexico City to settle the Texas border dispute and also to buy portions of California for $25 million. The Mexican government, in a state of chaos at the time, refused the offer.

President James K. Polk, apparently because he wanted a war which he believed would result in major additions to U.S. territory, sent U.S. troops into the disputed territory. Those troops were attacked by Mexican forces on April 25, 1846, resulting in the deaths of 11 U.S. soldiers. President Polk requested a declaration of war from Congress, and Congress obliged him on May 13.

It is also important to note that Southerners were much more favorably disposed to war with Mexico than were Northerners. Since Mexico was south of the United States, it was generally assumed that any territory acquired from a war with Mexico would eventually become slave states, which would add to the political power of the South and result in the spread of slavery, which most Southerners strongly favored.

As a result of its victory in the war, 1.2 million square miles, which today make up a large portion of our southwest, were added to U.S. territory.

Hawaii – The United States’ first overseas conquest
Stephen Kinzer, In his book, “Overthrow – America’s history of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq”, explores 14 instances of regime change, overt or covert, by the United States since 1893. The pre-Cold War events, discussed in this post, involved Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

In January 1993 word got out that Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii was planning to proclaim a new constitution, one that would place more power in the hands of the Hawaiian people and weaken the power of the wealthy White landowners who essentially ruled Hawaii. The ruling clique was not pleased about that, and they conspired to overthrow the Queen. They prevailed upon John L. Stevens, the American Minister to Hawaii, to officially proclaim a provisional government for Hawaii, knowing that he had the support of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, as well as an American gunboat waiting in the harbor and 162 armed American soldiers. Queen Liliuokalani, recognizing the futility of challenging American military power, wrote and signed a document that ceded her country to the United States.

The Spanish-American War and its offshoots
The principal excuse for the U.S. declaration of war against Spain, on April 19, 1998, was the February 15, 1998 blowing up of the Maine, which killed 250 American sailors. Though the cause of the explosion was never determined, American expansionists blamed it on Spain in order to provide an excuse for war. It is relevant to note that the battleship Maine had been sent to Havana when it appeared that the Cuban rebellion against Spain was on the verge of success and Cuban rebel leaders were promising that once Cuban rule was established they would initiate sweeping social reforms, including land redistribution.

The other main excuse for the war was to bring “freedom” to Cuba, though Cuba did not want and was very suspicious of our “help”. And, since the United States not only “freed” Cuba, but Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well, which had also been under Spanish rule, it decided to take all three of those countries under its wing, notwithstanding the fact that that was the last thing they wanted. So, following the American victory, the “Treaty of Paris” between the United States and Spain, signed on December 10th, 1998, ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.

Cuba
To persuade Cuba to accept U.S. assistance, Congress attached the “Teller Amendment” to their war proclamation, which stated that we would leave Cuba after the war was over.
American forces landed in Cuba in July 1898, and by August 12th the war was over. But President McKinley then rejected the Teller Amendment, claiming that Cubans were not capable of self-government and that U.S. control of Cuba was necessary for our own defense. Accordingly, on May 22, 1903, the United States and Cuba finalized the Platt Amendment, a treaty that determined the relationship between Cuba and the United States for the next several decades. Essentially, it gave Cubans permission to govern themselves as long as they allowed the United States to veto any decision that it so chose.

Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico had taken advantage of an offer by Spain to increase their autonomy and elect themselves a new government, which began to operate on July 17th, 1898. Eight days later the U.S. marines landed in Puerto Rico and raised the American flag. Before “freeing” the Puerto Ricans from Spanish “oppression”, the American commander made clear the good intentions of his country:


The war in Puerto Rico was short and resulted in a mere nine American fatalities. Puerto Rican semi-independence had lasted eight days.

The Philippines
Imperialist control over the Philippines proved much more difficult. Many U.S. Senators denounced the Treaty of Paris as an imperialist land grab – which of course it was. The main arguments in favor of approving it and thereby risking war with the Philippines were the commercial and strategic advantages that control of the Philippines would give to the United States, and of course our need to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos (Most Filipinos were Catholic, but few Americans knew that.) The Treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 57-27.

President McKinley proclaimed sovereignty over the Philippines on December 11, 1998, the day after the Treaty of Paris was signed. But the Filipinos had declared independence on June 12th. Desiring American imperialistic control over their nation no more than Spanish imperialistic control, the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed on January 23rd, 1899, and it declared war on the United States occupiers twelve days later.

A vicious guerilla war ensued, lasting three and a half years, from February 1899 until the middle of 1902. It was characterized by widespread torture, rape, pillage, and the frequent refusal of the American military to make a distinction between civilians and the Filipino military. Rationalizations provided for this behavior included the brutal behavior by the Filipino “savages” (true, but who was invading whose country?) and the claim that the American atrocities were the work of a few “bad apples” (not true at all). By the time that the U.S. had “pacified” the Philippines, the dead included 4,374 American soldiers, 16 thousand Filipino guerillas, and 20 thousand Filipino civilians.

Regime change in Nicaragua and Honduras – U.S. intervention for the benefit of wealthy American business interests
In 1909, William Howard Taft, who was especially sympathetic to wealthy businessmen, came to the Presidency and appointed a strongly pro-business Secretary of State, Philander Knox. Taft and Knox were highly receptive to the complaints of wealthy American businessmen.

Nicaragua
The complaints of American business interests against the new nationalist President of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, increased when Zelaya began to borrow money from European rather than American banks. That led President Taft to declare that the United States would no longer “tolerate and deal with such a medieval despot”. Consequently, American businessmen formed a conspiracy to overthrow Zelaya. However, the “rebellion” was on the verge of failing, when Zelaya provided an American excuse for intervention by ordering the execution of two of the rebellion’s leaders, who happened to be American citizens. Knox excoriated Zelaya for that, and Taft responded by ordering warships to Nicaragua. Zelaya resigned in order to stave off an American attack on his country. But the new Nicaraguan president tried to suppress the “rebellion”.

The United States Marines then intervened “to protect American lives”. The “rebellion” was consequently successful, and the United States installed its own puppet president. Thus began American rule over Nicaragua.

Honduras
President Taft and Secretary of State Knox disapproved of the President of Honduras in 1911, Miguel Davila. They considered him too liberal and independent, and he borrowed from European banks. So they asked him to transfer his country’s debt to J.P. Morgan, who would then oversee the Honduran treasury.

The banana tycoon, Samuel Zemurray, who owned a good deal of land in Honduras, hired himself four men to organize an insurgency, including Manuel Bonilla, whom Zemurray intended for insertion as his puppet President of Honduras. Zemurray’s mercenary insurgents invaded Honduras in December 1911. With the U.S. military standing by to inhibit retaliation by the Honduran government, by January 25th, 1912, the “rebels” had won some big battles. Continued U.S. military intervention led to the replacement of the Honduran president by Bonilla in February, 1912.

Later, a New Orleans prosecutor indicted some of the Americans involved in the insurgency for the violation of neutrality laws. But Taft ordered the charges dropped, and the prosecutor complied.


The Cold War

The right wing attacks against President Obama (and presidential candidate Obama before that) for being “socialist” have a very interesting and sad history in the United States. This type of attack is by no means new. In fact, it dates back to the onset of the labor movement in our country in the mid-19th Century. I discuss it in some detail in “The Century and a Half War Against Socialism in the United States”. A book on the subject that I would highly recommend is “Death in the Haymarket – A story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America”, by James Green.

The war against socialism in our country has been largely successful. It made the words “socialism” and “Communism” into words of abuse, in many respects similar to how the word “terrorism” is regarded in our country today. It fueled the Cold War and the McCarthyism that accompanied it.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a sort of counter-attack against it, as he brought our country out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Though he didn’t actually use the word “socialism”, many of his New Deal policies that led us out of depression, such as the Social Security program that still protects so many Americans against the hardships of retirement today, have characteristics of socialism.

But shortly after FDR died, less cool heads prevailed, and so began the Cold War. The Cold War had two major causes. One, the most obvious, was that following World War II, the only nation in the World that rivaled the military power of the United States, the Soviet Union, was ruled by a ruthless, psychopathic, maniacal tyrant. It was natural to fear the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, especially after his country developed the atomic bomb in 1949. The fact that Stalin and his country were Communist was coincidental to the fact that he was a ruthless dictator. 99% of ruthless dictators in the history of the world have not been Communists. But no matter. The fact that the ruthless tyrant who ruled the country that posed the greatest military threat to our country was Communist provided the excuse that the right wingers needed to equate Communism itself with evil and thereby fuel the Cold War for more than four decades.

Essentially, it gave the wealthy conservative elite of our society the excuse to treat with contempt anyone who advocated laws and policies that benefit approximately the less wealthy and powerful 98% of our population, and especially the poor. They accused (and still do) anyone who advocated those policies of being “socialists” and of engaging in “class warfare”.

More than that, it also fueled the Cold War by giving them the excuse to advocate U.S. covert or military intervention against any country that proclaimed itself Communist or socialist, or even merely leftist, or even those who were said to be ripe for Communist takeover. In fact, the domestic and foreign purposes of the war against socialism merged, so that the right wing imperialists could repeatedly kill two birds with one stone: Their imperialistic, militaristic desires were satisfied, while in the process extinguishing any socialist nation that could have provided a good example for the American people to follow. Here are some major examples:

Iran 1953
In 1953 our CIA intervened in Iran to overthrow a popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had done much to improve the lot of the Iranian people. Here is how Stephen Kinzer describes Mossadegh in his book, “All the Shah’s Men – An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”:


In Mossadegh’s place we installed the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. The stated reason for our overthrow of Mossadegh was that we were concerned that he would open his country to Communist influence (his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was also undoubtedly part of the reason).

Indonesia 1965
A power struggle in Indonesia in 1965 that resulted in the overthrow of Achmad Sukarno and the installment of a military dictatorship resulted in the massacre of up to a million people, mostly civilians, including a substantial portion of women and children – which the New York Times called “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history.” With respect to this episode it was later reported by Kathy Kadane that:


Vietnam 1954-73
The Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam. However, the United States, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, intervened to prevent the elections from taking place – and so began our long involvement culminating in an eventual Communist victory, but not until two million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans were dead.

South and Central America
As described by William Blum in his article, “A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present”, the United States intervened in eleven different South and Central American countries during the Cold War including Guatemala, Costa Rica, British Guyana, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The main purpose of these interventions was to facilitate changes to regimes that were friendlier to the United States (and in almost all cases less friendly to the indigenous populations of those countries.) For this purpose, we developed the School of the Americas, which was used to train native personnel in the techniques and ideology of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

An article on reasons to shut down the School of the Americas (SOA) provides a good description of what was involved, and can be summarized as follows:

It describes numerous atrocities committed by graduates of SOA, which are consistent with the SOA curriculum. While SOA torture manuals were withdrawn, their content was never repudiated by SOA. In an attempt to disassociate the ignominious reputation of the SOA from the U.S. government, SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001 by the Bush administration.

School of the Americas training was oriented to support the military and political status quo in each country, which placed the U.S. in opposition to any who seek free speech to discuss problems, alternative means to solve problems, or democratic means to change governments. More specifically, the enemy was identified as the poor, those who assist the poor, such as church workers, educators, and unions, and certain ideologies such as “socialism” or “liberation theology”. All of this just to make sure that Communists or “leftists” didn’t get a foothold in any of these countries.


The “War on Terror”

Although George Bush’s “War on Terror” represented an escalation of U.S. militarism and imperialism to new highs, in many ways it merely represents a continuation of past U.S. history. We still use any number of excuses to justify our militarism and imperialism. But since September 11, 2001, we have a brand new and very effective excuse.

I won’t go into the details of this “war”. The systematic government sponsored torture, which resulted in the deaths of unknown numbers of so-called terrorists, is well known. The abrogation of the eight centuries old right to habeas corpus resulted in the indefinite detention of unknown thousands of men and boys, stripped of any human rights whatsoever. Our president and vice president manufactured evidence of terrorism in order to lead us into a war against a nation that posed no threat to us whatsoever.

“Terrorist” has become the new bogeyman, replacing the “Communist” and “socialist” epithet of the Cold War. Our Congress even passed a law that allowed our President to imprison without recourse anyone whom he declares to be a terrorist. The use of the word “terrorist” has been taken to heights of absurdity. Those who fight to defend their country against U.S. invasions or occupations are called terrorists. Journalists who reported anything that the Bush administration found to be contrary to their propaganda were called terrorists. And they have been accordingly imprisoned or killed for doing so.

One is left to wonder what the right wing militarists would have done if not for the September 11 attacks on our country. As the Neocon organization “Project for the New American Century” so presciently pointed out even before the 9/11 attacks on our country, in the absence of a “new Pearl Harbor” there probably would be no desire by the American public for new military adventures. If the 9/11 attacks had not occurred, how could the Bush administration ever have gained public acceptance for the war that it began planning from the first days of its existence?

Indeed, one must wonder why a nation that spends several hundred billion dollars every year on national defense was unable to prevent airplanes from within its own territories from attacking its largest city and its capitol city… Oh, wait! I forgot! Such a diabolical plot could never have been anticipated… even though our government was warned about it several times.

Perhaps in the future we should spend less time dreaming up and carrying out plans for regime change, bombings, and invasions of sovereign nations, and instead develop some plans to… uh… use some of the airplanes that we spend so many hundreds of millions of dollars on to defend our own country against attacks.


CONCLUSION

The military history of the United States of America (and many other nations as well) is one long sad and, often, shameful story. We have so often used our military or our covert intelligence apparatus to advance the corporate interests of a wealthy elite, to steal the land or resources of other nations, for the purpose of war profiteering, to install governments in foreign lands that are friendly to our corporate interests in preference to the interests of their own people, or simply to destroy governments that adhere to ideologies that our leaders object to.

I deeply resent my tax money being used for such atrocities, conducted in my name. I deeply resent our national news media for accepting this state of affairs and even encouraging it. And I deeply resent our politicians who take advantage of the fears of the American people to lead us into wars that benefit nobody but the corporate interests that bankroll their campaigns.

It is terribly disheartening to me to hear a man as intelligent and, I believe, well intentioned as our new President declare that we should maintain “the strongest military on the planet…” Why? And why is it necessary that we spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined? President Obama is equally vocal about restoring our country’s moral leadership in the world. But if we exhibit moral leadership, then what need do we have for such an obscenely large and expensive military? What else could such a large military be required for, other than to dictate to the whole world that they bow down to our interests? Is that moral leadership?

I recognize of course that such is the cultural expectations in this country, developed over more than two centuries, that it is easy to believe that saying we should maintain “the strongest military on the planet” is necessary in order to get elected and re-elected to the highest office in the land.

Well, somehow those expectations need to be changed. As long as our country believes that it is mandatory that we spend nearly as much on our military as the rest of the world combined; as long as we fail to recognize, and passively accept the multitude of excuses that our politicians use to lead us into war; as long as our presidents can, with impunity, grossly violate our Constitution and our national and international laws in the service of leading us into and fighting an illegal war; then we can forever expect more of the same – until our country and world civilization are destroyed.