By Bob Livingston
War is a very American thing.
No country has been involved in more wars than the U.S. in the last 250 years.
In fact, you can count on one hand the number of years that America has not been involved in a war since the war after the “war to end all wars.” In other words, since World War II ended in 1945, America has been involved in a war or wars somewhere in all but five years.
Three more U.S. Marines died in April in Afghanistan in a war that has slogged on for almost 18 years. No one can explain why Americans are still dying protecting Afghanistan’s poppy fields for the “enemy” Taliban. Afghanistan is the world’s leader in opium production, and the black market opium trade funds both the Taliban and the “legitimate” Afghan government. Nor can anyone explain why we’re fruitlessly propping up a failed puppet government that will fall as soon as American troops leave.
We’re certainly not fighting there to apprehend Osama bin Laden, the purported mastermind and financier of the 9/11 attacks — if you believe the official narrative. He was out of Afghanistan within months of the opening of hostilities and he’s dead and gone; shot down by Navy Seals in Pakistan.
Nor are we seeking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported “principal architect” of the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in 2003, renditioned to a number of CIA black sites, tortured with extreme prejudice, and now resides in Guantanamo Bay.
Any al-Qaida operatives who might have assisted in the planning and carrying out of the attacks are doubtless long since gone, either in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen or Syria. They are, that is, unless we’ve armed them and shielded them as we did in Syria.
|
|
Afghanistan has served as a breakwater for many empires. The Meads and Persians, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Indo Greeks, the Turks, the Mongols, the British and the Soviets all tried and failed in Afghanistan.
Truth be told, the last 74 years of American empire have been little different as far as wars are concerned. Our country has been at war for 226 of its 242 years of existence.
America’s wars have several things in common. One is, they aren’t fought for the reasons most often stated. Two is, the country’s leaders lie to the public about how easy a war will be to fight and win, and how long it will take.
For instance, the Afghanistan war was unnecessary if it was fought for the stated reason: To apprehend or kill those responsible for 9/11. That’s what George W. Bush said, and that provided the “legitimacy” to attack Afghanistan, if you believe the official narrative that bin Laden was the culprit.
But the Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden — both before and after 9/11. After 9/11 the Taliban only requested some evidence of bin Laden’s guilt. (I note here that bin Laden was never listed on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor has he ever been indicted for the 9/11 attacks, like most of the other suspects were.) There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor was there a nexus between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden or al-Qaida, despite government propaganda to the contrary. So we were lied into an Iraq war — another war seemingly without end.
Being lied into war is a precedence established beginning America’s first war under the Constitution. On June 18, 1812, President James Madison signed into law the declaration of war against Great Britain and the War of 1812 began.
The idea of making war on Great Britain was not a particularly popular one in Congress. The declaration passed the House 79-49 and the Senate just 19-13. A number of New England States even discussed “separation,” the word of the day for secession, over the war and the later debt it caused.
At the time, Great Britain was, along with other European nations, attempting to beat back Napoleon’s designs on Europe, and had been for almost a decade. Both England and France were attempting to starve each other and were hindering, stopping, boarding and seizing the cargo of American ships attempting to trade with the two nations. But England went one step further: It began conscripting American sailors it claimed were deserters.
Under English law, anyone born in England was a British subject whether he claimed to be American or not. Some sources say British ships seized about 400 American merchant ships and as many as 6,000-10,000 sailors in the run-up to the war.
As British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh said: “England was fighting the battle of the world, as well as for her own existence as an independent Nation, she required the service of all her subjects.”
And that’s what Americans were told, but the war was about much more than that. In fact, Great Britain, not needing to open another front abroad while it was engaged in an epic struggle at home, promised to end the practice of conscription in order to avoid war and offered to release all sailors wrongly conscripted. Madison ignored British overtures.
A faction in Congress known as the “War Hawks” had been advocating for a war against Great Britain for several years in an effort to launch an invasion into Canada to expand American borders northward. The war would give them the pretense they needed and a three-pronged invasion of Canada was begun.
It was expected by many to be an easy venture. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina predicted it would take about four weeks. Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.”
Like all wars, this one was not as easy or quick as politicians predicted. And like all wars it resulted in many unintended consequences.
American forces were badly beaten, and America’s fledgling Navy — though able to defeat the inferior British frigates sent to America in one-on-one encounters — proved insufficient to fend off a British invasion. British troops marauded up and down the eastern seaboard, took Washington, D.C., burned the White House, the Capitol, and other government buildings in retaliation for the burning of several Canadian buildings by U.S. soldiers.
The British expanded the war into America’s interior by employing an amalgamation of American Indian tribes under the leadership of Shawnee War Chief Tecumseh. Although the Indians did not care for the British, they hated American settlers and their ongoing encroachments and treaty violations even more. For the Indians, it was an alliance of convenience. Indians engaged American forces in at least 40 significant engagements during the war, often fighting with either overt or covert British help.
The Michigan Territory fell into British hands and a November raid by Americans into Upper Canada was a disaster. British troops occupied Maine. New York City and Philadelphia were blockaded, and British ships bottled up the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.
By late in 1814, the U.S. economy was in the tank. Imports and exports had fallen dramatically, and U.S. coffers were bled dry. On Nov. 19, 1814, the U.S. Treasury defaulted. Banks were facing failure and the government permitted them to suspend specie payments. Militias were beginning to rebel.
This occurred despite the fact that just two months prior, on Sept. 11, 1814, U.S. troops had achieved their most significant victory of the war when Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough destroyed a British squadron on Lake Champlain, forcing the British to abandon their siege of the U.S. fort at Plattsburg and retreat to Canada on foot; and when Francis Scott Key had on September 14 watched Fort McHenry withstand a British bombardment, for which he subsequently penned the words that are now set to music as the Star-Spangled Banner.
Those American victories dashed Great Britain’s hopes of gaining significant concessions from the U.S. in peace talks and the British sold out their Indian allies by dropping its insistence of the establishment of a buffer state between the U.S. and Indian territories.
Prime Minister Liverpool gave up trying to teach the Americans a lesson, saying: “We might certainly land in different parts of their coast, and destroy some of their towns, or put them under contribution; but in the present state of the public mind in America it would be in vain to expect any permanent good effects from operations of this nature.” And Liverpool also recognized a growing distaste of the war back home.
The Treaty of Ghent that ended the war was signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. Word of the treaty did not reach British and American troops in New Orleans in time to stave off the famed Battle of New Orleans that was won by American troops under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson from December 24 to January 8.
But at least Madison followed the Constitution and got a declaration of war from Congress. American presidents no longer even bother with that formality anymore, and have not since World War II, choosing instead to lie about what they are and call them something other than wars.
The U.S. is currently involved in a number of wars, all on false pretenses. For instance, the war in Syria was started to “combat ISIS” and to depose Bashar Assad because he’s an “evil dictator who uses chemicals on his own people. The truth is America’s intelligence apparatus through America’s allies funded and equipped ISIS to rise up and overthrow Assad for a pipeline to transport oil and natural gas to Eastern Europe and cut out Russia.
The war party is currently trying to foment wars with Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other places on false pretenses.
Wars are not about freedom and “democracy” as we’re told by the establishment. Wars benefit the elite, the banksters and the military-industrial complex to the detriment of the people, their liberty and livelihoods.
