Spoiling for a Fight: An Overview of America at War

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(WeeklyHubris)—11/21/11—Born in battle, our nation has a yen to turnplowshares into spears, spoiling for a fight time and again in its history, embroiled in battles minor and major some portions or wholes of 155 years out of its 226 years as a nation.

We’ve outdistanced our nearest contender as wagers of war, Great Britain, by some 48 years. From battles we’ve joined in progress—World Wars One and Two—to those we’ve jump-started on our own—Iraq—we’ve been a bellicose people. Despite our oft-stated yearning for peace, we’ve not been good at keeping it.

Long before we became a nation, and long after we had won our war for independence, we battled Native American tribes, from 1622 in Virginia to 1900 against Apaches in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Most of the hostilities were brief, to be sure, but a few were history-making—the defeat of General Custer, for example. (My count of the years we’ve taken up arms doesn’t include any skirmishes with Native Americans before we claimed nationhood.) Experience gained in pushing Native Americans westward or containing them in areas not to the liking of European settlers proved a great boon when soldiers fighting for liberty engaged standing British troops. Imitating Indian practices yielded tactical advantages, as concealed snipers took out Red Coats marching in formation.

Setting aside the off-and-on clashes with Native Americans, we enjoyed our longest stretch of peace from the end of the War of 1812 until the onset of the war with Mexico in 1845. The horrific bloodshed of the War Between the States which, in casualties, cost the nation well over 600,000 of its finest men, shocked us enough to prefer plowshares until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Once again, I’m not including in my count those periodic pushes against Native American. If I disregard entirely raids against and counterattacks upon Indian tribes, our nation’s second longest rest from battle followed the end of the First World War, a stretch of roughly 21 years. Not a number to boast of for a nation proclaiming itself peace-loving!

Since the armistice of World War Two, with the role of world leader cast upon us, we’ve told Johnny to go marching off to war many times, from Korea to Iraq and Afghanistan and points in between, including a brief invasion of Grenada. Unfortunately for Johnny, he’s been asked to march off to Iraq and Afghanistan more than once in lieu of drafting his non-volunteering friends to take a turn at being shot at or blown up by a roadside bomb.

Largely, we’ve demanded that the have-nots bear the heft in these military adventures, one of which, the Iraqi, with malice aforethought, we created. Here, clearly, spoiling for a fight led George W. Bush and his neo-con backers to send Johnny and Joan packing for Baghdad and other targets in Iraq.

I should say not just neo-con backers, since both houses of Congress and the majority of American citizens lined up solidly behind Bush’s banner, only to find that his photo-op proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” horribly belied actual circumstances.

If the neo-cons can help place a like-minded candidate in the White House, my fear is that Johnny and Joan will head next for Iran, perhaps to join forces from Israel already engaged there.

We need not go looking for fights abroad. With the multitudes of paramilitary units spread out across the nation, we can bring military gear to bear not only on drug-runners but upon citizens gathered to protest some perceived (or actual) wrong in our socioeconomic system. Rather than allow policemen to handle protesters or cult groups, we turn again to forces and tactics used at Waco to oust dissidents. These paramilitary units can become a threat to our democracy if not held in check. Trained and armed as they are, they could readily take charge of cities and states, even the nation.

Over the course of our history, we have looked favorably at presidential candidates with a military background, 31 of our presidents having served in some capacity, from week-end warriors to chief commanders of major military operations, Generals Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower being the most famous.

I choose to end this piece with some facts related to General Eisenhower’s concern about the role of the military in American life.

As informed citizens know, he left his office with a warning to the nation that a threat to our democracy lay in what he called “the military-industrial complex.” That our nation ranks first as suppliers of munitions to other nations spoiling for a fight or acting to protect themselves from countries spoiling for battle, that our unemployment rate would stand at 11.5 percent, instead of just under 10 percent, if so many Americans weren’t busy making arms (see an article published 11/11/11 in The Christian Science Monitor), that states around the nation fight doggedly to keep military installations within their borders for economic reasons all point to the centrality of the industrial-military complex in present-day America.

My concern, sadly, in presenting this brief overview of America at war, is that we have fared badly at making peace and have done so by spoiling for a fight, from the Whiskey Rebellion to our recent intervention in Libya, but as I haste swiftly through American history, I must not leave out the attack on Fort Sumter, the public outcry for a war with Spain, Lyndon Johnson’s deliberate disregard of the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that led to our enmeshment in Vietnam, and Cheney and Bush’s eagerness to bring “shock and awe” to Iraq.

Fighting is in our blood.