The American Mind

Purposeless warmongering

William Hillman

(4/2019) ‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’ — Trump touts troop drawdowns in State of the Union. "Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years," he said. "In Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 7,000 American heroes have given their lives. More than 52,000 Americans have been badly wounded. We have spent more than $7 trillion in the Middle East.

"As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars," he said to bipartisan applause.

Yet members of his own party have pushed back against ending these wars. The U.S. Senate voted 70-26 against a "precipitous withdrawal" of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., then authored legislation and proclaimed that the Republican controlled Senate "will not shrink" from its important role in foreign policy.

Except it already has. The law approving U.S. operations in Afghanistan is nearly two decades old, while the American presence in Syria has no legislative mandate at all. If Congress really wants to keep U.S. forces there, here’s another idea: Instead of a nonbinding resolution itemizing the perils of a drawdown, how about the legislative branch exercise its constitutional duty and affirmatively authorize the use of force?

The tendency of today’s self-described "conservative" politicians to favor unending U.S. military intervention is hard to understand given how poorly such war making has served global peace or any American interest. It boggles the mind all the more because it is steadfast conservatives like Kentucky’s Eugene Siler (1900-1987) who have sometimes been most prescient about purposeless warmongering.

Siler’s example should be better heeded by many of our current leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who send so many of our young servicemen and servicewomen to the Middle East when there is no defensible mission left for the U.S. to perform there.

A devoted Christian who feared the devastation U.S. entry into the Vietnam War would eventually cause, Siler was the lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives opposing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that passed in 1964. (Siler’s dissent among House members often goes unnoticed in the record because he was unable to attend House proceedings that day and instead was "paired" with a member favoring the resolution who also did not attend the vote.)

This infamous legislation, whose own text mischaracterized it as a measure "To Promote the Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Southeast Asia," permitted the president "as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom."

President Johnson based the need for U.S. military action in Vietnam on the assertion that two U.S. ships were subject to a "deliberate" and "unprovoked" attack in international waters. At the time, he promised that "we seek no wider war."

We now know that the resolution did not achieve its stated purpose for "freedom" and that Johnson’s rationale for military action was false.

A conservative realist in the tradition of Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953), Siler knew it even then.

Being virtually alone in dissenting, Siler demonstrated not only forethought but courage as well. Though he retired that year, the quagmire the Vietnam War would become spurred him to seek a U.S. Senate seat four years later. Like the only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin measure, Siler was defeated. Though Johnson had wearied of the presidency, his White House had not tired of its pro-war propaganda campaign, and the war’s eventual ravages upon the nearly 60,000 Americans and over one million Vietnamese who died — not to mention those injured or bereaved — weren’t foreseen by most.

The prudent conservative Siler foresaw those ravages even then.

His resolve steeled by his Baptist faith, Siler was used to taking selfless and sometimes unfashionable positions. He sponsored legislation to prohibit the advertising of alcoholic beverages on interstate media. He vehemently opposed the judicial overreach that removed prayer from public schools. When in private practice as a lawyer, he refused to represent plaintiffs seeking divorces or defendants charged with whiskey-related offenses.

Politicians generally didn’t agree with Siler when he said the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was designed to "seal the lips of Congress against future criticism." Who could argue with him now?

When this self-described "Kentucky Hillbilly" would joke that he was running for president and planned to resign after one day in office, just long enough to order the withdrawal of U.S. troops, he swam against the current and lost re-election. Yet his words have relevance today, with 14,000 of our troops stationed in Afghanistan and 2,000 stationed in Syria.

President Trump has announced plans to begin bringing our boys and girls home, returning about half of our soldiers home from Afghanistan and most of those serving in Syria. Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s reaction so far has been to pass a "sense of the Senate" resolution rebuking the president’s policy.

At what point do we acknowledge that these wars we find ourselves quagmired in were based on misleading and outright false intelligence from the Bush administration? We all watched as Colin Powell the made the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them.

March 31, 2005 - The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reports that the intelligence community was "dead wrong" in its assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the US invasion.

The U.S. has spent $7 trillion dollars since 2001on the Bush-Obama wars and caused the death of 480,000 people. President Trump is right to end them.

The political class suffers from an addiction to endless wars and misguided foreign policies. Since the end of the Soviet Union the U.S. has spent (depending on whose numbers you believe), upwards of $11 trillion dollars of American taxpayers’ money to protect, Germany, England, France, Poland, and the rest of the NATO alliance from an enemy that ceased to exist almost 30 years ago. When President Regain realized that the Soviet Union’s economy was smaller than California’s, he knew it was a paper tiger and could be defeated by outspending them. Today, Russia’s economy is smaller than New York City’s.

At the other end of the globe, China has expanded its military reach throughout Asia, Africa, and into South America without a hint of resistance from the U.S.