[Dean's World] Dave Price: AlterNet Histories

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Posted by Dave Price:
AlterNet Histories
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1194882440.shtml


   Apropos [1]Dean's link below:

     The world's finest military launches a highly coordinated
     shock-and-awe attack that shows enormous initial progress. There's
     talk of the victorious troops being home for Christmas. But the war
     unexpectedly drags on. As fighting persists into a third, and then
     a fourth year, voices are heard calling for negotiations, even
     "peace without victory." Dismissing such peaceniks and critics as
     defeatists, a conservative and expansionist regime -- led by a
     figurehead who often resorts to simplistic slogans and his
     Machiavellian sidekick who is considered the brains behind the
     throne -- calls for one last surge to victory. Unbeknownst to the
     people on the home front, however, this duo has already prepared a
     seductive and self-exculpatory myth in case the surge fails.
     The United States in 2007? No, Wilhelmine Germany in 1917 and 1918

   Well, two can play at this game.
   Citing a threat to the nation's security, an American President
   launches an invasion of an illiberal land where one ethnosectarian
   group rules over another undemocratically, allowing them few if any
   rights. Most expect a quick victory, but the war drags on, becoming
   the most costly debacle in the nation's history. Some civil rights are
   suspended, and cries that the Constitution is being shredded are heard
   from coast to coast. The President tries to justify the continuing war
   on grounds of democracy and freedom, but critics charge that this was
   not the main rationale given for invasion, and that he has ruined
   these values in their own country. As the casualties mount and the
   President's popularity plummets, former generals are some of his
   fiercest critics. Few Americans believe the effort was worth the cost,
   and public opinion is strongly for withdrawal.
   Iraq 2007? No, the American Civil War, circa summer 1864.
   One has to wonder how much darker our own history would be had the
   1860s peace movement succeeded, and the American South had continued
   on as a collection of apartheid slave states with millions of
   African-Americans still living in chains.
   Antiwar movements are a peculiar facet of liberal democracy that can
   be both our greatest strength, to the extent that they keep us from
   even contemplating wars against other liberal democracies, but also
   our greatest weakness when they undermine the fight against illiberal
   enemies of democracy that enslave and oppress our human brethren.

References

   1. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67354/?page=entire