Progressive Ponderings: Bipartisan Militarism

by Joe Mayer

We received an e-mail yesterday that solidified our view of the United States as a bipartisan militaristic culture that regardless of which political party occupies the presidency, our number one foreign policy is to impose our will by military force. Fire Dog Lake, a leading progressive blog, intrigued us with “Time for a Pop Quiz!” The quiz challenged the recipient to match seven presidents with excerpts from seven “presidential war speeches.” The time frame covered 1950, Truman, to 2009, Obama. I flunked the pop quiz! Presidential attempts, Democrat or Republican, to justify and sell war to the American people all sound the same.

Congress and the mainstream media play a big role in this. Congress has basically abdicated its constitutional role of being the only authority in our democracy to declare war. Instead, they’re the cash cow providing presidents with the mightiest force in history to be used at will. The media, assessing its role to be always patriotic, promotes American exceptionalism.

President Obama played to the above with two recent speeches: one, announcing a new surge of thirty thousand new troops to be sent to Afghanistan and two, his speech at Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace prize. Both speeches were delivered with his usual eloquent and spellbinding manner. Both speeches convinced many hawks and doves alike. Both claimed the efficacy of war.

The Nobel speech was particularly bothersome. President Obama quoted Martin Luther King, and praised King and Gandhi for the use of nonviolence in achieving civil rights in the U.S. and the overthrow of Empire in India. Then he rejected nonviolence as impractical for the United States.

Obama continued to make his case by moving to Just War Theory. During late 2002 and early 2003 when President Bush was calling for the Iraq invasion, churches throughout our nations held discussions regarding Just War Theory and theologians revisited it to determine if it applied in this case. I recall no consensus.

Just War theory began with Cicero to justify Rome’s imperial ambitions. These ambitions were justified, he concluded, because of Rome’s advanced culture and its benevolence in rule. Sound familiar? Rome assassinated the religious founder of the next Just War promoters.

Early Christians rejected “Just War” and refused to serve in the Roman army. In the fourth century, Roman emperor Constantine declared Christianity legal; later he made it the religion of the state and meddled in its affairs including doctrine. Within a century, Augustine developed a Christian Just War Theory. This is basically the theory which was analyzed and debated prior to the Iraq war and which Obama cited in his Nobel speech. Cicero, Augustine, and later Thomas Aquinas theorized and wrote from positions of power. Their objectives were to justify aggression by declaring it just. Christian moral determination tends to follow the flag.

Massacre of innocents (children, women, the vulnerable, noncombatants), rape, extensive property destruction, cruelty including torture accompany all wars. Does “just” war make massacres just? Does it justify rape? Torture? Cruel domination?

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