There was a time when the left at least pretended to stand for peace and to oppose excessive militarism and unnecessary wars…but that time, apparently, is long past. Leftists today, motivated by a mindless hatred for President Trump and by identity politics, seem not to care that we still have troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, or that we are aiding Saudi Arabia in a brutal war against Shiite rebels in Yemen, or that we still have contingents of troops (mostly spec ops) in African countries most of us cannot find on a map.
It was not always so. America has a fine tradition of principled opposition to wars and to conscription. Lincoln’s Civil War was never popular; most Northerners would have rather let the South go its way. They may have opposed slavery or desired to preserve the Union, but not to the point of being willing to die for such causes. The most violent draft riots in US history took place in New York City during the Civil War. Europeans in 1914 marched off to war with boundless enthusiasm, but most Americans would have preferred to let the Europeans settle their own problems without our becoming involved.
Most leftist Americans, as well as many Christian patriots, and such well-known figures as Henry Ford actively opposed our entry into the conflict. The America First Committee opposed our involvement in WWII, and at least one massive (but peaceful) anti-war demonstration was held at UC Berkeley. Prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh were America Firsters, and future President Gerald Ford; JFK donated to their cause.
But after FDR cleverly set us up at Pearl Harbor most people believed that we had been unjustly attacked, and the three men mentioned above all joined the military and fought in the war they had hoped to avoid. Korea was an undeclared war which Harry Truman slyly called a “police action” and could have been avoided had we adequately armed South Korea. Much of the domestic opposition was organized by the CPUSA (Communist Party USA); after all, we were fighting against their fellow communists. But by 1953, with our young men being drafted into a war resembling the stalemate of WWI, trenches and all, opposition was becoming very widespread.
Perhaps we learned something from the Korean disaster, because opposition to our next undeclared foreign war was massive in scale. It began, mostly on college campuses, about the time (2/65) that we began regular bombing of North Vietnam. Soon the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) began “teach-ins.” By 11/67 15,058 Americans had died in the conflict; the war was costing us some $25 billion annually; and 40,000 young American men were being drafted every month. On 10/21/67 100,000 protesters gathered around the Lincoln Memorial.
The Communist Tet Offensive in 1/68 disillusioned still more Americans, which was why the Viet Cong carried it out…to influence domestic opinion. By 2/68 only about half of all Americans supported the war. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, leading to further disillusionment with our military leadership and our intelligence community. Much of the opposition came from communists and much was motivated by the draft, but let us remember that millions of loyal Americans also opposed the war.
There is a reason why the Constitution we used to have required that Congress formerly declare war before we begin a long-term commitment overseas. We should never go to war without debating the move first, and only if a majority of the people’s representatives are in favor of it, and only if we are willing to do whatever is necessary to win the war. Yet, having learned nothing, we continue to allow our Presidents to involve us in wars we never debated or voted for, often with insane rules of engagement even worse than the ones that so hampered our troops in Vietnam.
Since Vietnam we have sent troops into Lebanon under President Reagan, where we left our embassy and our Marine barracks unprotected from truck bombs, with disastrous consequences. For that, heads should have rolled, including the barracks commander, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of Defense, and Reagan himself. But in the US government, no one is ever held accountable.
We invaded Grenada and Panama, sent troops into Haiti, lost a Blackhawk helicopter in Somalia and then invited thousands of illiterate Somali criminals and terrorists to come and live in America. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a ruthless tyrant, but he made Iraq an effective counterweight to Iran, but we used his invasion of Kuwait as a justification for attacking his forces in Operation Desert Shield (8/2/90-1/17/91). We weakened Iraq and turned Hussein against us, but left him in power until we invaded in the Iraq War of 2003-2011.
We used the false flag of 9/11 as an excuse to launch, on 10/7/2001, Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan, an operation that has done nothing for our freedom, but has certainly endured…as our nation’s longest war. In Afghanistan we support a government of drug-dealing homosexual child rapists whose army, even with our training and support, is losing the war. On May Day 2011 we sent SEAL team Six to kill Osama bin Laden, alleged mastermind (ask Dick Cheney who was the real mastermind) of 9/11.
And through all this, there has been scarcely a peep of protest from the left…or anyone else, for that matter. Leftists demonstrate, often violently, for imagined police brutality against those sacred cows, the Blacks. They demonstrate for a woman’s right to choose to butcher her unborn child and have taxpayers fund the operation. They riot in protest over our failure to bring the entire Third World into our country and pay for their health care and college indoctrination (education in America is a thing of the past). But we are not fighting communists like them, and there is no draft, so they are not concerned about the killing or the waste of money. And so, little noted and unopposed, the endless wars drag on, and on, and on.
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