This blog's name is a reference to David Hackett Fischer's work Albion's Seed . Here's an interesting interview with Fischer.
Much of the interview is about historical stuff, but the following comment on the Iraq war is interesting:
TAE: Are there lessons we might draw from Washington’s Crossing that would apply to the current Iraq war?
FISCHER: I wrote that book before the Iraq war, and I think the answer is yes—not only from Washington’s Crossing but also from Paul Revere’s Ride. In the past, we’d gotten into wars in two different ways. Some of our leaders were very careful to, as Sam Adams said, stay in the right and put your enemy in the wrong. They were careful about who fired the first shot. Not only at Lexington and Concord but also George Washington, Lincoln, and FDR in 1941. On the other side are figures in American history who adopted the doctrine of preemption, always with disastrous results. General Gage in 1774 decided he would make a preemptive strike against the armaments of New England. Jefferson Davis and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explicitly justified the attack on Fort Sumter as a preemptive strike. What they did was to unite their opponents and divide their supporters.
I believe that we should have gone to war against Saddam Hussein, but we should have done it in a different way. He gave us a cause for war almost every week—firing on our aircraft, supporting Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines when they were murdering American missionaries, subsidizing terror bombers in the Middle East who were killing American civilians. We had cause for war against this man. I think the Baathists were as much of a menace to us as al-Qaeda or the Iranian leaders. They are our mortal enemies, and we have to deal with them.
But we did it the wrong way. We divided our supporters. We rallied our enemies. We did it on a shoestring. We did it not only as we did in Vietnam—trying to fight a major war without raising taxes—but we tried to fight a major war while we reduced taxes.
I still have high hopes for Iraq. I think there’s something going right over there. This great experiment in opening society in Iraq could still succeed. It will be a very long labor, and we have in the past sometimes shown remarkable stamina. We were 40 years in the Cold War, which is really quite amazing. I hope we can find the stamina to stay with this one.
I also liked this exchange:
TAE: Your first book was about the Federalist Party—conservatives navigating the Jeffersonian era. If you look at the kind of government we have now, did Hamilton and the Federalists really win?
FISCHER: I don’t think of Hamilton as the model Federalist. The most important Federalist, I think, was George Washington. But there have been extraordinary reversals, like Abraham Lincoln’s story of the two wrestlers on the frontier who wrestled themselves into each other’s coats. So that lobbyists on K Street look like friends of Hamilton and talk like Thomas Jefferson. (Emphasis added.)
It’s these interesting permutations and the way these legacies persist that are more striking than a single line of apostolic descent from any group in early America.
RTWT, as they say.
Posted by James C. Bennett at February 2, 2006 04:47 PMThanks for the link to the interview. I came over a while ago when I saw your blog's name, hoping there was a connection to my favorite non-fiction book.
Bill Bryson mentions the book in his Made In America -- which I recently panned on my own site, BTW.
Posted by: Assistant Village Idiot at February 2, 2006 07:21 PMBill Bryson mentions the book in his Made In America -- which I recently panned on my own site, BTW.
Could you give us the link to your review? Thanks.
Posted by: Jim Bennett at February 2, 2006 07:27 PMActually, the part about Iraq seems silly, not interesting. Given that he claims Iraq did, inded, offer of plenty of provocation, how can he then try to lump us in with Gage, Davis, and Stephens?
I think he's right about the different types of war the US has gotten into. The way I think of it is that the different American midsets, based ultimately on the regional settlement streams, mobilize for war in different ways, for different reasons, and with different expectations. Many American wars were gone into without the assent of all the various "cultural nations" (as I call them in my book) and as a result encountered dissent and lackluster support in parts. The Mexican War, for example, was only really enthusiastically supported by Dixie (you could call it the war the South actually won -- and that victory gave them the false sense that the Yankees just couldn't and wouldn't fight.)
When Fischer talks about maneuvering the enemy into firing the first shot, that has to do with buying the assent of those cultural nations that did not have a natural reason for supporting war.
He is wrong that any of the provocations of Saddam could have created the universal buy-in that WWII had. (WWII was almost the only American war that had full buy-in from all cultural nations, and that was only because the American left was out to save the Homeland of Socialism). No matter how much provocation we had from Saddam, the war would have been opposed by the hard left and many of their sympathisers
Posted by: Jim Bennett at February 2, 2006 11:40 PMI don’t believe that Mexican American war fits into this theory. The efforts at the time to put the U.S. “in the right” were laughably thin. What carried the day was a ruthless and determined President Polk and a small, well-led, professional Army and Marine Corps. The march on Mexico City was the 19th century equivalent Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The war was a rousing success for the Americans. They acquired the huge swath of land that became the American Southwest. Once the treaty was signed, they marched home and left the Mexicans to deal their own problems.
The success of the war became the historical justification.
Bram, my point was that the Mexican War was carried out without the buy-in of all the regions of the country. There was protest from Greater New England, from both Thoreau and Lincoln, for instance.
Posted by: Jim Bennett at February 3, 2006 09:21 AMJim,
No kidding about New England! Doesn't everyone remember:
"What are you doing in there???"
"No, what are you doing out there???"
(Conversation between Emerson and Thoreau, when the former came to visit the latter in jail for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the war.)
Posted by: Kirk Parker at February 3, 2006 07:24 PMGlad to give you the link
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/
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