What are we so afraid of?
Bombing Libya was never popular. Liberal backers of humanitarian bombing hold it up as a model, but for many years to come the war that keeps war spending and war waging acceptable in the greatest number of minds will continue to be World War II.
This is quite a paradox, because World War II was among the worst events the earth has witnessed. It killed 60 or 70 million people. It's hard to imagine an alternative that would have been worse.
The killing of 6 million Jews? For a decade leading up to the war, the United States and other western nations refused to accept Jewish refugees from Germany or to allow Germany to send them to Africa. Only peace could have stopped the killing once begun, whereas the war fueled it. World War II only became about saving the Jews in retrospect.
The takeover of the world by Nazism? The West had armed and funded the Nazis' rise, doing nothing to build civil resistance within Germany. But resistance within Germany would have eventually overthrown Hitler. A German war on the Soviet Union was almost certainly doomed, with or without the Western front. And exactly which part of Nazism was held off by slaughtering tens of millions on both sides? The United States had Japanese Americans, not to mention Native Americans, in camps, African Americans under apartheid and used for medical experiments and sterilizations, a military industrial complex put in charge of our government, Nazi scientists imported to the United States to help develop weapons of mass destruction and torture. The United States now embraces preemptive wars, targeted killings, and the militarization of the police. Nazism didn't win, but it may be an oversimplification to say that Nazism lost.
Roosevelt lied repeatedly about German attacks on allegedly innocent U.S. ships, just as Wilson had done before him. Roosevelt lied about forged Nazi documents. But the U.S. public remained opposed to war until Pearl Harbor. The United States had left Napoleon and other war-crazed conquerors to their fate in Europe up until World War I's Wilsonian propaganda campaign and crackdown on civil liberties. It would have done so again without Pearl Harbor.
By December 7, 1941, Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and -- just 11 days before the supposedly unexpected attack -- he had secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.
Wars, as opposed to occupations, are not defensive. Nor are they waged defensively. Wars between militarized nations cannot be begun by one party alone. It takes two to tango. Such wars have ended now. World War II was the last one. We don't bomb white families anymore. Wealthy nations don't go to war with each other anymore. They meet at Camp David or in Chicago to plot the exploitation of the poor nations of the world. Although, on Thursday the prime minister of Russia, the borders of whose nation NATO is building bases on, said the result could be all-out nuclear war.
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