When we're members of (or at least cheerleaders for) a "team" - be it sports, family, community, or government - our instinctive baseline assumption is that the team's leaders are working honestly for the benefit of everybody.
It's why when President Johnson told us we'd sustained an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and had to go to war with North Vietnam, it took about a decade for the majority of Americans to realize we'd been lied to. Richard Nixon even doubled down on it, riding to re-election in 1972 on his promise to "win" the Vietnam war "with honor."
It's why when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that Saddam Hussein intended to use against us, it took most Americans several years to realize that we'd been lied into a second war we didn't want or need.
If it took us years to figure out that American leadership was lying to us about issues of war and peace, why should any of us think Russians will only take a few days or weeks to figure out that the same thing is happening to them right now?
We made the same mistake average Russians are making right now. Repeatedly. It's all about human nature being exploited by ruthless politicians.
This is the great danger for all nations, and democracies are only slightly less vulnerable to it than autocracies like Russia.
Which is why the Framers of the Constitution put into it a provision they believed would stop or at least slow any hasty or dishonest attempts to drag America into unnecessary war.
Speaking directly to this issue, on April 20, 1795, James Madison, who shepherded through the Constitution and Bill of Rights and would become President of the United States in the following decade, published an essay he titled Political Observations 20.
In it, he offered an "observation" that's critical for us to hear today:
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."
Reflecting on war's impact on the Executive branch of government, Madison continued his essay about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war for a commander-in-chief president.
"In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [president] is extended," he wrote. "Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people."
It's that human tendency to rally around the flag during a time of crisis, to believe "patriotic propaganda" that leads us to war, that Madison was worried about.
We can now look back over the past 50 years and so how badly it has torn apart our country (and continues to haunt us in Iraq and Afghanistan).
War, after all, is legalized murder. And, as we see today in Ukraine, it often involves large amount of property destruction and even widespread rape.
War, Madison proposed, and the impulse to use war to gain political power or get rich, is cancer, a malignancy that infects "republican" governments as well as kingdoms and theocracies.
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