Congressman Samuel Taggart said, "The conquest of Canada has been represented to be so easy as to be little more than a party of pleasure. We have, it has been said, nothing to do but to march an army into the country and display the standard of the United States, and the Canadians will immediately flock to it and place themselves under our protection. They have been represented as ripe for revolt, panting for emancipation from a tyrannical Government, and longing to enjoy the sweets of liberty under the fostering hand of the United States." Taggart went on to present reasons why such a result was by no means to be expected, and of course he was right. But being right is of little value when war fever takes hold.
The expectation that people will appreciate being occupied, whether a pretense or sincere and truly stupid, didn't work out in Iraq, and didn't work out two centuries ago in Canada. The Soviets went into Afghanistan in 1979 with the same stupid expectation of being welcomed as friends, and the United States has been repeating the same mistake there since 2001. Of course, such expectations would never work out for a foreign army in the United States either, no matter how admirable the people invading us might be or how miserable they might find us.
What if Canada and Iraq had indeed welcomed U.S. occupations? Would that have produced anything to outweigh the horror of the wars? Norman Thomas speculated as follows:
"[S]uppose the United States in the War of 1812 had succeeded in its very blundering attempt to conquer all or part of Canada. Unquestionably we should have school histories to teach us how fortunate was the result of that war for the people of Ontario and how valuable a lesson it finally taught the British about the need for enlightened rule! Yet, to-day the Canadians who remain within the British Empire would say they have more real liberty than their neighbors to the south of the border!"
The War of 1812 would seem to have undone the legitimacy of the Revolution rather than confirming it. In 1812, the choice of war resulted in the burning of our national capital, the death in action of some 3,800 U.S. and British fighters, and the death of 20,000 U.S. and British from all causes, including disease. About 76 were killed in the Battle of Baltimore, plus another 450 wounded. Nowadays an incident in Baltimore that resulted in that kind of carnage would be described with words other than "glorious," and "successful." Peace was made by negotiation after the War of 1812, just as it could have been made prior to the killing.
Is saying so an insult to the troops whose cause the war was? Well, 12.7% of U.S. troops deserted during the War of 1812, facing the serious risk of torture, mutilation, or execution. Does that sound like an army that had chosen that war? Many soldiers believed they served their state, not a nation, and not an empire. Many refused to invade Canada. The Governor of Vermont called his state's militia home, during the war, to serve his state. Now there's an action worth celebrating! There's a lesson to be learned. Our states' militias have been nationalized, making it much easier to use them abroad. In fact, each state's national guard has been paired up with a foreign nation's military as a means of spreading imperial influence. Maryland is matched up with Bosnia-Herzegovina. This murder-exchange program began as a quiet way of spreading U.S. militarism east toward Russia, but now it's throughout Africa and the rest of the world.
The U.S. military is never disbanded anymore. The wars are never fought here anymore, unless you count drone pilots. The wars kill mostly civilians and almost entirely non-Americans. The preparation for wars and stationing of armed forces around the globe costs far more money and effort than the wars themselves. Taxes never go away in between wars anymore. We don't get our civil liberties back anymore. Much of the military is privatized. A lot has changed. But some things have not changed. More than ever we require lies before we'll tolerate war. Even though many of the lies must now depict the wars as philanthropic, we would still never get wars off the ground without racism, bigotry, and genocidal emotions -- or without waving flags.
Prior to 2001, the Taliban was willing to turn Osama bin Laden over to a third country if he was promised a fair trial and no death penalty, and if some evidence of his guilt of crimes were offered. In 2001, the Taliban warned the United States that bin Laden was planning an attack on American soil. In July 2001 the United States was known to have plans to take military action against the Taliban by mid-October.
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