The Cycle of Imperialism - the roots of Team America: World Police

[Pluvious]

(The following is from my friend Steppy)

I make it a point to study history. One of the subjects that has gotten a lot of my attention lately is Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the United States Army during the Civil War and later president of the United States. Popular rhetoric about the Civil War has tended to paint Grant as an unimaginative drunkard who threw armies into the grinder with brutal disregard for life. The reality is nothing like that image. He was a highly intelligent man, though one who was extremely practical and down to earth.

He abhorred bloodshed of any kind, loved animals and was never a hunter. Though he liked bourbon and it only took one shot or two to make him drunk, he only drank when he was extremely lonely and idle. During the Civil War, he drank very rarely and never when in the midst of campaigns. If one takes a moment to read a chapter or two from Grant's memoirs, it usually proves to be an impressive and entertaining experience. He was an extremely eloquent and intelligent writer, candid and sincere with little attempt to spin facts.

As for his reputation as a butcher, during the course of the war his battles resulted in a significantly lower percentage of casualties to his side than his counterparts in the Confederacy. Throughout Grant's battles, the Union casualty rate tended to be around 10-10.5%. By contrast, Robert E. Lee lost roughly 16% of his troops in battle prior to 1864, after which accurate numbers were impossible for the Confederacy. During the 1864-65 campaigns, most historians estimate almost 50% of Lee's army became casualties.

I mention this because I was reading the Bruce Catton biography of Grant last night and in the second volume, "Grant Takes Command" there is an interesting letter that appears near the end of the book. Grant was not a politician and had no aspirations to be one, despite later becoming president, an office for which he did no campaigning whatsoever.

As the Civil War came to an end, he found himself increasingly forced against his will to advise and enact decisions that had profound political and sociological ramifications for the United States. For instance, after the surrender of Lee's army, Grant sent General Sheridan and 50,000 US troops to Texas. Officially, their purpose was to arrange the surrender of Confederate forces there and prevent their becoming guerrilla bands.

In reality, Grant sent them as a show of force to try to convince the Maxmillian government that French and Austrian occupation of Mexico was not acceptable to the United States. Grant fell in love with Mexico during the Mexican War in the 1840's. Unlike Confederate president Davis, who wanted to colonize Mexico, Grant always wanted Mexico to be an independent nation and he used his clout as general of the army to help persuade the French and Austrian governments to allow Mexico its freedom.

Nonetheless, Grant was similar to other prominent Americans of his day in believing that America had a unique destiny as a bastion of democracy and justice in a world full of imperial dynasties. He revealed some of this in a letter he wrote to his wife in the week after Lincoln's assassination.

General Sherman had taken it upon himself to negotiate a surrender that not only encompassed the army he faced under Joe Johnston, but also took in all the governments of the southern states. This was way beyond Sherman's scope and Grant had to delicately tell his friend that this couldn't be done.

In fact, some in the angry, vengeful days after Lincoln's death, considered Sherman's attempt to rapidly reconcile differences in the south as treason. So Grant hurriedly sailed south to meet Sherman and help unravel the mess. He wrote to his wife to explain that he was going to have to travel to Raleigh and in the letter, he revealed a very interesting view of the world:

"I have a Herculean task to perform and shall endeavor to do it, not to please anyone but for the interest of our great country that is now beginning to loom above all other countries, modern and ancient. What a spectacle it will be, to see a country able to put down a rebellion, able to put half a million soldiers into the field at one time and maintain them! That will be done and is almost done already. That Nation, united, will have a strength that will enable it to dictate to all others, conform to justice and right. Power I think, can go no further. The moment conscience leaves, physical strength will avail nothing, in the long run."

I see in this a lot of the fundamental concepts behind our foreign policy attitude that we somehow have the right to fix other governments and regions that we see as broken. Grant was a fundamentally sincere, humble, and kind-hearted man, despite some of the charicatures of history. It seems contradictory in a sense that he could object to France and Austria occupying Mexico and then turn around and call for the US to literally dictate to other nations that they should conform to justice and right. But in reality, it is consistent.

Grant believed that the US had the power AND the responsibility to make the world a better place for the principles of freedom and justice that he believed in. The Maximillian government in Mexico was an obstacle to the freedom of the Mexican people so they had to go. At the same time, had some dictator popped up and oppressed the citizens of that nation, Grant very likely could have been persuaded to use the force of American arms to overthrow it.

The notion of freedom at gunpoint seems eminently self-contradictory. But the reality is, if you believe strongly enough in your own sense of right and wrong, it is not.

In the United States, flush from overthrowing a rebellion and ending the institution of slavery once and for all, it would have been very easy to believe your nation had proved itself to the ages, morally and ethically.

To hold a free election and maintain even a limited sense of democratic freedom in the midst of a civil war is virtually unthinkable. It is easy to see how Lincoln and his most responsible subordinates would come to believe that might makes right. I honestly think they believed that they could make the world a better place, too.

What becomes frightening is when a man steps beyond mere belief in his nation's ethical and social superiority and begins to believe he is an instrument of God. That is why there is something chilling and potentially devastating in this Ron Suskind article ("Without a Doubt" - http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101704A.shtml).

Bush has Grant's sense that the US is in a position to dictate what is right and just, but he also believes that God is speaking to him and giving him the game plan.

Neither Lincoln nor Grant were particularly religious individuals in what was a very religious age. The two of them were pragmatic and I think, profoundly good-hearted men who had the ability to go from ruthless to magnanimous depending on the needs of the situation. Whether or not Bush is good-hearted is another matter, but the fact the he feels his decisions are guided by God when his writing and rhetoric display an intellect far inferior to those of Lincoln and Grant is, to me, unsettling.

It is extremely dangerous to take on the mantle of policeman for the world. If you have the intelligence, the moral stability, and the compassion to pull it off, it is a wonderful thing. But in our time and in our nation, the "leader of the free world" is in no way guaranteed to reach that office with those skills a certainty. This is why the election process needs to be controlled by active public participants -- not corporations, not news media organizations, and not the political parties. The system is flawed and it lacks both justice and right.

It's no wonder that Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant sat out the entire 1868 presidential campaign.

-Steppy (oct-2004)