Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 15, 1993 TAG: 9401140013
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In four well-defined cases, the nation's military and naval emissaries were sent to wage open war on societies American leadership regarded, whether rightly or wrongly, to be America's enemies.
Off they went, invariably for longer periods than originally predicted, to France in World War I, to nearly every corner of the globe in World War II, to Korea, to Vietnam.
Those foreign adventures were variously regarded at home. Despite Woodrow Wilson's pledge to ``keep us out of war,'' soon broken, Americans came quickly to accept the inevitability of American involvement in the war against Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. Few openly questioned the necessity for World War II. But Korea drew bitter opposition, and the opposition deepened as time passed. Of domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam, it is hardly necessary to speak.
But in other instances, American intervention in the affairs of other nations was justified less convincingly and often opposed more vociferously.
Wilson sent a ``punitive expedition'' into Mexico in 1916, ostensibly to catch Pancho Villa, less openly to provide American troops an opportunity to practice maneuvers they might use in France.
Only a year before he had sent troops into Haiti, and they stayed there, accomplishing nothing, until 1934. Throughout the '20s and '30s, American servicemen roamed the streets and jungles of Nicaragua, to no good end, either for Nicaragua or the United States. Throughout that period, American soliders, sailors and Marines saw duty in Cuba, the Philippines and China. Their presence was not sought and was deeply resented by the native peoples.
Nor did it do much to make friends, in recent years, of the people of Lebanon (occupied twice), the Dominican Republic, Cuba (which John F. Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to invade), Grenada or Panama, in the unsettled domestic business of all of which we sought, for high holy reasons, to meddle.
This was the ``American Century'' loudly proclaimed, after World War II, by Henry R. Luce, the founder and owner of Time magazine, who argued that by the late '40s it had become the mission of the United States to bring the ``blessings of democracy'' to the unfortunate rest of the world - especially the Third World - hitherto denied them.
If this was arrogant, and it was, it also expressed a deep need of the American people to evangelize the globe, assuming the burden borne in the previous century by British troops and missionaries. They were now, along with the British empire, defunct.
It has proved, in fact, as endless a folly as the British empire had been: a sequence of ``missions'' abroad that not only failed to uplift the ``white man`s burden,'' as Kipling called it, but produced war, civil war, political confusion and enduring enmity.
It was certainly true, as American presidents orated time and again, that few Third World countries had the history, the affluence or the institutions to live democratically. But it was also apparent, or should have been, that American troops could not work democratic miracles either.
Now, the national catastrophe of Vietnam still painful, the nation has moved once again to impose American democracy with American troops. In Somalia the shibboleth was that we were there for ``humanitarian'' ends. But the ``humanitarian'' effort could not go forth, it developed, without martial engagement as well. In Haiti we propose to establish, once again, a democracy that not even Haiti's people want, and will fight us to resist.
It is time to quit - to admit that good intentions are not enough and that we cannot bring them to fruition anyway. It is time to cut and run before more American servicemen are killed, for nothing. It is time to bring the "blessings of democracy" to America instead.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB