THE NEXT ONE FOUGHT FOR THE STATED REASONS WILL BE THE FIRST:

Fool Me Twice: Iraq isn't the first war launched on false pretenses. (Eric Rauchway, 4/18/07, New Republic)

Suppose--hypothetically--that upon being attacked by a set of dangerous, swarthy foreigners who want to take over the world, the United States retaliated against a completely different set of dangerous, swarthy foreigners and found itself stuck in a dirty war with no exit and endlessly ramifying bad consequences as far as anyone could foresee. You might think we're talking tediously about Iraq again, but we're not: It's something we've done before. Then, as now, American leaders systematically misled the American people to justify the misdirected intervention: But as Ann Hagedorn notes in her new, smart, and well-told Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919, the people, the press, and their prejudices had to help, too.

Early in 1917, the German military took their last gamble of World War I. Believing that their U-boats could sink American supply ships fast enough to choke the Allies into suing for peace before the antagonized United States could mobilize for war, they set their submarines to attack U.S. ships. In mid-March they sank three merchantmen, and in early April President Woodrow Wilson got a congressional declaration of war. Within a year the U.S. Army, before the war a negligible force of around 100,000 men, swelled into a force of more than a million that, almost by its mere appearance in France, sealed the fate of the Central Powers.

But he American response to the German threat went awry in response to Russia, which had fought with the Allies against the Central Powers, but signed a separate peace with Germany after the Bolshevik Revolution in the autumn of 1917. A few months later, a coalition of allies willing to change the Bolshevik regime invaded Russia. Around 15,000 U.S. soldiers went along.

The expedition didn't lack justifications--if anything, it had too many.

The funny thing is, from the first few sentences you'd assume he was talking about WWII.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 18, 2007 5:02 PM