Justified Wars
Radley Balko has a poll at The Agitator, asking which wars, in retrospect, were justified. I picked the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII, the Gulf War and Afghanistan.
This, of course, is a tricky question. In 1812, for example, we had a legitimate causus belli, the impressment of neutral American sailors into the British Navy, but we also invaded Canada for no reason, so that one comes out as a wash, and thus, probably not justified.
Korea is also hard. I tend to be a fan of international collective security, and the fact that American troops defending South Korea from an invasion were under the imprimatur of the UN certainly counts for something. But much of the Korean War was unbelievably stupid. In The Coldest Winter, David Halberstam’s history of the conflict, he alleges that MacArthur greatly massaged the intelligence about Chinese cooperation in the conflict, which allowed him to press on past the 38th parallel and the Yalu River, inviting massive Chinese intervention. So I guess the Korean war was half legitimate. With MacArthur’s invasion of North Korea, we still only got to status quo ante, at the cost of tens of thousands of American, Chinese and Korean lives. The appropriate analogy would be had we gone on to Baghdad in the Gulf War. Had that happened, it wouldn’t have gotten my vote.
Much more interesting than my responses are the cumulative totals. Balko obviously has a libertarian leaning readership, but the non-interventionism on display is still quite impressive. The revolutionary war, a war that even libertarians could love, only gets 21%, and WWII gets a mere 19%. It’s no surprise than the purely-imperial wars (Mexican-American, Spanish-American, Philippine-American) get a combined 4 percent, but still, it just goes to show how far out of step hard core non-interventionists are with the American public. In basic US history classes, at least, most wars are taught as being totally awesome (except Vietnam).
BIG FREAKING EDIT/UPDATE: Jeff Darcy points out in the comments that the polling software is simply counting the number of votes, not voters. So even if every respondent picked the Revolutionary War (which, looking at the comments, most did), it wouldn’t get 100%, because of all the other wars people picked too. My bad.
That’s about right, I’d say. But I have trouble writing off the Mexican-American war. Obviously, it was a purely imperial endeavor that was totally unjustifiable *at the time*, but it’s really hard to imagine a United States at all similar to our current nation without that war.
Dylan Matthews
August 11, 2008 at 10:45 am
The low percentages are the result of the poll software counting percentages of *votes* instead of voters. If everyone voted for the Revolution plus one other war, the Revolution would show as only 50%. If you read the comments, it’s clear that the 22% figure is not correct and the audience does *not* consist of “hard-core non-interventionists” at all.
Jeff Darcy
August 11, 2008 at 10:57 am