Wednesday, June 04, 2003
A LITTLE HISTORICAL CAUTION FOR BUSH CRITICS
In the aftermath of WWI and a spirit of public disillusionment with the failure of the United States to secure a European peace, the American public turned very strongly against war and anything that smacked of militarism, to the point of destroying the United States army - a good description can be found in the recent Eisenhower biography by Carlo D'Este.
One of the causes of the hardening of public opinion against national security policies and favoring isolationism was the work of the Nye Committee led by Senator Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota. The committee report charged essentially a conspiracy among arms manufaturers - big business - the so-called " merchants-of-death " to start WWI for their own profit margins. This highly effective piece of propaganda was largely put together by a key committee staffer, an ambitious young lawyer named Alger Hiss. It has taken approximately fifty years, the declassification of the Venona decrypts and the opening of Soviet archives but today most informed people on the Left will admit that Hiss was a communist spy. His mythology however lives on in the cry " no blood for oil ".
Let's take the charges of " Bush lied about Iraqi WMD " for the political spin and myth-making that it is from an opposition party that is intellectually bankrupt. ¶ 11:21 AM
In the aftermath of WWI and a spirit of public disillusionment with the failure of the United States to secure a European peace, the American public turned very strongly against war and anything that smacked of militarism, to the point of destroying the United States army - a good description can be found in the recent Eisenhower biography by Carlo D'Este.
One of the causes of the hardening of public opinion against national security policies and favoring isolationism was the work of the Nye Committee led by Senator Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota. The committee report charged essentially a conspiracy among arms manufaturers - big business - the so-called " merchants-of-death " to start WWI for their own profit margins. This highly effective piece of propaganda was largely put together by a key committee staffer, an ambitious young lawyer named Alger Hiss. It has taken approximately fifty years, the declassification of the Venona decrypts and the opening of Soviet archives but today most informed people on the Left will admit that Hiss was a communist spy. His mythology however lives on in the cry " no blood for oil ".
Let's take the charges of " Bush lied about Iraqi WMD " for the political spin and myth-making that it is from an opposition party that is intellectually bankrupt. ¶ 11:21 AM
