Reasons to Kill: Review

REASONS TO KILL: REVIEW

Innocents abroad – or natural born killers in pursuit of an empire?

Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War
by Richard E Rubenstein
Bloomsbury, £18.99

The knowing fraud that took the United States – and some of its allies – to war with Iraq on the basis that not only was Saddam Hussein in close concert with al-Qaeda but that he had, or was developing, weapons of mass destruction is, according to Richard Rubenstein, not unique in American history but, rather, part of a pattern stretching right back to the years after independence. George W Bush had nothing on James Polk who, in 1846, declared: “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” Polk had goaded Mexico into attacking US troops in disputed territory that any international court would have said was Mexican.

Similar in so many ways was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the US into Vietnam’s civil war, when three Vietnamese PT boats looking for South Vietnamese coastal raiders bumped into the USS Maddoxinside their territorial waters and were accused of making an unprovoked attack on the destroyer. Lyndon Johnson in private admitted “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.” Not that it stopped him using the incident to get Congress to give him a blank cheque to intervene, which was promply cashed to deliver 180,000 troops on the ground.

The 1998 US-Spanish War was little different. The new government in Madrid had been desperately trying to avoid a war with the US over Cuba, where the American public sympathised with the Cuban struggle for independence. The Spanish government had already relieved General “Butcher” Weyler, whose scorched earth policy had done so much to engender support for the insurgency, from his post as Governor of Cuba. Conveniently, an enormous explosion sank the visiting battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour. The US Navy blamed it on a Spanish mine and Congress declared war. If it was a mine it was more likely the responsibility of Cuban rebels, trying to draw America into the war, or rogue Spanish officers opposed to peace negotiations. In 1976 a US investigation concluded that a fire in the vessel’s coal store had ignited the magazine. And, of course, at the end of the war of liberation, with Spain vanquished, Washington parlayed, on the basis that the Philippines was not capable of looking after itself, a war of occupation as they brutally put down, with the loss of 200,000 Filipino lives, an insurrection against their replacing Spain as the colonial masters.

Even the Pacific War – not that Rubenstein mentions this – was not as clearcut as the perfidy of the attack on Pearl Harbor suggests. Washington had spent 18 months in a brutal economic war with the Japanese that, as they saw it, gave them no option but to fight or surrender any ambitions to create an Imperial Japanese empire.

But why do Americans meekly follow their presidents and sacrifice their lives for their ambitions? Reasons to Kill dismisses both naive innocence and the natural born killer instinct of frontier days. Nor does self defence provide an explanation. If any attack on an authoritarian regime nestling under the US umbrella is seen as an attack on the US itself then exerting American power around the globe becomes a domestic issue – thus neatly eliding each intervention into the category of self defence.

In reality it’s an amalgam of the founding myth of persecuted refugees fleeing their oppressors to the New World that endows their descendants with a destiny to save those who may not want saving. Plus the fact that the family business is arms production and sales, the military and war.

Washington spends, including peripheral costs, almost 50 per cent of its federal budget on the military-industrial complex, a higher portion than any country, including North Korea. Rubenstein shows these are the Reasons to Killand how they will continue to drive American policy.