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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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July 13, 2005
by Gordon Francis Corbett
Righteous foreign policy, like proper domestic policy, has only one purpose: the protection of every citizen's rights. Unhappily, few Administrations in our country have hewed to this objective. Wilson's, Franklin Roosevelt's, and both Bushes' foreign policies are essentially identical. All, in one way or another, worked or work at building and asserting the power of America's Establishment. They use any tactic or stratagem that will advance those goals, always ostensibly to serve beneficent goals. Speaking of Roosevelt, see if this sounds familiar. I can hear him now:
Roosevelt never said the "quotation" I provide above. I invented it. Nevertheless, it does express the essence of his foreign policy; and, had the American people not been determined to remain aloof from the European war, you can bet that he would have said something similar in announcing his alliance with Britain. As it was, Charles Lindbergh and the Committee to Defend America First gave our people a rallying-point from which to express their outrage that our president was pulling us into a second European war only twenty-one years after the last of some fifty-three thousand American soldiers died in battle to end the first. To let the American people discover German evil and British virtue, Roosevelt created a kind of political theater. He ordered American destroyers to escort British cargo ships as they carried Lend-Lease goods to Britain. Then, when German submarines torpedoed the USS Greer and the USS Reuben James, he used their sinkings to illustrate why we should aid a beleaguered foreign power when we were at peace. Nevertheless, the American people never came to favor ordering American armed forces to intervene against Hitler. On the first week of December 1941, a poll showed eighty per cent of the people favoring abstention. If liberal historian Robert Stinnett ("Day of Deceit") is correct, Roosevelt was given one more card, and it was a trump. In 1940, a Commander Arthur McCollum wrote a memorandum suggesting eight steps that would lead the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt implemented them. We know the result. Flashback: when James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for president and vice-president in 1920, they sought to realize, not only their own personal advancement, but also President Wilson's dream that our country would join the League of Nations. Besides the facilitation of international diplomacy, the League's central idea was that when an aggressor attacked, other members would mobilize their forces, defeat the aggressor, and restore peace. Unhappily for Cox and Roosevelt, the American people backed Harding and Coolidge, who spurned "One World" for our traditional policy of non-alignment. The attack on Pearl Harbor and our Establishment's guidance killed the Founding Fathers' foreign policy. Roosevelt replaced it, and realized President Wilson's dream, by founding the United Nations and having the Senate ratify the United Nations Charter. Over the years that have unfolded since, few politicians have dared to advocate leaving the United Nations; nevertheless, recent events have made more popular proposals for lowering the blue flags at Turtle Bay. Should we do so, a cheer will rise from the shades of the authors of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. Modern libertarian thought sustains the Framers' foreign policy of non-alignment and non-intervention. Under the Framers' Constitution, the individual American citizen hires public guardians, whose salaries and equipment he defrays with his tax payments. Those guardians promise to perform specific tasks that protect that citizen's rights. Some of these guardians belong to our Armed Forces. Our citizen controls them through his Representatives and Senators, who create rules for their governance. He also controls them through his president, who directs them to fight any foe that would violate his rights. His uniformed guardians promise to achieve that mission when they swear to defend the Constitution, and they give that pledge new life every month when they accept his money. The nature of rights restricts our civilian and uniformed guardians' prerogatives. Rights operate only negatively. Every person has exactly the same rights, and their exclusively negative operation keeps them from conflicting. So, measures taken to defend some rights must not curtail others; nor may our paid public guardians protect the rights of one citizen by violating another's. The Constitution limits strictly how our paid public guardians may protect the rights of our citizen. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, but no clause permits delegation of that power to any other branch; neither does any allow our armed forces to defend foreign nations when we are at peace. Finally, because its Thirteenth Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude without qualification, our Constitution outlaws conscription. Consider how these principles and Constitutional provisions affect the issue of compulsory third-party involvement, which forms a cornerstone of the Wilsonian-Rooseveltian-Bushian foreign policy. When a robber attacks an innocent person, he forfeits his own right against interference. Therefore, voluntarily, a third person may defend the robber's intended victim. Similarly, when Nation A attacks Nation B, a citizen from Nation C may join B's armed forces and work to defend B if he so chooses. But, when Nation A attacks Nation B, the leaders of Nation C may neither order its men to defend B, nor compel its citizens to support B financially. Absent an attack by A on C, or a genuine threat by A against C, C's leaders have no proper ethical role in the conflict between A and B. George H. W. Bush, whom I call Bush I, did not heed this precept. He had learned that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons, and he decided to stop him. So, he directed Ambassador April Glaspie to tell Hussein that we would not interfere if Iraq were to take back its "nineteenth province," i.e., Kuwait. Hussein invaded. Bush I had fooled Hussein into committing an abhorrent act against a neighboring nation. As he intended, it stripped all legitimacy from Iraq's government and from Hussein himself. It also de-legitimated Iraq's power to develop nuclear weapons. We know the rest. What made our 1991 invasion of Iraq constitutional? Congress issued no declaration of war. More to the point, under our Framers' and modern libertarian principles, what made Bush I's invasion of Iraq ethical? Iraq had not attacked our nation. True, Hussein might have attacked Saudi Arabia, but that was a matter for the Saudis. Most Saudi oil went, not to America, but to continental Europe, to Britain, and to Japan; and, in any event, an Iraqi abrogation of contracts between the post-conquest Saudi Arabia and our neutral country is the kind of thing normally settled by bargaining, not by bullets. Bush I's moving against Iraq's nuclear-weapons program would have been ethical if our public guardians had learned that Hussein planned to attack the United States, and if the president had told us that he had obtained solid evidence of that fact. To the best of my recollection, Bush I never said that the U.S. Government had so learned. Actually, we ordinary Americans only learned about Hussein's nuclear-weapons program much later. In any case, although the soldiers, sailors, and airmen whom the president sent were all volunteers, we individual Americans did not volunteer the money paid for their salaries and support. We paid our government's tax demands to avoid imprisonment. Using coercion to obtain money for our defense is ethically proper, but Bush I never showed us how attacking Saddam Hussein's armed forces and kicking them out of Kuwait would defend the United States. Thanks to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, we know that when Bush II took office, he began preparing immediately to depose Hussein. His pretext was that Hussein had persistently thwarted United Nations weapons inspectors and was working to create so-called "weapons of mass destruction" with which to make trouble. Moreover, said the president, he was working with Osama bin Laden's al-Quaeda. After Bush II captured Iraq, our soldiers found no nuclear or other extraordinarily powerful weapons. Some say that Hussein had built such weapons, but sent them to Syria or to Iran. Others contend that they never existed. As for al-Quaeda, practically every Middle Eastern government has relations with them. No clause in the Constitution allows doing warlike things without a declaration of war. Regardless, some try to justify current policy by attributing wisdom to past transgressions. Without declarations of war, our Administrations have attacked Tripolitanian pirates, Haitian rebels, and Nicaraguan rebels. Before World War II, our Navy patrolled China's Yangtse River. After World War II, we pursued "police actions" in Korea and in Viet-Nam. We did not declare war then, because we abjured that privilege when we joined the United Nations. Each Constitutional violation had more ethical justification than its successor. Each indicted its Administration and warned of future adventures, but no warning was heeded. The time has come to stop ignoring obvious facts. Fact Number One: Governments do not derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Public guardians derive their just powers from the consent and the rights of the citizens who hire them through the electoral process. Fact Number Two: Violating any man's rights is a crime. Therefore, because no one may violate one man's rights to protect another's, no man can ask his public guardians to violate one man's rights to protect another's. The obvious exception: a Congressionally declared war, which, because the enemy leaders presumably attacked us, compels our public guardians to kill the enemy nations' people. Fact Number Three: The Constitution protects our citizen's rights by limiting our public guardians' discretion through specificity. If the Constitution does not give a specific power, it does not exist. Fact Number Four: The Constitution does not permit our government to aid foreign governments. Fact Number Five: Every American has the unqualified right to do anything that is peaceful. Therefore, our public guardians may not force our citizen to serve in any of the Armed Forces, because this action would deny him his peaceful pursuits. Fact Number Six: Every American has a right to keep every bit of his wealth, except for the proportion needed to protect his rights. Therefore, when Congress has not declared war, taxing our citizen to protect foreign nations violates this particular right because that expenditure cannot protect his rights. And that fact, in turn, brings us to the Ninth Amendment. "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The Framers wrote the Ninth Amendment to prevent future presidents' and Congresses' using the Framers' omission of a given right to support their violating it. Therefore, because every American has a right to keep any proportion of his wealth not needed to protect his rights, and because, in the absence of a declaration of war, spending tax money to protect foreign powers cannot protect our citizen's rights, such use of tax money violates the Ninth Amendment. The immoral and forcible taking of money is robbery. Despite a pledge to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," in full violation of that document's Ninth Amendment, our public guardians are robbing every American citizen. We can use this fact to hold our public guardians accountable. We can tell our friends and neighbors not only that our public guardians should never have invaded Iraq, not only that we should make them leave Iraq pronto, but that their using our tax money to govern Iraq is morally and Constitutionally wrong. Please do not misunderstand me. We must not withhold from the IRS the proportion of our incomes intended for these un-Constitutional purposes. Trying anything like that would be futile and dangerous. Nevertheless, we can say that our public servants are robbing us. We can say that they do not respect the Constitution they swear to uphold. We can say that when we replace these thieves with honest men, we will take a long step toward regaining our freedom.
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