The White Man's Burden

Last week, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan made it clear that the American presence in his country was becoming increasingly unwelcome. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's opinion does not differ by much.

Until the late 19th Century, America's wars were fought against the would be, actual, and former colonial powers (France and England) or for the acquisition (from Mexico and the Indian Nations) of sparsely populated land into which to expand. These wars were fought for the sole benefit of the United States.

The Spanish American War of 1898 was the nation's first imperial war and the first, aside from the Civil War, to include a strong altruistic motive. Following the Treaty of Paris, the United States become the temporary administrator of Cuba and acquired permanent colonial authority over well populated territories (Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines) ceded to it by Spain. No significant natural resources, or additional land into which to expand, were a part of the gain. Aside from the USA's acquisition of land for military bases (Guantanamo in Cuba and Subic Bay in the Philippines) the major beneficiaries of the war were the inhabitants of the countries freed from Spain.

Since then, all of America's major wars have been entered into for largely unselfish reasons. Although the United States has reaped benefits from some of these wars, the fundamental objectives were to protect the freedom of allies and trading partners as well as to reduce threats posed by hostile regimes.

The cost to the United States, after its acquisition of responsibility for the Philippines, was well described by Rudyard Kipling in a poem (Take Up the White Man's Burden) written in 1898:

Take up the White man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

The entire poem http://tinyurl.com/yaf95hu should be required reading for any President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense or National Security Advisor who may be considering military action for any reason other than an invasion of our country.

That there may be good reasons to go to war is undeniable but the costs, particularly in the modern era, are extraordinarily high. Careful consideration of those costs against the often elusive benefits is mandatory.

While the 1st Gulf War war (1990 - 1991) seems to have met the test of reasonable benefits, your correspondent is not at all certain that the balance now favors us in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Assuming that it does not, out highest priority must be to extract ourselves from these swamps and rebuild our military capability. Only then, will we be able to make an effective response, if it is needed, to what seem like very real threats from North Korea and Iran.