19-Nov-2015 Update
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced, this morning, that “We are at war with ISIS”:
This “interview” is, itself, a case-study in media propaganda. The “questions” are little more than thinly-disguised demands for blood and gore. I guess that’s good for ratings. It’s horrible for humanity.
Q: How can you assure the American public that there is indeed a strategy and that the leadership role America is taking in the fight against ISIS fully addresses the threat that it poses?
…
Q: So you agree with the French president that we’re at war with ISIS.
A: Yes.
This is not journalism, it is instead old-fashioned tribal drum-beating. This clip brought to mind Alexander Haig’s similarly flagrant overstepping of bounds when he ended his then-promising political career with his “I’m in charge” moment. The media at that time correctly lambasted Mr. Haig’s eagerness to seize power, and his career was ended.
Today’s media is a stark contrast, deteriorating into sheer mob-baiting. This has not been a good month for NBC.
America is not France. In America, Congress — not the President and not the Secretary of Defense — makes such a declaration. I hope and pray that America is wise enough and has learned enough from our disastrously self-destructive responses to 9/11 to NOT fall for the exact same parlor-trick again.
End 19-Nov-2015 update
As night follows day, it took less than a week for the director of the CIA to cite the Paris attacks as motivation to dramatically expand government surveillance (emphasis mine):
U.S. and European officials are calling for expanded government surveillance powers in the wake of Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, which have killed at least 129 people.
Addressing the violence Monday at a Washington conference, CIA director John Brennan blamed public “handwringing” over U.S. surveillance programs as an obstacle to catching terrorism suspects.
“I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call,” Brennan said.
Brennan’s comments reflect growing pressure to grant new digital authorities to law enforcement days after the blasts in Paris. Speaking in Washington Monday, European Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said “targeted access” to personal data is becoming “crucial” to terror investigations. And British officials debated Sunday whether to fast-track sweeping new legislation that would allow police to monitor citizens’ Web browsing.
I see. So the desire to preserve our constitutional right to privacy and Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search is “handwringing“.
The last time I checked, we’ve had a DEMOCRAT in the Oval Office for the last eight years. Mr. Brennan works for Barack Obama. If nothing else, one learning from this is that electing a fellow Democrat — even an allegedly left-leaning African-American Democrat — does NOT protect our constitutional rights and liberties.
Mr. Brennan, one way or another, works for Mr. Obama. I think it’s time for a very public and very prolonged trip to the woodshed for Mr. Brennan, for a VERY PUBLIC whipping. Mr. Obama might not be able to outright dismiss Mr. Brennan, but he can make life very difficult for him. If, of course, Mr. Obama himself has a genuine commitment to the Fourth Amendment.
The cited article does point out that greatly expanded French surveillance authority, granted in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, did NOTHING to prevent these latest attacks. Our entire “security” game is little more than yet another Indulgences racket, first promoting hysteria about some evil enemy and then using that hysteria to promote intrusive and UTTERLY INEFFECTIVE actions whose primary benefit is to strip us of our inconvenient human rights.
The CIA is an agency that benefited greatly by the decision of WE DEMOCRATS to not investigate or prosecute our own war crimes. This is an agency that literally has blood on its hands — much of the kidnapping, abuse, torture, and murder was done BY THE CIA and FOR THE CIA.
The very foundations of America — not to mention THIS VERY SITE and our community — are under direct attack. The source of that attack is our own government.
I suggest we pay far more attention to Mr. Brennan and those who support him than we do to ISIS/ISIL.
I can’t help but notice how closely this resembles complaints about the “Ferguson effect” preventing law enforcement from carrying out their legitimate work. My own view all along is they can search whatever, just for crying out loud get a warrant. I’m pretty sure it is within the President’s authority to dismiss a CIA director, but as you allude to this President has turned out not to be the greatest champion of these rights himself.
Now one of the presidents henchmen … that’s a different story.
There is implied criticism of the President a couple paragraphs after the blockquote.
I do think the concern for this website toward the end is hyperbolic.
Is there some part of “sweeping new legislation that would allow police to monitor citizens’ Web browsing” that makes you think sites like BMG would not be targeted?
Have you seen any indication that anybody in the current administration would resist such legislation if it were proposed here?
Of course, it’s likely that the NSA already monitors this and similar sites, so perhaps there’s no need for people like Mr. Brennan to talk about it.
…and no, I don’t think it would be used for quite the nefarious purposes you suggest. They are looking for those browsing terrorist platforms. BMG is public. If government officials wanted to know what was going on at BMG they could just, you know, logon to BMG like the rest of us. I still have faith in the first amendment to protect what is said here, something that while the UK generally respects similar rights is actually not etched in stone there. I’ll believe otherwise when I see it and stand by the hyperbolic characterization.
We are not talking about “government officials” who want to know what’s going an BMG.
We are talking about automated data mining software that stores EVERYTHING, and that applies rule engines to flag text of interest. It is approximately as accurate as the similar engines that target advertising towards you based on your search history — not very.
When this secret technology, based on secret rules, determines — rightly or wrongly — that a particular participant is worthy of further attention, that attention itself is secret. We are talking about a world where any of us can be declared a “security risk” with absolutely NO awareness, recourse, or due process.
Were you paying attention when Brandon Mayfield was “detained” for weeks? Do you remember the many “suspected terrorists” who disappeared without charges, representation, or even a pretense of due process?
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. By the time you are willing to admit the abuses that are already taking place, I fear it will be far too late to correct them.
…and inform them that I spend a lot of time on this site and save them the trouble. I’m just not that worried about BMG. If there were concern about the use of certain words with no context provided this site would have been shut down a long time ago. There are a lot of things the government COULD do. In our early days a standing army was considered a threat to liberty. Now we have the most powerful standing military on the planet. They COULD take over in a coup and start dropping bombs indiscriminately on domestic soil, but they aren’t going to. In some ways mass data is less concerning because it’s just there without 99+% ever being acted upon, and often not identifiable.
I’m sorry, Christopher, but you really don’t have a clue about how bulk data gathering works. Your blissfully naive fantasy and speculation about this is completely at odds with reality. If you were only a tenth as informed about the techniques and potential abuses of mass surveillance as you are about the intricacies of Roberts Rules of Order, I’m convinced you wouldn’t make comments like this.
Surely you value Habeas Corpus. Surely you are disturbed when government authorities remove people from the streets and hold them secretly for arbitrary times.
When the data, rules, and results — virtually EVERY aspect — of the program is secret, then oversight is either impossible or meaningless. When so much data is gathered, so little is acted upon, and the material being sought is such a vanishingly small fraction of the sample, it is a basic law of statistics that virtually ALL the hits will be false positives.
That means that virtually EVERY individual identified by programs like this will be innocent — yet none of them are even informed that they’ve been falsely smeared. Instead, they find that it becomes harder to get on airplanes, or harder to get jobs. The fact that some of the data is not personally identifiable doesn’t mean these programs don’t attempt it anyway — they simply get it wrong, and rely on other independent statistical measures to catch the “mistake”.
It’s all well and good to ignore all this when nothing is happening nearby and no mobs are running through the streets demanding the arrest of “terrorists” and “terrorist sympathizers”. When our Secretary of Defense falsely claims we’re at war, and our CIA director dismisses such concerns as “handwringing”, then I get more alarmed. I guess you don’t.
What our government not only could but DID do, since 9/11, includes the following:
– Removed US citizens from the public and held them, incommunicado, for weeks without access to attorneys.
– Kidnapped anyone they chose and moved them, secretly, to “friendly” countries for “enhanced interrogation”.
– Tortured “detainees”, many of whom were the victims of simple mis-identification.
Perhaps you aren’t concerned about suspending or ignoring:
– Habeas Corpus
– Fourth Amendment protection from improper search
– Freedom of assembly
– Right to due process
I am.
I’m even aware of at least some of them. Heck, I think Ted Kennedy was once detained at Logan because someone with his name ended up on a no-fly list. It seems to me there can and should be lawyers and judges working overtime to address these things. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be vigilant. Eternal vigilance is, after all, the price of liberty. You just are making it sound as though as I type this I should be looking over my shoulder to see if the feds are about to break down my door for something I put on this site, and no, I absolutely do not live in that type of fear. I notice that whatever fear you have hasn’t stopped you from posting here either. I sometimes wonder if this is another one of those times when your 60s/70s experiences play too much a role in how you view things today.
I assure you that my commentary is motivated by what I do and see EVERY DAY RIGHT NOW. When I’m not on BMG, I spend a great deal of my day on such matters.
…but if I thought for a second that BMG or its users were in any danger I would be the first to cry foul.
Just want to chime in here with some historical info for the casual BlueMassGroup viewer that may not be aware of SomervilleTom’s past.
SomervilleTom has the distinction of being one of the 16 year olds who made it into J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI files. We’re not talking just any old FBI files … we’re talking the secret ones baby! Area 51 stuff. You can read all about it here => http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/2015/10/a-bit-of-context-on-john-sanzone/
He was such a bad apple that he organized a student strike because teachers were allowed to smoke cigarettes on his high school campus while students were not. He really is an amazing man!
He had an FBI file because under Hoover looking at an authority figure crosseyed could get you an FBI file.
And you’re preaching to the choir man … of course I believe SomervilleTom discovered he was in J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI files.
I remember the 1960’s Christopher … of course they were opening secret FBI files for 16 year old children that wore black arm bands and demanded smoking sections for students at their local high school.
Shoot – Why does everyone get so defensive when I talk about somervilletom’s story?
Just to be sure you understand what we’re talking about here, a typical failure of rule engines like we’re talking about is mis-categorization of text because of missing context.
Someone who reads a large number of web pages pertaining to breast cancer is different from someone who reads a similar number of pages pertaining to salacious activities involving the same body parts. Rules engines are typically not capable of distinguishing these two clearly different contexts.
When mass surveillance programs attempt to identify “persons of interest” they rely on such rules. The very best approaches attempt to “train” themselves. Such training, however, is only effective when there are enough actual known “true positives” to provide a statistically-significant benchmark.
Here is a simple and fun way to get an approximate measure of how good or bad today’s text processing technology is. Machine translation is among the most-studied and most-developed areas of text processing. Google is better at machine translation than pretty much anybody.
Try the following experiment:
1. Navigate to Google’s translation engine.
2. Enter an English sentence
3. Use the tool to translate your sentence into a different language.
4. Copy the result into the left-hand search pane.
5. Use the tool to translate the “translated” result back into English.
6. Compare the result of the round trip with the original.
For extra fun, pass it around several times and watch your original text converge on something different. Try making the loop include more than one language.
At the end of your experiment, ask yourself if you’re comfortable with making life-and-death decisions based on the behavior of tools like this, bearing in mind that the analysis systems used by NSA are FAR LESS sophisticated than Google’s translation tool.
Tom is analyzing this issue from his professional perspective as an IT guy (correct me if I’m wrong?) and Christopher seems to be articulating the idea that bulk data is not a direct threat to his own privacy or personal life (ditto?) , but seemed to agree with my point that it doesn’t work and can be a threat to civil liberties if it’s used to charge the wrong people.
We are all against the Patriot Act, all against big data, and all mindful that protecting all of our precious liberty at home is how we can best beat terrorism here or abroad.
It can indeed yield interesting results, but just like I may have to tweak the translation a bit in my head to get it to make sense and give the phrase proper English syntax it seems there should be human interpreters to truly read and make sense of the output.
There is no human in the loop for the bulk surveillance we’re talking about. There are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people, with at least hundreds if not thousands of records each day for each person. Such bulk data gathering is why the NSA just built the LARGEST DATA CENTER IN HUMAN HISTORY in Utah. The NSA proudly announces that is the first “yotta-byte” store in the world. A “yotta byte” is 10^24 (2^80) bytes. For comparison, the largest hard disk drives today are measured in single-digit terra bytes. A tera byte is about 10^12 bytes.
I invite you to enjoy this amusing video to help comprehend just how big the new NSA data center is.
The almost always false annotation is associated with the individual information, and that association stays there in perpetuity. I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted to correct an error in a credit history, but those who have know how tedious it can be — at least, after years of industry resistance, consumers have SOME ability to at least see those reports. The same is not true for any of this NSA data.
When an emergency happens, and federal authorities desperately seek ANY leads of ANYBODY who might be relevant, those false annotations cause those individuals to be identified. Now you have a person under great stress who believes he or she is looking at lists of “potential terrorists”. Since the overwhelming majority of the “hits” that person sees are false, he or she is looking for a needle in several train loads of hay. It is not a scenario that is likely to result in reliable results.
There is no time for any “human interpreters to truly read and make sense of the output” — the damage is done. The people on that list are placed in the impossible position of proving they are NOT terrorists, while attempting to rebut false “information” that they cannot even see.
The gathering and use of bulk surveillance is antithetical to the constitutional rights of every American.
The kind that failed to stop 9/11, failed to identify the Boston Marathon bombers ahead of time, and has apparently failed Parisian and French authorities as well. We need on the ground intelligence, we need double agents, and to the extent we use cyber assets it should be to convince people not to join ISIL. Part of that convincing is showing three crucial differences between them and us:
1) We respect our religious minorities
Including members of Islam. This is a war against an extremist and to many Muslims, heretical fundamentalist form of their faith. They can build and attend mosques free of harassment, they can come to this country seeking refuge, and they can worship without harassment from government entities like the FBI.
2) We respect civil liberties and due process
No more Gitmo, no more indefinite detention or enemy combatants, no more drones killing people without a trial and killing scores of innocent bystanders as well. Let’s restore some liberty here at home. Dismantling the ineffective TSA and repealing the Patriot Act would be the biggest ‘up yours!’ we can send to these thugs.
3) End torture once and for all
Let the distinction between those that burn their prisoners be between a nation that treats it’s prisoners with respect and the full protection of the law and the Geneva Conventions. We are the civilized world after all, let them be the barbarians, and we will not stoop to their level to win.
These are fantastic recommendations and ones I hope we can achieve.
I am hugely pessimistic about these issues, though.
As far as #2 (and likely #3), it has no chance under the current administration. It has no chance under any Republican administration (except possibly Rand Paul’s, but he has no chance). I don’t think it has any credible chance under a Clinton administration.
Democrats and progressives went crazy about the Bush administration’s abuses, but have largely not held Obama’s feet to the fire on these issues. Another 4-8 years of a Democratic administration following these similar actions will fully institutionalize these terrible policies and we may never be able to clawback those liberties in the future.
If Clinton wins, how will the left ensure she does not continue these same policies or (and I don’t think this would be surprising) go further down these terrible paths? I don’t know how we do that. I think we’ll be spending most of our energy pushing back against outrageous attacks from the right and doing our best to get very centrist legislation passed while the executive branch flexes its muscle in almost every area. Can we hope for any accountability?
I also think Obama deserves more too. He has been trying to close Gitmo almost since the day he stepped foot in the Oval Office and IIRC signed an order banning torture early on. I don’t think the left will necessarily have to work as hard as you suggest to keep Clinton in line.
I know I am hard on Clinton, and I may be too forceful in my criticism on some issues. On these issues, I am nothing but deeply concerned. I have not seen much at all to think that she will change course with regard to civil liberties and extrajudicial assassinations.
As far as Obama, he has been a disaster on these issues. An absolute disaster, especially given his campaign promises. On civil liberties, I think Obama deserves an F. Yes, much better than Bush, but so so far from anything good.
Here’s the latest on Gitmo – another delay, despite this being possibly a top 3 priority for Obama during his campaign.
Yes, he signed an executive order on torture, but renditions continued, drone assassinations expanded, and the level of secrecy about actions didn’t give way at all. Also, that whole bulk spying thing.
If it was a Republican in office doing these same actions, we’d be pulling our hair out and talking about impeachment. He shouldn’t get a pass because he’s a Democrat – in fact, we should be angrier because it was such a deep betrayal of the values of those who put him in office.
Maybe it shouldn’t be, but I think there is enough context to figure out the nuances. The last time we were truly at war was the 1940s. I do fault the media for saying a President has “declared war” which only Congress can do, but not for asking these questions of the SecDef. We may need to respond more forcefully to ISIS, whatever we decide to call that.
When we send large numbers of American soldiers to fight and die anywhere, we are at war, regardless of whether Congress technically declared war. We’re also at war if we are dropping thousands of bombs on people and killing scores or combatants and civilians.
We were at war in Vietnam, we were at war in Iraq twice, in Afghanistan, and we’ve been engaged in war throughout the middle east for more than a decade.
Just because we now have the capacity to engage in war in ways that not every man, woman, and child in the United States feels as war, does not make our activities less warlike, and they certainly do not seem less warlike to the people we’re killing in other countries.
Congress has abdicated its constitutional power in this regard, but we have to call these things what they are – and that is war. In terms of using the word too casually, that is not the problem at all. The problem is that we engage in war too casually.
…is largely why we have not declared war since the forties. A true state of war is all encompassing, commandeering the nation’s economy, disrupting or at least changing civilian lives, invoking patriotic feeling to get everyone to make some sacrifice or contribution to the war effort. This is why from what I can tell why Congress is supposed to get involved to get the people’s buy-in to these disruptions. When the Constitution was written the familiar model was European kings going to war often for reasons of dynastic ego, but that would also mean hardship for all classes without their consent. I think between the different models and the War Powers Act we can make this work. So from my constitutional and historical research I stand by the technical definition of war, but aren’t going to fault anyone for more casual usage. My comment above was in response to the update where Tom DID seem to be objecting to casual usage.
It was tough to tell what you were replying to given the alignment of comments.
The all-consuming wars do not exist for rich countries anymore. We can have soldiers playing video games in Nevada killing more people than full battalions used to. It’s still war. And it is too easy now.
If we were in a true war as you describe it, the world would basically be over.
I think we should be calling our activities what they are, and war is the most suitable term.
Thank you for demeaning my service in pursuit of your trivial semantic game. I’m confident that I speak for all my fellow Vietnam vets, and for those who have served and are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, when I tell you that you do not know what you’re talking about. You could start with a dictionary.
my comment was directed at the clueless Christopher.
…and was not going to judge too harshly the more casual use of the term. After all, I usually refer to the Vietnam WAR as well. I of course appreciate and respect your service, but I don’t need the attitude.
WOW – Seriously Christopher, you need to think before you talk. This isn’t the first time your ignorance has insulted someone. You should at least apologize to kirth.
To be charitable to Christopher, I think he was referring to total wars that are officially declared by Congress. That said, I was told by Jack Goldsmith that ‘declaring war’ was outlawed by the UN Charter, so we should basically look at the AUMFs for Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and Iraq and Afghanistan as the modern equivalent to constitutional declarations of war in years past. As constitutional scholar Garret Epps reminds us today in the Atlantic, we lost over 53,000 Americans in a ‘police action’ that Congress never even authorized. Hard to call that anything other than a war to the men who fought and died in it, and it’s certainly memorialized as one.
I also agree with the thrust of the argument that the homefront has been intentionally made to feel unaffected by the war, in a way it wasn’t during WWII. We haven’t had gas rationing since Korea, we haven’t had a draft since Vietnam, and we largely see the war through the choreographed television coverage the military and government want us to see it in. It’s very difficult to find the kind of raw and visceral footage we saw during the Vietnam Era that turned the country against that conflict. Vice, Sebastian Junger, and independent documentaries have recorded such footage for the niche audience that seeks it-but good luck seeing it on the evening news or CNN anytime soon.
In that sense I think Kirth is right to feel angry that those of us who haven’t served sometimes insist we aren’t really at war, but, that is the way our government has manipulated the public. Remember when we were supposed to go shopping when the Afghan War began? I for one would favor an alternative so the average citizen, not just those in the military or with family in the military, can see the costs of war for themselves and make more informed decisions about our foreign policy.
War of 1812
Mexican War
Spanish-American War
WWI
WWII (that would be the 1940s, December 8, 1941 to be exact)
The Civil War qualifies in the sense of being all-consuming, but the USA wasn’t going to dignify the CSA with an official declaration. I was not aware of the UN making war declarations illegal, though I suspect if another nation were to outright bomb us a la Pearl Harbor we would likely ignore that.
I may occasionally betray ignorance, but I think I have a pretty clean record on the insult department thank you very much.
N/T
The reason WWI got it’s name is that it was unprecedented in the way that it was all-encompassing. WWII was even more so. I’m reasonably confident that future historians (if civilization survives long enough for them to exist) will describe them as two phases of one war. The seeds of WWII were surely planted in the fertile soil of devastated Europe by the hopelessly misguided Treaty of Versailles — with the hapless Woodrow Wilson being outmaneuvered both at home and abroad. The GOP of that day has the blood of WWII on its hands as well, given their resolute refusal to embrace the proposed League of Nations.
We will, hopefully, never see a repeat. If we do, as others observe, it will be over before virtually all of us even know it’s begun — pretty much all of us, and literally ALL of our communications capability, will be destroyed in the first exchange of nuclear weapons.
When a sitting Secretary of State agrees, on the record in a formal interview apparently held in an official setting on federal property, that we are “at war with ISIS”, there is nothing “casual” about it.
I notice no reluctance to describe returning veterans as veterans of war. There is nothing casual about that usage, either. There is certainly nothing casual about the enormous number of lives destroyed and damaged by what you deem “casual” usage.
England and France didn’t need the US to stop Italian aggression in Ethiopia. They didn’t have to give up Czechoslovakia. The tone of the times, and the US reflected that, was to stay out of the way.
I don’t think historical trends a easily subjected to “blame.” Who would you blame for 80 years of Communism? The Germans for shipping Lenin there? I would be more likely to blame elites in Russia for creating the conditions that spawned it. Or just maybe we had to go through a cycle of it just to show it wouldn’t work. These things are unclear.
For the life of me, I have no idea why liberals look up to him. Despite his personal and downright vicious strand of racism, his segregation of the federal government and the District of Columbia, his opposition to suffrage, labor unions, and immigration he is still somehow held up as a model of wise liberal government. And that is before we get to his awful foreign policy, which led to the curtailment of political freedom at home, to date he is the only American President to have jailed one of his election opponents, and the waste of hundreds of thousands of American lives fighting a European war they had nothing to do with.
The whole goal of intervention was to get the US in at the negotiating table, and he even squandered that! Getting outwitted and outsmarted by lesser powers like Orlando’s Italy, leading to an unnecessarily punitive settlement with Germany that he was manipulated into agreeing to by the likes of Marshall Petain (later a proud Vichy puppet for the Nazi’s) and Italy’s Orlando. Italy outwitted us! A country that wasted a million lives and three whole years trying to retake a quarter of a mile of Austrian territory. The only WWI power to switch sides I might add!
So now France, which militarily would’ve been defeated by Germany were it not for American help, and which was in far worse shape economically and politically than Germany, got to set the terms and punish Germany so severely it led to the rise of Hitler and their occupation in WWII. I love France, always have, but boy did their government get lucky with a sap like Wilson.
So he sowed the seeds of the League’s failure before it even began, and the League, unlike the UN, would’ve been able to override congressional war powers as it was constructed. And after Wilson lied about WWI, it was time for electoral payback. People forget how deeply unpopular he was by 1920 and how that led to the Democratic party losing three straight elections, since we lost the public’s trust and the Southern racists like John C Davis and William McAdoo he put in charge of the party kneecapped Smith in 28′. So no, fuck Woodrow Wilson. We are still cleaning up his mess today.
…and I for one to place the blame for that failure squarely at Lodge’s feet and am ashamed that he was our Senator. He did successfully keep us out of war during his first term and got in reluctantly in the face of mounting evidence that we might not have a choice in his second. As I look back over history and think about how I would have aligned myself politically had I been alive, it is Wilson’s presidency that would cause me to consider leaving behind the Republican Party of Reconstruction and consider the Democratic Party, a transition that would have been complete by FDR.
“The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
—Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (1901)
Britain repeatedly violated the Neutrality Act and was given a slap on the wrist, our bankers like JP Morgan all funded Britain and France from the outset of the war, as did the steel and oil companies, which sold exclusively to the allies. William Jennings Bryan resigned convinced Wilson wanted war. The Republicans like Lodge were frankly, more hawkish than Wilson, and wanted war to back Britain which they had ancestral ties and lingering affinity for. It’s why Hughes, himself opposed to the war, had to run a tightrope that downplayed it, ultimately losing states that narrowly went for Wilson on the promise he wouldn’t go to war.
He then went out of his way to instruct his State Department, now with Bryan out of the way, to condemn the Germans and goad them into the unrestricted submarine warfare. As late as the summer of 1916, a German blockage runner sailed into Newport harbor and was greeted with great fanfare by a crowd fascinated by it’s speed and technological prowess, and happy both sides were able to get food.
Just as the Embargo against Japan drew them into the war in WWII, the Embargo against Imperial Germany had the same effect. Unlike Japan, they really went any worse than the allied powers on humanitarian grounds and were not a security threat to our national interest. The war wrecked Europe, and American involvement was the only way it would’ve ended in an Allied victory. A stalemate leading to a cease fire, which would’ve more accurately reflected the results, might have prevented WWII. Our involvement probably made things significantly worse.
Germany conspired with Mexico to get us into the first war and we were, after all, attacked in the second war. Bryan actually ended up campaigning for Wilson in 1916 and even offered to enlist as a Private once war started, though Wilson turned him down.
People also forget there were a series of regional conflicts in between in the Balkans and Central Europe that arguably continued the allied and central fight into the late 20s, and then Japan began the Manchuria war while Italy invaded Eithiopia in the 30s, arguably part of the same war as well. So I completely agree with most of that characterization. So it almost works 1914-1945, with very few years of peace in the misguidedly named ‘interwar’ period. So I hope more scholarship can be devoted to WWI, the greatest tragedy in modern history. All of our modern conflict in the Balkans and the Middle East are directly linked to that war’s outcome.
…the two world wars as analyzed by some as two phases of one war with a hiatus, which is not at all unreasonable.
Sorry, my bad.