The war party's playbook.(The Last Word)

During his presidential campaign, the Republican candidate was perceived as a man of modest ambitions, devoted to reining in government growth at home and pursuing a more "humble" foreign policy. Once in the White House, however, this seemingly unpretentious man suddenly morphed into a "war president."

The new president brought in his train a shadowy clique of ambitious figures--bankers, media moguls, and political opportunists--who had been trying, without success, to maneuver the United States into a foreign war. The president himself claimed a mandate from "Providence" to wage a global war on behalf of "liberty."

For nearly two years, the president and his allies--particularly in Republican-aligned media--stoked public outrage over the threat posed by a distant regime. Congressional speeches and newspaper accounts abounded in tales of hideous atrocities wrought by the regime against its helpless subjects. Even in the absence of a specific threat to our nation, the president insisted, "the broad ground of humanity" justified armed intervention to end such outrages.

After hundreds of Americans were tragically and suddenly killed, the War Party had its casus belli. When the war finally came, U.S. forces quickly prevailed over the enemy, which proved to be a third-rate power in deep decline. But the U.S. military found itself confronting a fierce insurgency waged by an indigenous population that wanted independence, not merely a "regime change." At the turn of the century, the American Republic had begun to take on the traits of a global empire.

Such was the outcome of the 1898 Spanish-American War, now widely recognized by historians as a brazen exercise in cynical aggression that did nothing to enhance American security, liberty, or independence. It was quite successful in enriching a politically powerful oligarchy that effectively controlled both the Republican and Democrat parties.

In his valuable 1979 study The Politics of War, the late historian Walter Karp describes how the emerging American oligarchy concluded that "the American people could ... be diverted from their domestic concerns if the right sort of foreign crusade was offered." A foreign war, wrote U.S. Consul General to Havana Fitzhugh Lee in 1896, was just the thing to "knock the pus" out of the "populistic boil." During the second term of Democrat Grover Cleveland, an effort was made to provoke a war with Great Britain over a border dispute in Venezuela. But London was soon distracted by a more pressing dispute with Germany over colonial issues in Africa.

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