Liberty at home, not crusades abroad: for over 100 years after its founding, the United States avoided foreign aggression, knowing such actions would lead to endless problems. Then we veered off course.(HISTORY--PAST AND PERSPECTIVE)(Viewpoint essay)

Watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the vantage point of the British ship where he was held captive, American patriot Francis Scott Key anxiously spied the star-spangled banner through the dawn's early light. The moving scene prompted him to put to words a poem he titled "Defence of Fort McHenry." The fourth stanza of that poem encapsulated the stakes that compelled McHenry's garrison to withstand the might of the British armada and keep the flag flying at all costs:

 
   O! thus be it ever, when freemen 
      shall stand 
   Between their loved home and the 
      war's desolution! ... 

During the War of 1812, freemen did stand, and their stand preserved our beloved country. Key's stirring words describing that stand at Fort McHenry in 1814 were set to music and are of course known to us as the "Star-spangled Banner," our National Anthem. And what an anthem it is! Just as Key was moved by personal observation to pen his famous words, one generation of Americans after another has been moved to experience the heartfelt sensations of what it means to be an American by Key's beautiful words set to music.

America once again finds itself embroiled in a war, a "modern" war. Instead of defending our country against an encroaching foreign invader, our men and women in uniform have once again been sent far from home for dubious reasons. The ostensible cause for the Iraq War, recall, was to find and destroy Saddam Hussein's reputed weapons of mass destruction. It was not to attack a regime that had attacked us, since Hussein, unlike al-Qaeda, did not have anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack. When the reputed WMDs were not found, our war aims shifted to nation building.

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President Bush's interventionist foreign policy posits that the United States has a unique duty to help Iraqis discover "democracy" amongst the wreckage of Hussein's brutal dictatorship. For Bush, America is an embodiment of an idea that must be exported through force of arms if necessary, not so much a political or communal entity that must be protected. If he did view our country as a political or communal entity, he would have secured our borders long ago.

The notion that American ideals must be exported to other countries is not new, but it was something that our Founding Fathers considered unwise, and it did not provide the rationale for either our War for Independence or the War of 1812. Put simply, President Bush's grand strategic vision does not find its roots in the Founding Era. Nonetheless, those roots still go back many years--certainly to the Spanish-American War in 1898, which could arguably be called our first imperialistic war.