Overhearing something on NPR about the way the USA makes every war about themselves, I thought I'd dig around a bit, see if the speaker was right (I feared he was) and see if I could determine why, since we dropped any semblance of isolationism, we now considered ourselves to be the only ones that could keep the peace; why only our type of government was acceptable. God knows, many of us in this country quit buying that 50 years ago.
So, lets start with the War of 1812. (1812-1814) While I lost ancestors to this war, I never really understood it. In my class, it was all about America. What I didn't get was that it was actually about Europe, specifically Napoleon Bonaparte. England did not want the new USA to partner with France--again. It was also assisting Native American leaders in fighting against the westward expansion of the USA. I would hate that more if I didn't know what imperialist colonizers the British were at that time. At any rate, the main cause was an inability to agree on trade with other countries/embargos and fighting to take over the rest of the continent.
The next declared war was the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Well, we fought this on foreign soil due to "manifest destiny". You know, The USA is going to be from Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. We were expanding our territories. (Don't we fight other countries when they try to take territory from their neighbors?) We were not exactly the good guys here. Just greed and bullying in the image of Great Britain. Not once in school did I ever learn anything about Mexico except the Aztecs cutting hearts out of people. I know nothing about Mexico in the late 1840s. I do know that when a war is fought where you live, the people shooting and looting and destroying your home are not seen as heroes but as invading monsters.
Then came the Spanish-American War fought in 1898. This started with the sinking of the Maine (later determined not to be caused by the Spanish military) and ended with the freeing of Cuba to develop its own government and the changing of Guam and Puerto Rico to US ownership and Spain sold the Phillipines to the US for $20,000,000. This took Spain out of the Americas and by serendipity, having no colonies to focus on, resulted in a Spanish renaissance at home.
The next official US war was World War I. The US participated from 1917 to 1918 fighting against Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. It started with an assassination by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1914. An escalation of threats and mobilization orders followed the incident, leading by mid-August to the outbreak of World War I, which pitted Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire (the so-called Central Powers) against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy and Japan (the Allied Powers). The Allies were joined after 1917 by the United States. The four years of the Great War–as it was then known–saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction, thanks to grueling trench warfare and the introduction of modern weaponry such as machine guns, tanks and chemical weapons. By the time World War I ended in the defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918, more than 9 million soldiers had been killed and 21 million more wounded. (from history.com)
So the USA was there the last year of 4 bloody years, but every show I ever saw on WWI was about the US military heroics. It was fought in Europe. Of the 9 million deaths, US deaths were estimated between 53,000 and 150,000. I do not think WWI is about the United States. We lost people and those people will be forever mourned, but this is not our story.
The next official war is WWII. While my grandfather was in the first world war, my father and practically every man his age (it seemed) was in the second world war.
The USA was in WWII from 1941-1945.
Overview of World War II (Digital History ID 2922)
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths.
World War II started in 1939. The USA joined the allies in 1941 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
The US was horrified that our Naval yard was bombed. Globally, the deaths from this war had been going on for 2 years and we were shocked that someone attacked us. Amazingly, the shows I saw as a kid were always about the glories of US soldiers fighting evil, never about the Allies pre-1941, and god-forbid if they had been from the side of the enemy.
In addition to these declared wars, there have been eleven Congressionally approved actions and 7 UN authorized while funded by congress peace-keeping things. Interestingly, the Vietnam War, from 1964-1973 was one of the first type ( I had a roommate that lost her soldier father in Vietnam several years before 1964--my first clue that they weren't telling us everything), and the Korean War, 1950-1953 was one of the second kind.
In the 1800's, we fought about trade, pirating, slave trading, and the acquisition of territory.
In the 1900's, we fought about stopping regimes we saw as against our best interests, translate that as fear-mongering over "communism" and loss of access to cheap natural resources.
In this century, its confusing. We want the oil. We hate their religion. We hate kings. We don't like who they voted into power. We jump into other people's civil wars and revolutions, then ignore genocides and slavery. There is no rhyme or reason---until you look at the strangely woven corporate loyalties and political intrigues that determine which bad guy is good and which bad guy is our enemy.
But of all of those wars, only 2 have been fought in our land--the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Those were about us.
There rest of them really are someone else's stories. We need to not be so egocentric.
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