Clinton Orders Massive Bombing of Iraq

In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. military to undertake a large-scale aerial attack on Iraq. This offensive was provoked by Sadaam Hussein’s multiple offenses: as the dictator of Iraq, he’d violated human rights, he’d developed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and he’d arrogantly defied UN requests to inspect his weapon-producing facilities, despite the fact that he’d previously agreed to allow such inspections.

Although the Iraqi people were not of themselves violent, Iraq under the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein was a threat to neighboring nations, having already attacked and invaded Kuwait, causing thousands of deaths in the 1990/1991 war, as historian Gregory Ball writes:

In response to Saddam Hussein’s continued refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, the United States Government planned Operation DESERT FOX in the fall of 1998. The primary mission of DESERT FOX was to strike military targets in Iraq that contributed to its ability to produce, store, maintain, and deliver weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The U.S. government expected to achieve several goals with the operation. First, it would degrade Iraq’s ability to create and employ WMD. Second, the attacks would diminish Iraq’s capability to wage war against its neighbors. Third, the operation would impress upon Saddam Hussein the consequences of violating international agreements, including allowing United Nations inspectors unfettered access to Iraqi sites. The United States and Great Britain launched Operation DESERT FOX on December 16, 1998, after U.N. Chief Inspector Richard Butler notified the U.N. that Iraq had failed to provide full cooperation during inspections.

Although Operation Desert Fox was short in duration, lasting only a few days, it nonetheless inflicted massive destruction and numerous casualties on Iraq. President Clinton was able to demonstrate his willingness to engage in warfare, and his commitment to serving the United Nations and to implementing the consequences which Sadaam Hussein brought upon himself for violating UN agreements — agreements to which Hussein had committed himself.

Understanding Obama: Part 02

The axiomatic property of the Obama administration was that Obama did not understand, like, or trust the United States, the American people, or the Constitution. Built into Obama’s presidency was therefore an essential irony: he did not like the people who elected him, and did not trust the constitutional system which put him into the White House.

The checks and balances which the Constitution built into the structure of the government are designed to slow the process of legislation. This was conceived as a safeguard to protect the people from the government.

There is a natural temptation to want a strong government. It is assumed that a strong government could and would quickly address and fix problems and crises.

Yet there is great danger in a strong government. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” In other words, the government can only do things for you in proportion to what it can do to you.

A weak government is the surest way to protect individual political liberty and personal freedom. But protecting freedom and liberty was not among Obama’s goals. As historian David Limbaugh wrote in 2012:

President Obama has repeatedly revealed his impatience with our Constitution’s separation of powers and its checks and balances, lamenting that democracy is sometimes messy and frustrating. He just wants the other branches to get out of his way, because he can’t allow a silly inconvenience like the Constitution to obstruct his utopian vision for America.

Obama subjected the nation to great risks: shortcutting constitutional processes in one circumstance would allow eventually for shortcutting them in other circumstances. Eventually, due process and equal standing before the law would be endangered.

It is telling that many of the voters who elected Obama in 2008 and 2012 were the voters who chose to vote for President Trump in 2016. This was a telling rejection of Obama’s methods by the very electorate who placed him into the White House in the first place.

Understanding Obama: Part 01

What happened in the United States in November 2008? And what happened in the United States between January 2009 and January 2017? The election of Barack Obama and the presidency of Barack Obama constitute a shocking narrative: the country’s president did not like, trust, or understand the nation or its constitution.

To parse the verbs, the reader will note that Obama expressed a distaste both for the people of the United States and for the Constitution of the United States; he placed no confidence in, and refused to rely upon, the nation or the process which the nation codified into its constitution; and he demonstrated a lack of insight or comprension regarding the very people who voted for him and the very constitutional system which put him into the nation’s highest office.

The irony will not be lost: the president did not like, trust, or understand the citizens who voted for him and the constitutional process which made him president

Further irony lies in the fact that Obama was at one time paid to be a professor of constitutional law at a university.

In any case, historian David Limbaugh notes that “the destructive policies and actions of the Obama administration” form “Obama’s broad-based assault on the American republic.” Obama conducted a “war on our Constitution and our political economic liberties,” and an “assault on America’s economic, social, cultural, national security, business, and industrial institutions.”

The net result of Obama’s presidency is that many - millions - of voters who enthusiastically cast their ballots for him were dismayed enough, after observing his behavior in office, to vote for President Donald Trump.

The election of President Trump - whether the reader loves or hates him - is the ultimate fruit of the Obama administration.

Obama’s performance in office - from his appointment of corrupt and incompetent individuals like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, to the 1.7 billion dollars he wasted trying to start a healthcare website - drove citizens to vote against the candidate who seemed to be a continuation of Obama’s policies.

The reader should not, however, hold Obama responsible for the failure of his presidency and his administration. The culpability lies rather with his handlers - the people who found and groomed him, directed his campaigns and political career, shaped his policies and wrote the speeches he delivered. Obama was, in some ways, a victim of a political machine which used him as a mouthpiece and as a frontman.

Winning a War with Dollars Instead of Bullets: Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative

The Cold War was a decades-long period of tension which shaped the second half of the twentieth century. Although there were periods of violence and bloodshed — like the Korean War and the Vietnam War — many of the Cold War years were times of tense and anxious peace.

The ‘peace’ which filled many of the Cold War years was not a pleasant peace. On the ‘western’ side, the United States and its NATO allies developed high-tech weapons. On the ‘eastern’ side, the Soviet Socialists and their Warsaw Pact allies did the same.

The stress and apprehension of these ‘peaceful’ years were caused by the knowledge that terribly powerful weapons were being stockpiled. Had these weapons been used on a large scale, the results would have been disastrous.

Peace was preserved by the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Socialists truly wanted to use these weapons. Leaders on both sides wanted to intimidate their opponents by owning these weapons, but they knew that using these weapons was an action to be avoided.

The Cold War was ‘cold’ because, rather than fighting and directly engaging their armies with each other, both sides wanted to pressure the other side by simply manufacturing these weapons.

The Cold War and its end were not about physical combat, but rather were ultimately about economics. Which side would be able to afford to develop and build the most terrifying weapons?

So it was that, upon taking office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan began one of the most ambitious, and one of the most expensive, defensive systems ever conceived. In March 1983, President Reagan publicly announced the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI), as historian Robert Maginnis writes:

By the mid-1980s, the economic strain of Russia’s very expensive military overreach was especially tough, a major reason to end the Cold War. The strain increased significantly once the newly minted President Ronald Reagan committed the US to increased resources for defense and introduced his bank-breaking “Star Wars” initiative, an expense the Kremlin was unprepared to match.

The SDI would make most of the USSR’s missiles useless. If the Soviet Socialists launched missiles at the United States, most of them would never reach their targets, because the SDI would stop the missiles in flight.

In order to overcome the SDI, the Soviet Socialists would have to develop an entire generation of sophisticated missiles. Such an effort would require billions of rubles or dollars.

The Soviet Socialists simply could not afford to develop offensive missiles which could successfully attack the United States. Missiles which could break through the SDI’s defensive shield were plainly too expensive.

The Cold War ended, then, because the Soviet Socialists ran out of money. The United States, rather than outfighting the USSR, merely outspent the Soviets.

Becoming President: Nixon in 1968

The political mood in the United States in 1968 was tumultuous. Richard Nixon competed with Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination.

In the Democratic Party, it seemed at first that incumbent President Lyndon Johnson would easily win the party’s nomination; but in March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election.

After LBJ withdrew from the contest, four candidates seemed strong: Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, and Eugene McCarthy. It was not at all clear which of these would win the party’s nomination.

In June 1968, a Palestinian terrorist murdered Robert Kennedy. This created further confusion in the Democratic Party. George McGovern entered the race after Kennedy’s death, additionally complicating the situation.

Eugene McCarthy represented the anti-war radicals; Humphrey represented the labor unions and major urban political machines within the Democratic Party; Wallace represented the segregationists who opposed Nixon’s support of civil rights legislation.

At the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August 1968, the party ultimately chose Hubert Humphey as its candidate, but the ‘big story’ in the media was the major rioting in downtown Chicago in the area surrounding the convention. Radicals and revolutionaries of various stripes, beginning with anti-war activists but then spreading to all manner of troublemakers, caused damage and injury. Hundreds of rioters and hundreds of police were wounded.

When the dust settled, then, it was Nixon vs. Humphrey in 1968. Recalling the campaign, Donald Rumsfeld writes:

Amid anger and protest, Nixon offered himself as a source of reassurance and stability. For voters it was a welcome change from the anguished presidency of Lyndon Johnson. But because he had been defeated in two high-profile elections during the past decade, he had to battle the impression that he was a loser.

Humphrey suffered from the internal fractures within his Democratic Party. By contrast, the Republican Party was unified behind Nixon.

But Nixon had suffered a prominent defeat in the 1960 presidential election against Kennedy, and had further endured a loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. How could Nixon shake the reputation of being a loser?

Nixon gained much public sympathy after the 1962 election, when Howard Smith, a news broadcaster on the ABC network, invited Alger Hiss to comment on Nixon’s losses.

Alger Hiss was a convicted felon — a Soviet spy who’d been paid to reveal U.S. government secrets to the KGB in Moscow, and who’d been paid to give misleading advice to U.S. policymakers, including President Roosevelt — and the America public was not happy with the network for giving airtime to a Soviet Socialist espionage agent.

Rebounding from his political losses, and gaining public sympathy from Hiss’s TV appearance, Nixon emerged as a strong leader. Nixon eventually won the November 1968 election by a landslide.

Ronald Reagan vs. John Maynard Keynes

Much of President Reagan’s economic policy was directed at undoing New Deal policies which were leftover from the Great Depression. These policies were fifty years old by the time Reagan was in office, and he thought that they needed to be updated, revised, or replaced.

Reagan was elected in 1980 and took office in 1981. In a 1986 comment in the Wall Street Journal, he noted that Keynesian economics were “a legacy from a period when I was back in college studying economics.”

Indeed, Keynesian theories began making an appearance with early publications like Indian Currency and Finance, published by Keynes in 1913. His major publications came later, like The Economic Consequences of Peace in 1919, A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill in 1925, and his large systematic explication in the Treatise on Money in 1930.

Keynesian views were widely understood by the time Ronald Reagan graduated from college in 1932.

Many historians see the influence of Keynes in FDR’s “New Deal” policies, policies which were designed to heal the damage done by the Great Depression, but which instead caused the Depression to last longer and do deeper harm to the economy.

By the time Ronald Reagan became president, many voters believed that it was time to discard Keynesian economics and find other, more credible, economic policy systems.

Re-Examining the Integration Narrative: School Desegregation Before Brown

The simple narrative taught in most history textbooks is that prior to 1954, schools in the United States were divided into two categories: those for Black children and those for White children. After the landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, schools across the country were gradually integrated, sometimes against resistance, to the point at which they are now largely, if not entirely, integrated.

This simple narrative is wrong.

When the case of Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. was first presented to the Supreme Court in 1952, there were already many integrated schools around the United States.

Desegregated schools were nothing new; in fact, they were almost a century old. Some schools, like Berea College in Kentucky, were integrated even prior to the Civil War.

There is a great deal of documentation about desegregation before 1954.

Yearbooks from high schools reveal substantial integration among students in towns like Muncie, Indiana. In the mid-1940s, African-American students and white students were mixed together in academic classes, in sports, and in music groups like choirs.

Similar instances of desegregation appear in high schools in other cities.

Integrated schools since the time of the Civil War were more common in the North than in the South, more common in smaller towns than in large cities, and more common in parochial private schools than in preparatory boarding schools. The main targets of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision were public high schools in large cities in the South.

Some small towns integrated out of economic necessity rather than moral principle. Many parochial schools considered it part of their mission to integrate. Some schools in the North had never been segregated, and so had no need to desegregate.

Oversimplified narratives in history textbooks could lead students to assume that all schools were segregated prior to 1954, while in reality, by 1954, there were large numbers of integrated schools.