It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [97]
Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson created the illusion that his soon-to-be World War I enemy—Germany—fired the first shot at the United States, when in reality, Germany was trying to play fair. The German Embassy in Washington notified Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, that the British passenger ship the Lusitania carried illegal weapons and would become a German target in open waters. Bryan tried to convince Wilson that he should warn Americans of the ship’s danger, but Wilson refused to do so. He saw an “opportunity” in the form of lost American lives, which would present him with a clear and decent motive to enter the war. When the Lusitania went down near the coast of Ireland, 114 Americans went down with it. Thereafter, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned.
Scheming like FDR, McKinley, and Wilson, President Lyndon B. Johnson provoked an attack to spark the Vietnam War, claiming that America was shot at first. To carry out his charade, President Johnson pushed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was itself based on false reports of attacks on American naval forces, through a pliant Congress. In turn, Johnson built up American forces in Southeast Asia and eventually collected more than five hundred thousand American troops to fight in that catastrophic war. Millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed and wounded in the conflict, along with fifty thousand dead young Americans. To what end?
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Turning to the War on Terror, we see that the more things change, the more they stay the same; presidents in the twenty-first century lie just like their nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts. Throughout most of his presidency (and particularly after September 11th), George W. Bush purposefully inspired fear and anxiety in Americans through every channel of communication available to him: “We are in imminent danger of attack.” “The terrorists are out there.” “The terrorists want to destroy our way of life.” Bush and his team, not having presented any form of convincing evidence of so-called weapons of mass destruction, lied us into war with Iraq. Professor Robert Higgs elaborates:
The 9-11 attack, then, is to the Bush administration as the Pearl Harbor attack was to the Roosevelt administration: an enduringly evocative pretext for whatever “retaliatory” measures the government chooses to take, even if, as in the present case, the retaliation is aimed in large part at parties who had nothing to do with the initial attack.9
Moreover, if the government truly believed that we were all in grave danger, then surely it would shift all of its resources toward eliminating that threat; protecting Americans’ personal freedoms would take precedence above all other government initiatives. However, this has been far from the case. For example, the government enacted an enormous farm bill in 2002 immediately after September 11th which purported to spend $180 billion over the next decade, a 70 percent increase.10 This vast farm bill can be coupled with the $40 billion (and growing . . . ) the federal government spends on education along with the $11 billion dished out annually for “community and regional development.”11 If terrorists are lingering in our airports, what is Congress doing spending money on fertilizer, math books, job training programs, and peonies? Professor Robert Higgs argues convincingly:
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It is all too clear that either we are not really in grave danger, and hence the government’s actions, though sufficiently objectionable in many ways, are not lethally reprehensible, or we really are in grave danger and, given that condition, the government is acting in a completely irresponsible and utterly immoral manner. If semi-organized gangs of suicidal maniacs numbering in the thousands are out to kill us all, the government ought not to be fiddling with kindergarten subsidies and the preservation of