US Imperialism Violates “Historic Identity”
Friday, 18 April 2008, 10:48 am
Article: Massachusetts School Of Law
Revolutionary War Historian Joseph Ellis Says U.S. Imperialism Violates
“Historic Identity”
America’s military presence in Iraq represents “a basic violation” of its
“historic identity,”
that of a nation founded in opposition to imperialism, Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian Joseph
Ellis said.
Americans have neglected an im****tant lesson from their own past, Ellis,
an authority on the
Revolutionary War period, said. “We have become the imperial power. We
have become Great
Britain and have succeeded Great Britain as the hegemonic power of the
world. I would think we
would wish to avoid making some of the mistakes she made.” He challenged
the idea that the U.S.
needs a military presence in South Korea and Western Europe as well as
Iraq.
“The notion that (our problems) are going to be solved in a military
fa****on is fundamentally
misguided and it’s going to send us right down the path that Britain went
and into oblivion,”
Ellis warned in a recent talk at the Massachusetts School of Law at
Andover.
Ellis, author of “His Excellency: George Wa****ngton,” “American Creation:
Triumphs and
Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic,” and other histories of that
period, suggested the
problems facing the U.S. occupiers of Iraq today are not dissimilar from
those the British
faced battling George Wa****ngton.
“After his early defeats, Wa****ngton realized that the British have to
win, but he does not
have to win. The British had enormous problems of supply, and they don’t
have enough troops.
They can take New York, they can take Charleston, but they can’t hold them
because they don’t
have enough troops to do this,” Ellis said. “The only solution was to
fight a defensive---what
they called a Fabian strategy---or a war of posts. It’s not just a battle
between armies but
between populations. Does this sound familiar?”
Prior to assuming command in Iraq, General (David) Petraeus wrote studies
saying it would take
almost a million U.S. troops to put down an Iraqi insurgency and, Ellis
noted, “we aren’t going
to get a million troops.” The result in Iraq has put the insurgency in a
position where, even
if they can’t win, they will succeed if they just don’t lose, but that the
U.S. has to “win.”
The Revolutionary War was a battle “for the hearts and minds of the
American people, and
Wa****ngton realizes that,” Ellis continued. “The only major battle he
fought was at Monmouth
Court House (June 28, 1778) until the end of the war and that was by
accident. He comes to an
understanding that an occupying army has massive problems not just in
defeating but in
suppressing and controlling an insurgency. Eventually, the British won’t
lose, they will simply
give up because the ordinary people back in London don’t want it.”
Ellis said when British Prime Minister Lord Frederick North heard General
Cornwallis
“surrendered 7,000 troops at Yorktown in October, 1781, he said, ‘Oh, my
god, it’s over,’
because he knew that public opinion in Britain was not going to sustain it
(the war) any longer.”
Great Britain recovered from the loss of its empire in North America,
Ellis said, but over time
“overreach, overextension, (and) hubris” collapsed its empire, as these
cir***stances felled
the Roman Empire before it.
“I would think as a historian that we got choices here (in Iraq),” Ellis
said. “Those choices
ought to be informed by past experiences both of the United States or of
other world powers,
and especially Great Britain.”
Ellis gave his talk April 5 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover,
a non-profit law
school purposefully dedicated to providing an affordable legal education
to minorities and
students of modest means that would not otherwise be able to enter the
legal profession.
*************
Jeff Demers
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
**
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