Frontpage
Interview�s guest today is H. W. (Harry) Crocker III, who has worked
as a journalist, a speechwriter for the governor California (Pete
Wilson, in his first term and reelection campaign), and as Vice
President and Executive Editor of Regnery Publishing. He is the author
of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History, and Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision, as well as the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey. He is also the author of the new book Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian-Fighting to Terrorist-Hunting.
FP: Harry Crocker, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Crocker: Thanks, I'm happy to be here.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Crocker: Well, I wanted to bust a lot of myths about American history: including
the myth of the Indian as a noble savage; the myth that America has
always been a non-imperial power; the myth that the Southern
Confederacy was wrong; the myth that the American military relies on
big battalions rather than on the extraordinary individual courage and
skill of the American fighting man; the myth
that we �lost� the Vietnam War (we won and the Democratic Congress
shamefully gave it away); and the myth that the Iraq War is a disaster,
among others. If
I have one wish for the book, I�d like it to be put into the hands of
every serving soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine so that he can know
that his sacrifice today is part of the great sweep of American
military history. I titled the book Don�t Tread on Me
because that seems to me America�s unofficial motto, the phrase that
best sums up the American spirit, especially the spirit of the American
fighting man, and that explains our history.
FP:
The "myth" that the Southern Confederacy was wrong? Kindly clarify this
point as many readers may think that you are implying that defending
the evil institution of slavery was a legitimate thing to do. Yes, the
Civil War was not initiated to free the slaves, but it was about
slavery and freeing the slaves was its end result and its humane and
positive result. So the Southern Confederacy was wrong in the sense
that it inhabited an evil institution that had to be liquidated in a
democratic nation and the North was right in that it represented
freedom and equality for all. It was right in that it freed the slaves.
Kindly clarify the context and meaning of your position.
Crocker: Well,
Jamie, as every politically incorrect schoolboy used to know, Lord
Acton, the great historian of liberty, wrote a letter to Robert E.
Lee in November 1866 saying, "I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." And he was talking about liberty, not slavery. He thought secession was a necessary check on what he called "the absolutism of the sovereign will."
But
it's also wrong to deal -- especially from the painless distance we
have now -- with slavery as an abstraction, as an obvious moral evil to
which the sacrificing of 600,000 dead (not to mention the infliction of
military rule and the bitterness engendered by Reconstruction over the
South) is a but a trifle, an historical necessity. The idea that an
"evil institution" should be "liquidated" -- those are the words of a
Soviet commissar, not a conservative. Robert E. Lee in his reply to
Acton's letter said that no one in Virginia bemoaned the loss of
slavery; Virginians like himself had long wanted to do away with it;
but that they did not think that the costliest war in American history
was, to appropriate your words, the "humane and positive" way to do it.
And of course, if
slavery is the historical trump card, then the War for American
Independence was wrong, because many of the founders held slaves and
upheld slavery against the British who were willing to abolish it, as a
war a measure. You remember Samuel Johnson�s great taunt in Taxation No Tyranny: �how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?� The
founders of the Southern Confederacy thought of themselves as following
directly in the founders� footsteps, which is why George Washington is
on the great seal of the Confederacy -- and also why the politically
correct are just as eager to prohibit naming schools after George
Washington as they are after Confederate heroes.
But for me, as a natural Tory (and 1776 Loyalist) and adoptive Virginian, the real issue was best put by Robert E. Lee, a soldier who had served the United States his entire adult life, and who opposed secession and slavery (which he thought, and I quote, "a moral and political evil"), but who turned
down command of the Union armies and said: �a Union that can only be
maintained by swords and bayonets � has no charm for me�.�
I think he took the position of every humane man when he said: �With all my devotion to the Union
and the feeling of loyalty and duty as an American citizen, I have not
been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my
children, my home.�
I often ask anti-Confederates to put the question that was faced in 1861 into the prism of their own lives. If the South seceded today, how many of us would think the appropriate response would be to send armored divisions over the 14th Street Bridge here in Washington, to carpet bomb Southern cities, and to blockade Southern ports?
Lee
believed that Americans should resolve political disputes through
gentle persuasion and free assent. He did not believe in waging war
against fellow Americans�and neither do I.
FP:
Sometimes wars have to be fought, even between fellow citizens,
especially if it means to root out a cancer. And slavery was a cancer.
A wise individual once said that this great nation could not go on
being half free and half slave. Something had to give. And though the
Civil War was a great tragedy, what an incredible testament to the
greatest nation on earth that it sacrificed 600,000 thousand of its own
citizens in war so that all of them could be free.
Crocker:
Would it not have been a greater testament if we had abolished slavery
without 600,000 dead, including one-quarter of the white male draft age
population of the South -- and within that number many of the South's
best and brightest who died leading from the front, defending their
homes, and what they saw as their freedom, and whose view of slavery,
to be fair to them, was far more paternalistic than brutal? I rather
hope abortion, a rather more heinous crime than slavery, can be
abolished without recourse to war.
FP:
Yes it would have been a greater testament if the U.S. had abolished
slavery without war. Unfortunately we have to deal with the world in
which we live rather than with the world in which we wish to live. At
the time of the Civil War breaking out, it didn't look like the South
was interested in shedding itself of the institution at any time soon.
In any case, let's save a dialogue on this for another time and place.
Tell us some of your thoughts on America's founding period.
Crocker: Well, the most controversial might be that what drove the war for independence was not primarily
all the stuff we normally hear about--no taxation without
representation and all that--but the founders' ambitions to create an
empire of their own.
This
is one of the most obvious neglected facts of American history. All you
have to do is go back and read what Washington, Adams, Franklin,
Jefferson, and Hamilton wrote to see that they envisioned America as a
great and powerful empire that would be bigger and more powerful than
the British empire. And I should say, an historian with a name familiar
to all your readers, David Horowitz, argued just this point in an
unjustly neglected book, The First Frontier: The Indian Wars and American Origins. He's
absolutely right, and I quote him--and the founders--to that effect.
The primary driving factor in the American War of Independence was the
Proclamation Line of 1763 that the British drew to inhibit American
westward expansion and keep peace with the Indians. The Americans
didn't care about keeping peace with the Indians. They wanted their
manifest destiny of a westward empire.
FP: So you argue that America is, was, and always has been an empire?
Crocker: Yes, absolutely. We were the product of an empire (and a very libertarian one). And I wonder how many of your readers remember that the founders' first foreign policy impulse, and a lasting one, was to annex Canada? John Quincy Adams and many other presidents wanted to annex Cuba,
(which would have meant no Fidel Castro and no Cuban Missile Crisis).
And manifest destiny wasn�t merely a matter of overthrowing the British
and sweeping away the Indians, but seizing Florida from Spain, and
acquiring, in the words of President James K. Polk �an immense empire,
the value of which twenty years hence it would be difficult to
calculate� in the Mexican War, a war that ensured that my ancestors
(I�m a sixth generation Californian) lived under an American rather
than a Mexican government.
We
shouldn�t forget either that we gave the Philippines the first elected
legislature in Asia; our �little Brown Brothers� were great allies in
World War II; and a couple of years ago there was poll that showed that
the Philippines, India, and Poland were the three most pro-American
(and pro-Bush) countries in the world. I think it�s easy to understand
why. The Poles are grateful that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and
Pope John Paul II worked together to liberate them from Communism. And India and the Philippines are great allies in the war on terror because we were in the Philippines and the British were in India and we have given them a pro-Western, pro-market orientation.
It�s simply self-defeating to hide our virtues under a bushel. The only reason why the so-called Anglo-sphere nations of America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, et al. are the way they are is because of the British empire.
It�s certainly as important today � in a clash of global civilizations
such as we have with militant Islam -- to believe that Western ideas of
justice and morality should be upheld, defended, and promoted.
FP: Share with us your views on why Patton should have been promoted over Eisenhower.
Crocker: Eisenhower was
a "political" general in the sense that George Marshall thought he had
the requisite diplomatic tact and managerial competence to keep the
peace among the allied commanders and lead them successfully in World
War II. And he did. But really, the very impolitic Patton was much more
astute in his political judgments. Eisenhower unfortunately shared
FDR's rosy view of the Soviets as progressive anti-imperialists. It's
amazing how much more suspicious Eisenhower and FDR were of British
imperial designs than Soviet ones. Patton, on the other hand, shared
the view of Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery, Patton's great
rival, that we should drive as far east as possible to keep the Soviets
out of Eastern Europe, or as much of it as we could.
FP: Did the U.S. military win the war in Vietnam? If so, how did we lose?
Crocker: Yes,
the American military won the war -- it was the North Vietnamese, after
all, who capitulated to sign the Paris Accords in 1973. But the
Democratic Congress hurriedly undid our obligations to our ally,
denying the South Vietnamese our military support, ammunition, spare
parts, and even medical supplies when the North Vietnamese invaded in
1975. It was the most shameless bugout imaginable, and one reason why
it's hard to fathom why anyone would want to entrust that party with America's defense and foreign policy again.
FP: What are your thoughts on Iraq?
Crocker: Amidst
all the bad news that grips the headlines today, we shouldn't forget
that the war was necessary, and a stunning success in what we set out
to do. We toppled Saddam Hussein, an overt enemy of the United States, and in doing so we convinced Moammar Gaddafi to surrender his weapons of mass destruction program and convinced Pakistan to shut down A. Q. Khan who was the main funnel of this technology to rogue states. Those are singular accomplishments.
Our
military has performed with extraordinary skill and courage. I only
wish that the Bush administration had learned some of the lessons of
history: primarily �divide and conquer� and �reinforce success.� If we
had not pledged to uphold a unified Iraq and instead created an independent Kurdistan, an independent Shiite Mesopotamia, and an independent rump state of Iraq,
and reinforced our initial victory with a doubling of our troop
strength to stem the inevitable initial chaos, our job would be done.
FP: So how do you see the situation in Iraq
now? What can feasibly be done now? And what do you think needs to be
done in the terror war in general for us to achieve victory against
Islamic jihad?
Crocker: Well, given that I was for partition of Iraq from the get-go, I do not see a civil war along sectarian lines as a disaster for the United States, as long as we're not involved in it. Nor would it be a disaster for the United States if democracy fails to take hold in Iraq; America's best friends in the Arab world are pro-Western monarchs.
Toppling
Saddam Hussein was a militarily achievable goal--and we did that
splendidly. Even superintending three successful elections was a militarily
achievable goal--and that mission was accomplished in 2005. Given that
the administration is devoted to a democratic outcome for Iraq, we might as well let Arab democracy take its course with no further assistance from us.
The
realistic model of Arab democracy is probably something like the Gaza
Strip, where political parties Hamas and Fatah supplement ballots with
running street battles. Better that Arab-Muslim passions be turned
against their own city councilmen and politicos than against the
Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy, and better that Sunnis and Shias proclaim
death to each other rather than death to us (though they seem willing
and able to do both).
As
far as our national interest is concerned, it doesn�t much matter what
Islamists and Baathists and Fatahists do to one another as long as they
leave us alone�and by leaving us alone, I mean not only not attacking
us (or developing means to attack us), but deferring to our right to
befriend whom we choose to befriend, to trade with whom we wish to
trade, and to broadcast our ideas to whoever wants to listen, to be
ourselves in the world, and to be true to our unofficial motto of Don�t Tread on Me.
And that means that the war is just as much one of civilizational confidence as it is anything else.
FP: Harry Crocker, thank you for joining us today.
Crocker: My pleasure.
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