Over the last few months many of the Americans who voted for President Obama in 2008 are expressing disillusionment and even anger at some of the things the man they elected is doing. These people have only themselves to blame. They would have known exactly what to expect from then-Senator Barack Obama if they had exercised due diligence before casting their votes.

Voting is the only dangerous activity that the uninformed, irresponsible, and careless are encouraged to engage in.  We don’t see public service announcements urging the untrained to handle guns, or to drive on the public streets. Yet every autumn public service announcements urge all of us to exercise our right to vote.

Elections have consequences. The dangers of a misplaced vote can be just as great as those of a mishandled gun, or a recklessly driven car; and there will never be a democratic nation where this is not true. Ronald Reagan understood how fragile democracy and freedom are. “Freedom,” said Reagan in a 1961 speech, “is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Thomas Jefferson warned more specifically about the dangers of ignorant voters: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Voters Make Tragic Choice in 1932

Germany’s 1932 parliamentary elections make a useful case study. In a free, fair, democratic election, the German people put their government in the hands of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist party. A large plurality of voters in Germany’s multi-party parliamentary system voted National Socialist, and millions more voted for the Soviet-backed German Communist Party. These two radical socialist parties got a clear majority of votes cast.¹

The millions of ordinary Germans who voted for National Socialist (Nazi) candidates were doing monstrous harm to their nation, but that was obviously not their intention. They voted as they did because they thought a Socialist government would bring relief from the economic hardships that the Treaty of Versailles and the worldwide economic depression had been inflicting on the working class.

They voted for candidates who promised to strengthen and rejuvenate their nation. Because they didn’t look deeply enough into the backgrounds and character of the party’s leaders, they did not foresee that the very Nazis who were promising to help them would bring devastation to their country. Nor, for that matter, did they foresee that the Soviet leaders who funded and ran the German Communist party would soon send the Red Army to brutalize those Germans who survived the war.

In the months leading up to the elections, the Nazis and Communists had been accusing each other of betraying “true” socialism and colluding with capitalists. Both accused the other German political parties (notably the Social Democratic Party, which finished second to the Nazis in its 1931 vote total) of supporting the capitalist status quo. Neither radical party was honest about its true agenda, which in both cases was power, repression, and domination.

Hitler believed that most people were simple-minded and easy to manipulate, and he made his views clear in a book published six years before the 1932 elections. (This is one of the many red flags that should have made German voters more reluctant to trust the man.) “The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted,” said Hitler, “and their understanding is feeble.” Tragically, the behavior of German voters in 1932 confirmed Hitler’s opinions.

Among the victims who suffered most from the choices German voters made in 1932 were the German people themselves. Millions of them were killed in the war that their chosen leader started in 1939. Most of those were killed by Communist soldiers from the Soviet Union, after Hitler’s 1941 invasion of that country.

When the Soviets turned back the invading German army in 1943, they launched a counter-offensive that was every bit as brutal to German civilians as it was to the German military. Communist soldiers gang-raped hundreds of thousands of German women, while their leadership did little or nothing to stop them. It is estimated that some ten thousand German women died of rape-related injuries and suicides in 1945 in Berlin alone.

The millions of German voters who voted for candidates of the Stalin-backed German Communist Party in 1932 surely would have voted differently if they had understood the de-humanizing oppression that Communist leaders like Josef Stalin inflict on the peoples they control. And, most certainly, those who voted for Hitler’s National Socialists would have voted differently if they had taken the effort to learn more about the character and intentions of that Party’s leaders.

More Recent History

German voters are not unique in having voted for leaders who ended up dominating and oppressing them. In 2007 voters in Gaza put candidates of the political party/terrorist group Hamas control of their government; new democratic elections are not expected any time soon.

In 1998 Marxist candidate Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in a fair and honest election. Within a few years he had nationalized various businesses, including news media. With firm control of the media, Chavez was re-elected in 2006. He quickly pushed through a referendum to eliminate Venezuela’s two term limit for the presidency, thus paving the way for his own continuation in power. Only time will tell what methods Chavez might resort to in order to retain his power, if control of the media proves insufficient.

When American Voters are Careless

American voters, like those in other nations, have shown a willingness to go to the polls and cast their votes without first exercising due diligence. Four of the last eight governors of Illinois, for example, have been indicted on criminal charges. Three of the four have served or are serving prison sentences, and the fourth, Governor Rod Blagojevich, may well be joining the other three before the summer is over.

Illinois is certainly not the only state where the voters sometimes choose criminals for positions of political power. Louisiana and Arkansas, to cite two others, both have a long history of public officials who end up in prison.

It’s true that none of the criminals who persuaded Illinois voters to put them in the Governor’s Mansion have ever tried to seize dictatorial power, but then again none of them ever had control of the government of an entire nation.

The closest thing to an overthrow of democracy that Illinois politicians have ever been able to get away with is ballot stuffing (creating bogus votes by using the names of dead people, for example) on behalf of themselves or their political cronies. It is widely believed, for example, that dead voters in Illinois helped determine the outcome of the 1960 US Presidential race.

Fortunately for all of us, voter fraud is a difficult thing to pull off, especially when at least some of the officials with oversight (beginning with the US Attorney General and his Justice Department) are not themselves corrupt.  The very fact that three recent Illinois governors have done time is a testiment to the effectiveness of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, a bureau of the Justice Department.

The larger problem in American history, as in other places, is legitimate voters who cast their votes without first doing their homework.

Obama Voters Suffer “Buyer’s Remorse”

In 2008 American voters made Chicago political insider Barack Obama President of the United States. He had to battle his way to a close victory in the primary elections, but his margin of victory in the general election was a comfortable seven percentage points. Today, just a year and a half into his presidency, many of the sixty-three million Americans who voted for him in November of 2008 are expressing disappointment at the radical nature of the President’s appointments and agenda. 

The millions of mainstream Americans who voted for President Obama did not realize they were choosing a leader who would populate his administration with leftist radicals like Anita Dunn, Cass Sunstein, and Van Jones. Ordinary Americans did not foresee that the President would appoint an Attorney General who would refuse to prosecute burly members of a radical black rights group who had armed themselves and blocked the entrance to a polling place to keep white voters out.

Many of the people who had been impressed with the candidate’s vague promises about bringing “change” have expressed dismay at the kinds of change the new President has been effecting. The vastly increased government spending, the government takeover of most of the health care industry, and the threats to impose draconian limits on how much fossil fuel Americans can use; have all been unpopular with the very voters who put the President in office.

Why Voting is a Solemn Responsibility

Proper pre-election day diligence would have protected these voters from the remorse they are feeling today. A carefull look at President Obama’s friends, sponsors, mentors, and voting record would have made it clear that he is a left wing extremist with no respect for the traditions and values of mainstream America. The good news is that he does not seem to be trying to ban opposition political parties, or demand direct control of the news media, or use the military to intimidate his opponents.

The bad news is that some future President might do all these things, if American voters don’t start doing their homework before filling out their ballots.
¹Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 115

A good example of this bias is the coverage given to the Year 2000 presidential race between Texas Governor George W. Bush (R) and Vice President Al Gore (D). Young students learning about this race in a freshman history class are likely to hear all the same talking points that Gore supporters were using back in late 2000 and early 2001. Students who are interested in hearing the other side of the story will have to resort to sources of information (like this website) that are as committed to a conservative point of view as college faculties are to their liberal agenda.

The Basic Facts

The 2000 race was extremely close. By the time the polls closed it was apparent that the candidate who won Florida’s 25 electoral votes would be the next President. To make matters worse, the voting in Florida was a virtual tie; the 1,784 vote advantage that Governor Bush had after the first vote count was well within the margin of error for anything as inherently sloppy as vote counting, in a state where some six million votes had been cast. This narrow margin triggered a re-count requirement according to Florida law. All six million ballots were run through the counting machines a second time, with the result that Bush’s margin of victory narrowed further, to a mere 327.

The absurd narrowness of this margin, in something as important as a Presidential election, was sure to frustrate the loser and his supporters, and it did. Vice President Gore decided to challenge the election results in court, demanding a hand recount of the votes in three carefully chosen counties.

 The Partisan Positions

Conspiracy theories blossomed in late 2000 as Gore supporters searched for ways to make their candidate the winner. One of the primary objections that Mr. Gore and his supporters raised was the claim that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of candidate George Bush, had deliberately prevented black voters from casting their votes for Mr. Bush. Another objection, and the chief basis for Gore’s demands for a manual count of ballots in hand-picked counties, was that the physical design of certain ballots was confusing to Gore supporters. A third objection, widely and loudly voiced by Gore supporters then and now, is that the Electoral College, the mechanism for electing Presidents spelled out in the US Constitution, is inherently unfair. Each of these complaints shows up in mainstream history textbooks today.

Bush supporters had their own gripes about the way the Florida voting was conducted, but these are not mentioned in any of the widely used freshman history textbooks.

“Disenfranchising” Gore’s Voters

The textbook Nation of Nations opens its coverage of the 2000 presidential race by telling students that Mr. Gore was better qualified than Mr. Bush to be President:

Gore had written a book on the global environmental crisis, promoted federal support for the Internet, and given new stature to the office of vice president. Where Bush knew little about world affairs (he had traveled outside the United States only twice), Gore seemed better prepared to conduct the nation’s foreign policy.¹

After expounding on the relative merits of the two candidates, the book goes alludes to dark rumors of a racist conspiracy between candidate George Bush and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush: “More serious charges alleged that the state had actively suppressed voting in heavily black counties. Those accusations were particularly sensational since George Bush’s brother was Florida’s Governor.”²  The book does not go into specifics, but this accusation may be based on complaints about a vehicle inspection traffic stop conducted by the Florida State Patrol, which supposedly intimidated Gore voters.

In his freshman textbook Give Me Liberty, Professor Eric Foner describes another of the mechanisms by which the State of Florida supposedly “actively suppressed” the black vote: “But the largest reason for Gore’s loss of Florida was that 600,000 persons – overwhelmingly black and Latino men, had lost the right to vote for their entire lives after being convicted of a felony.”³

Voting: Too Complicated?

Another partisan complaint faithfully repeated by left-leaning history profs is that the ballot formats used in several Florida counties were so hard to read and understand that they made voting an insurmountable challenge for thousands of Gore supporters. (Conservatives had fun with this claim when it was first made. One Bush supporter was photographed holding up a sign that said “Democrats: Too Dumb to Vote.”)

Nation of Nations describes the situation this way: “Some Florida counties had used ballots so complicated that voters with poor eyesight might choose the wrong candidate. Other counties used punch card machines so antiquated that they failed to fully perforate many ballots.”⁴

Give Me Liberty alludes to the so-called “Butterfly Ballot” used in Palm Beach County, and repeats a claim made by other Gore supporters then and now: “In one county, a faulty ballot design led several thousand Gore voters accidentally to cast their votes for independent conservative candidate Pat Buchanan. Had their votes been counted for Gore, he would have been elected president.”⁵

Objecting to the Electoral College

Another complaint common among Al Gore supporters is that the Electoral College system allowed Gore to lose the presidential race despite “winning the general election.” In other words, Gore was denied the presidency even though he got more votes than Bush on a nationwide basis. Professor Foner puts it this way:

Coming at the end of the “decade of democracy,” the 2000 election revealed troubling features of the American political system at the close of the twentieth century. The electoral college, devised by the founders to enable the country’s prominent men to choose the president rather than the ordinary voters, gave the White House to a candidate opposed by a majority of voters, an odd result in a political democracy.⁶

The Other Side of the Story: Allegations Refuted

When the authors of Nation of Nations state that “charges alleged that the state had actively suppressed voting in heavily black counties,” the authors choose not to tell their students is that these charges were investigated exhaustively by the US Commission on Civil Rights, which could find no evidence of such a thing.

According to the Commission’s report,⁷ the routine traffic stops that were conducted in three locations on election day were typical of the traffic stops the State Patrol had been conducting for years. (The State Patrol sets up roadblocks and briefly detains motorist to inspect their vehicles for safety, and confirm that each driver has a valid license.) Only one of the three was conducted in an area with a significant black population. Furthermore the State Patrol officers involved had arranged the traffic stop without the involvement of, or even the knowledge of, anyone in the Governor’s office or any other non-police government agency.

Criminals as a Voter Group

Even weaker is the accusation by history professors and other leftists that the State of Florida had engaged in some kind of sinister anti-Gore conspiracy by banning convicted felons from the voter rolls. The law in question pre-dated the 2000 election by many years, and had passed the Florida legislature with wide support among legislators of both parties.

Punishing criminal behavior is no more racist than it is sexist. While 91% of America’s prison inmates are male,⁸ no liberal has ever claimed that the prison sentences are some sort of sexist conspiracy against men. Yet leftists frequently claim that the disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics in prison represents a racist conspiracy.

The law punishes behavior, not race. Bank robbers are sentenced to prison for their robberies, not for their race; and in Florida they lose their voting privileges on the same basis. (And, of the two things under discussion, prison time would strike most people as a more severe punishment than the loss of voting rights.)

On those Challenging Ballots

Of all the charges that liberals have leveled against Florida Republicans, the most ridiculous is that Republicans were somehow responsible for the difficulties that many would-be voters had in filling out their ballots in Democrat-leaning counties. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For one thing, the pro-Gore counties were not alone in having ballots rejected for technical reasons. Several Bush-leaning counties had higher percentages of rejected ballots than any of the three Gore counties that became so infamous. The simple truth is that there is no perfect system for eliminating individual error when millions of individuals are filling out their ballots.

More to the point, the ballot design used in each county is chosen by that county’s Supervisor of Elections. In counties with heavy concentrations of liberal voters, the Supervisor is invariably a Democrat. Thus the person who designed Palm Beach County’s infamous “Butterfly Ballot” was a lifelong Democrat named Theresa LaPore.

On the Electoral College

The Electoral College system for electing US Presidents was written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. Whether it is a good or bad system is purely a matter of opinion. It is, however, the law of the land until such a time as the American people care enough about the issue to amend the Constitution.

And while it is understandable that leftists might complain about the system in general terms, it is disgraceful that a college professor would claim, as Eric Foner does, that the Electoral College was designed to “enable the country’s prominent men to choose the president rather than the ordinary voters.”

As Professor Foner must know, the College was a compromise between the larger and smaller states. It came about because the more heavily populated states were pushing, back in 1787, for the kind of presidential election system that liberals are calling for today, in which the candidate who gets the most votes on a nationwide basis is declared the winner. The smaller states wanted the President to be chosen by the states, with each state given an equal voice. The Electoral College, in which each state is given a number of electoral votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives, was the compromise finally agreed upon.

Dr. Foner’s misrepresentation of this important part of America’s history is a good illustration of the pervasiveness of bias in history texts.

Conclusion

It’s not surprising that liberals were frustrated with the outcome of the 2000 presidential race. And, given the partisan agenda of college faculties, it’s not surprising that some of that frustration would color the way history textbooks portray the events. The important issue for any student is to know that there is another side to the story.

¹Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations; (2006 edition) p. 983
²Ibid.
³Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition) pp. 961, 962
⁴Nation of Nations, p. 983
⁵Give Me Liberty, p. 961
⁶Ibid, p. 962
⁷USCCR Report, Chapter 2, under heading “Police Presence at or Near Polling Places
⁸Bureau of Justice Statistics website: Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009 – Statistical Tables
(click “spreadsheet”, then click “pim09st17.”

On March 20 of 2003 the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. Six weeks later they captured the nation’s capital and drove dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The war was politically controversial; conservatives supported the war effort, and liberals vociferously opposed it. Initially a majority of Americans joined with conservatives in supporting the war, as shown by polling data from the period.

Since 2003 liberals in the media and academia have worked tirelessly to win the American people over to their side. As early as 2006, college history textbooks were being updated to include sections about the Iraq war, with most portraying it as an immoral exercise in imperialism. According to the leftists who make up most universities’ history faculties, the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had nothing to do with protecting Americans from terrorism, and everything to do with the personal ambitions of US President George W. Bush.

The World in 2003

The problem of international Islamic terrorism was brought forcefully to the attention of the Bush administration in 2001. Prior to the events of September 11 of that year, President Bush and his predecessor had shown only mild concern about the issue, despite a 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center with explosives; and subsequent deadly attacks on two US embassies,  a US naval vessel, and a residential building occupied by US soldiers in Saudi Arabia.

The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center did not differ from the 1993 attack in the evil of its intentions; each time the intention was to bring down both of the Twin Towers and kill thousands of innocent people. Both attacks were orchestrated and funded by the same shadowy network of terrorist groups. The only reason the second attack prompted a global “war on terror,” where the first one didn’t, is that the second attack was successful.  President Bush and millions of other Americans watched footage of an airplane plunging into one of the towers, and of both towers crashing to the ground, and terrorism became a front burner issue.

The horror of the 9/11 attacks made Islamic terrorism real to millions of Americans who had previously viewed it as only a minor problem. President Bush was one of them. A few days after the September 11 attacks, the President addressed a Joint Session of Congress and said “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” ¹

In 2001 the two nations most guilty of harboring and supporting terrorism were Afghanistan and Iraq. United States forces invaded Afghanistan on October 7 of 2001, and quickly toppled the existing Afghan government. The US invaded Iraq on March 20 of 2003 with the same effect.

The View from the Ivory Tower

Mainstream history books today contain many of the talking points used by anti-war activists in 2003, starting with the claim that Hussein had nothing to do with September 11, and should therefore not be viewed as an enemy of the United States. In his widely used freshman history textbook, Professor Eric Foner portrays the Iraq war as an act of unjustified violence by a rogue Republican President: “Although Hussein was not an Islamic fundamentalist and no known evidence linked him to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Bush administration in 2002 announced a goal of “regime change” in Iraq…Early in 2003, it announced its intention of going to war with Iraq, with or without the approval of the United Nations.”²

Dr. Foner goes on to state, as “history,” one of the political slogans most widely used by left wing critics of the Iraq war; that removing Saddam Hussein from power distracted the United States from its fight against “real” terrorists: “Foreign policy ‘realists,’ including members of previous Republican administrations like Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser (sic) under the first President Bush, warned that the administrations preoccupation with Iraq deflected attention from its real foe, Al Qaeda, which remained capable of launching terrorist attacks.” ³

The real result of the war, Dr. Foner tells his students, was that “Charges quickly arose that the United States was bent on establishing itself as a new global empire.”⁴

The freshman textbook Nation of Nations also repeats some of the talking points popular among left wing magazines and websites: President Bush justified his imperial ambitions in Iraq, goes the narrative, by dishonestly claiming that Hussein was building and stockpiling “WMD’s”, or Weapons of Mass Destruction:

Under renewed pressure from the United Nations, Hussein allowed inspections to resume, but Bush grew impatient. “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons – and we do – “ he proclaimed, “does it make any sense for the world to wait … for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?”

…UN weapons inspectors, however, reported that they could find no evidence of WMD’s or programs to build them. The Security Council refused to support an American resolution giving the United States the authority to lead a UN-sponsored invasion.

…Although a large majority of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, a vocal minority had opposed the war. Some believed that a doctrine of preemption was not only morally wrong, but also dangerous. If the United States felt free to invade a country, what was to stop other nations from launching their own wars, justified by similar doctrines of preemption? Opponents also argued that no solid evidence linked the secular Saddam Hussein with the religious al Qaeda. ⁵

The Other Side of the Story

Conservatives who approved of the invasion of Iraq offered lots of arguments in support of their side, but these arguments tend to be left out of mainstream history books. The most compelling reasons for overthrowing the Hussein government had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks per se, and nothing to do with the United States “establishing itself as a new global empire.” Conservatives supported the invasion because Hussein’s government had long been one of the most important state sponsors of Islamic terrorism. In 2003 two thirds of the American people agreed with the conservatives, because the events of September 11 had finally made it apparent that terrorists could kill Americans in large numbers.

A Safe Haven for Terrorists

Before the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was well known as a safe haven for international terrorists. Terror mastermind Abu Nidal, for example, had moved his base of operations from Libya to Iraq in the 1990’s. By that time he had been implicated in murders and bombings in several different countries, including attacks on commercial airliners in Scotland and England. In 2002 the Hussein government reported that Nidal had shot himself. It is widely believed that Hussein had actually ordered the assassination of Nidal, fearing that Nidal would turn against him during the expected American invasion.

Nidal was not the only foreign-born  terrorist living in Iraq before the invasion. He was not even the only one whose first name was Abu. Palestinian-born terrorist Abu Abbas was another guest of the Hussein government, living in Iraq apparently without the knowledge of the American government. Abbas had planned and led the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, among other atrocities. He was discovered and arrested, along with several members of his terror entourage, when American forces entered Baghdad in 2003.

PLO leader Yasser Arafat was another terrorist leader who enjoyed Hussein’s active support.  Arafat supported Hussein’s invasions of Iran and Kuwait, and Hussein provided funding for the PLO’s terrorist activities, including a $25,000 bounty for the family of any PLO member who would detonate a suicide bomb in an Israeli restaurant or shopping mall.

Salman Pak: Terrorist Boot Camp

Hussein’s government did more than finance foreign terrorists. They also operated a training facility called Salman Pak where Arab volunteers from around the Middle East could train for various kinds of attacks against “enemy” civilians. The facility was even equipped with a commercial aircraft for use in hijacker training.

Guerilla War against America

One of the cited reasons for the Bush administration’s decision to remove Hussein from power was the dictator’s obvious hostility to the United States, which dated back to the 1991 “Gulf War,” in which an American-led military operation repelled Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait and badly damaged Saddam’s army.

President Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, had been the President who led the US into war against Iraq back in 1991, and Hussein had promised vengeance. In 1993 Hussein’s Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate the elder Bush when he visited Kuwait after his retirement from the Presidency. President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes against Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in retaliation for the attempt on the Sr. Bush’s life.

Another thing mainstream history books fail to mention about the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq is  Hussein’s apparent involvement in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil before the September 11 attacks.  There is abundant evidence that Hussein’s Intelligence Service provided material support to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the time leading up to their deadly attack on the Oklahoma City building.

On Those Weapons of Mass Destruction

College professors and other left wing radicals make much of the fact that very few “WMD’s,” or Weapons of Mass Destruction, were found in Iraq after the invasion, despite President Bush’s repeated pre-invasion references to the probability of Hussein having and/or developing such weapons. The other side of the story is that President Bush was not alone in his concerns.

His predecessor in office, President Bill Clinton, spoke in very strong terms about the threat posed by Hussein’s WMD capabilities, after ordering air strikes against suspected WMD factories in 1998.

President Clinton was not the only Democrat who expressed such concerns. In the months leading up to the 2003  invasion virtually every leading Democrat in Congress described Hussein’s WMD programs as an imminent threat to the United States. Senator Ted Kennedy, to cite one example, said in 2002 that ”We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

Some of the fears expressed by both Republicans and Democrats were fueled by the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which detailed the CIA’s reasons for believing that “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and  restrictions.”

The intelligence services of key American allies like the United Kingdom were saying the same things.

It is easy to say now, with 20/20 hindsight, that Hussein’s WMD programs were nowhere near as dangerous as everyone thought they were in 2002; but it is tendentious to the point of dishonesty to say, as many history books do, that President Bush was not expressing honest concern for our nation’s welfare when he discussed the evidence of WMD programs in Iraq.

And with our without WMD’s, Hussein was a major terror broker who had demonstrated his hostility to our country. Removing him from power was a major step forward in protecting the security of the United States and the American people.

The one-sided treatment of the Iraq war in mainstream history books is one more example of how university faculties are trying to indoctrinate, rather than educate, their students. Any student who wants a well-rounded education would do well to look for the other side of the story in sources outside of the classroom.

¹ http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html
² Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition) p. 974
³ ibid
⁴ ibid: p. 973
⁵ Davidson, Gienapp, Geyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations (2006 edition) pp. 999-1,000

International peace treaties are like many other things liberals cherish; they are beautiful in theory, useless in practice, and a dangerous trap to anyone who puts faith in them. An accurate knowledge of the history of treaties would undermine the belief in them that leftist professors are trying to promote, so college profs (and the textbooks they write) tend not to cover the subject very well.

The leftist culture of most college history faculties requires professors to cover up a lot of politically embarrassing data, and the history of international peace treaties is just one example of that. Positive examples of the results of peace treaties are hard to come by, and negative ones abound, so professors who want to indoctrinate their students are forced to suppress a lot of actual history while claiming to teach history.

What’s in it for Me?

The history of international relations tells us that nations, like individuals, tend to do whatever they think is in their best interest. This includes decisions to engage in, or refrain from, acts of war. As John Jay said in 1787, “Nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.”¹ This is particularly true of undemocratic nations, where the lives of soldiers have little value to the people who make the decisions.

When a totalitarian government wants to attack another country, the only factors that bear much consideration are the relative strengths of the two nations. Pieces of paper with signatures on them mean very little. 

In 1939, for example, National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler signed a non-aggression treaty with Communist dictator Josef Stalin.  The treaty stipulated that Germany and the Soviet Union would not attack each other as they went about their business of attacking and conquering smaller European nations like Finland and Poland. Two years later Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting a war that would result in the deaths of some twenty million Soviets and nearly as many Germans.

Hitler’s decision to violate the treaty had nothing to do with the treaty itself, which was a mere piece of paper. The decision was based solely on Hitler’s expectation of success. (Germany was powerful enough to invade the Soviet Union because Hitler had already violated the arms limitations clauses of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; another example of Hitler putting his nation’s interests ahead of any loyalty to a signed treaty.)

Paris Treaty “Protects” South Viet Nam

The 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Viet Nam War, offer another good example of what happens when one nation trusts another nation to honor a signed treaty, when violating the treaty would achieve something of value. The treaty stipulated that the United States would remove its military forces from Viet Nam; and that the Communist government of North Viet Nam would stop all aggression against South Viet Nam, keep its forces north of the 17^th Parallel, and allow the South Vietnamese people to decide their political future “through genuinely free and democratic general elections under international supervision.” The treaty also required the Communists to return all American prisoners of war, and cooperate in the identification of remains of American soldiers who had died in battle. It further stipulated that North Viet Nam would keep its troops out of Laos and Cambodia.

The last American troops pulled out of Viet Nam in 1975, as per the treaty. Without American military power to oppose them, the North promptly invaded and annexed South Viet Nam. They joined forces with Communist insurgents in Laos to conquer and enslave that country. In the same year Communist revolutionary Pol Pot, who had been armed and supported by North Viet Nam, gained full control of Cambodia and started a three-and-a-half year reign of terror during which he murdered somewhere between 15% and 25% of the nation’s population.²

American POW’s were either kept in captivity, or simply killed off. None were returned to the US.

The Beat Goes On

In 1975, while North Viet Nam was sacking South Viet Nam, Iran and Iraq signed a peace treaty that would supposedly keep either country from crossing the border between them. Five years later Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had built up his military to such an extent that he felt confident of victory over the Iranians, and he invaded Iran. The war raged for eight years and killed off most of the able-bodied young men of both countries before Iran was able to repel the Iraqis and restore, more or less, the old border.

These twentieth century examples are nothing new. Throughout history, nations that trusted enemies to honor treaties suffered as a result. It’s how Carthage was destroyed in 149 BC, and it’s been the bane of too-gullible political leaders ever since.

Even democratic nations will violate treaties when there is a clear national interest at stake. In the nineteenth century the United States abrogated its treaties with various Indian tribes, even though doing so was quite literally unconstitutional. The United States is unique in all the world in that international treaties have Constitutional status as the “supreme Law of the Land,”³ but that made very little difference to Indian tribes that gave up their weapons and put their trust in treaties.

Peace in the Real World

The best way to avoid war in the real world is for international borders to be clearly defined and well defended, and for peace-loving nations to be strong enough to intimidate aggressor nations. South Korea provides a good example. In the early 1950’s South Korea, like South Viet Nam a few years later, had to fight off a Communist invasion, depending on help from the US. Like South Viet Nam, they were able to negotiate a cease-fire that divided North from South, leaving the North in Communist hands.

But instead of wasting time negotiating a treaty, the South Koreans fortified the “temporary” demilitarized zone between North and South. They strengthened this makeshift border with fences, razor wire, and millions of land mines. They stationed a well-equipped army along the border on a permanent basis, and asked the United States to contribute a few thousand troops to the border force, with the implied promise that the US would send more troops at any time if needed.

The land mines and armed troops have kept the Communists from attempting another invasion for over half a century; something a piece of paper almost certainly would not have accomplished. North and South Korea are still technically at war, since the two countries still have not signed a peace treaty. North Korea still harbors the same bad intentions it had half a century ago, as recent events make clear. Yet South Korea enjoys security and prosperity. 

Today the South Korean people enjoy democracy, freedom, and living standards among the highest in Asia. They have not had to fight any real battles with the North for some fifty-seven years. Just north of them, the people unfortunate enough to have been trapped on the Communist side of the border have no civil rights, no human dignity, and very little hope. Millions of them are literally starving.

It is unfortunate that the South Vietnamese did not learn a lesson from the story of Korea.

Why It Matters

A typical college student in the United States spends four or more years listening to information and arguments that support a leftist agenda, while being sheltered from data and arguments that might militate in favor of more conservative positions. Since people quite naturally base their beliefs on the available information, a four year diet of information hand-picked by leftists will inevitably have some effect.

In contemporary politics, conservatives and liberals disagree on foreign policy issues, as on most other issues. Conservatives argue that a strong military is essential to our national security, where liberals are forever advocating a weakening of our military forces, and a dependence on the good intentions and honorable behavior of other nations. The agenda on most college campuses is to bolster arguments for the liberal side, and suppress any information that supports the conservative side; thus the prevailing view taught in classrooms is that military buildups are bad, and treaties are good.

One commonly used textbook, for example, accuses Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of blocking American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles out of personal malice toward Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.⁴ Another accuses Republican President George W. Bush of damaging the status of the United States by refusing to sign a UN treaty restricting the use of fossil fuels.⁵ Many portray President Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980’s as financially ruinous, while failing to acknowledge the role it played in winning the Cold War and liberating much of the world from the horrors of Communism.

College faculties, in other words, teach only one half of history. Any student who wants to know the other half has to be willing to look for the information on his or her own time.
¹Federalist Paper #4
²Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek, and Margolin; The Black Book of Communism, pp. 588-591
³United States Constitution; Article VI, Section 2
⁴Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations, (2006 edition) p. 673
⁵Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition), p. 970

This liberal monopoly on the flow of information allows college faculties to promote all kinds of politically correct beliefs, including some that don’t stand up well to actual scrutiny. The gospel of man-made global warming is one such belief. The best way to convince students of the truth of the theory is to “protect” them from all the evidence that undermines it.

 Similarly, positive attitudes toward the United Nations are best encouraged by the suppression of information. University professors, like most liberals, are eager to portray the UN as a force for Good; and the best way to do that is by concealing a lot of embarrassing data.

Critics of the UN point to its endemic corruption, its domination by totalitarian governments, and its lack of positive accomplishments.  Admirers of the UN praise if for the utopian theories on which it was founded, and try to keep the critics from getting a chance to speak.

Fortunately for the UN, its admirers get to write most the mainstream college textbooks.

The View from the Ivory Tower

A typical freshman history textbook says that the Franklin Roosevelt administration “believed that the United States could lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy, and ever-increasing living standards. New institutions like the United Nations and World Bank had been created to promote these goals.”¹ In describing the constitution of the UN, the same book states “There would be a General Assembly…where each member enjoyed an equal voice – and a Security Council responsible for maintaining world peace.”² Another textbook says “Roosevelt envisioned a strong international organization led by the world’s principle powers…The new organization would work to disband empires…The world after victory would be a world of nations, not of empires or blocs.”³

A Democracy of Dictators

The UN was constituted, right from its inception, to subordinate the interests of any one nation to the will of the majority of nations. In theory this constitution would promote equality and justice, but in actual practice an assembly where “each member enjoyed an equal voice,” as the textbook puts it, and where most of the member nations are totalitarian, forces the world’s democratic nations have to accept minority status.

It’s a sad fact that only about a third of the world’s nations can be properly described as politically “free.” By giving equal voting power to every nation, the UN effectively becomes a democracy of dictators. And since the totalitarian nations tend to be Socialistic in their economic structures, hence desperately poor, the UN is frequently a tool that poverty-stricken totalitarian regimes can use to extract financial aid from freer and more prosperous nations.

Sins of Commission

Like the General Assembly, the UN’s various commissions tend to be populated with representatives from repressive Third World regimes. This is true even of commissions that supposedly exist to promote noble ends like equal rights for women, or human rights for all people. In 2002, for example, the UN Human Rights Commission included members from several nations with dreadful records of human rights violations; including China, Cuba, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

For many years the Human Rights Commission turned a blind eye to the repressive policies of its own members, as well as those of most of the world’s undemocratic nations, and spent much of its time discovering supposedly grievous human rights offenses in Israel, which until very recently was the only democratic nation in the entire Middle East. (Iraq, of course, is now the other democratic nation in the Middle East.)

After years of complaints from Republicans in the US government, and conservatives in various other Western nations, the UN pledged to reform the Human Rights Commission. In 2006 the name was changed from “Human Rights Commission” to “Human Rights Council,” but the name was about the only thing that changed. Human Rights “Council” members elected this year include Mauritania, Malaysia, Qatar, Angola and Libya.

Libya’s frequent membership on the Human Rights Commission/Council comes despite the Arab nation’s sponsorship of terrorist bombings in western nations like Germany and Scotland, and it’s use of torture to force phony confessions from medical workers who come to Libya to provide humanitarian aid.

The Commission on the Status of Women, like the Human Rights Council, is usually populated with representatives from totalitarian nations. This frequently includes Islamic nations where the subjugation and abuse of women is a cultural norm. Among the members recently elected to this commission is the nation of Iran, where men can torture and kill women with impunity, even when not ordered to do so by the government. As with everything else about the United Nations, the women’s rights commission is a good thing only in the abstract; in actual practice it is a travesty.

We’re from the UN and We’re Here to Help

Corruption runs through the UN from top to bottom, and when funding is allocated for some noble-sounding purpose, the money tends to be siphoned off for the benefit of the UN officials entrusted with it.  The recent “Oil for Food” debacle is a good example. A Washington Post article describes the humanitarian goals on which the program was founded:

The oil-for-food program was established in December 1996, to provide relief to Iraqis enduring hardship from a U.N. trade embargo that was imposed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The program allowed Iraq to sell oil under U.N. auspices and to use the proceeds to buy food and medicine and also pay billions of dollars in war reparations.

The end result of the program was billions of dollars of illegal profits for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and millions for corrupt UN officials who ran the program as a sort of partnership with Hussein. Any attempt to provide actual aid to the suffering people of Iraq was just an afterthought.

And it’s not just the high ranking officials who put their own needs ahead of their duties. When the United Nations sends armed “peacekeepers” to some troubled nation, the UN troops usually take advantage of their power and financial status to sexually exploit  the locals. Wherever these peacekeepers are sent, there are widespread reports of local women and underage girls being raped, forced into prostitution, or coerced into sex by the threat of having food withheld. When the peacekeepers leave, they often leave behind a legacy of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

The United States has been providing around 27 percent of the funding for these peacekeeping activities. If college professors and other liberals didn’t do such a good job of selling the UN as a force for Good, there would probably be more Americans pressuring their Representatives and Senators to cut off the funding that facilitates these abuses.

A History of Deception

Lies and corruption are nothing new to the UN. At the 1945 conference that founded the UN, the United States’ representative was Alger Hiss, a Soviet spy who would later be convicted of perjury for denying his espionage activities on behalf of the Stalinist regime in Moscow. The representatives of the fifty nations present elected Hiss to chair the conference.

The Soviet Union also sent its own representative to the conference, so the USSR and the United States had something in common. Both of them were represented by someone on the Soviet payroll.

From that day to this conservatives in the US have complained about the UN. In 1979 retired California Governor Ronald Reagan complained in a couple of his syndicated radio addresses that the UN was intervening in the African nation of Namibia on behalf of a Marxist group that was trying to prevent democratic elections and take over the nation by force.⁴ In the 1990’s American Republicans have complained about the UN’s counterproductive efforts in the Congo and Rwanda, and the evidence of UN complicity in the slaughter of innocents in Srebrenica.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of its corruption and anti-democratic tendencies, and its almost complete lack of positive accomplishments, the UN continues to enjoy a fairly positive public image in the United States. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 49% of Americans have “at least a somewhat favorable opinion of the UN.” If the people we trust to teach history in America’s classrooms would present a more honest view, the UN would probably be almost universally condemned.
¹Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition) p. 779
²Ibid., p. 774
³Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff; Nation of Nations (2006 edition) p. 611
⁴Reagan in His Own Hand, edited by Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson; pp. 190, 191