Presidents At War
By opting to invade Iraq, George W. Bush was following in the footsteps of history
It was after the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932, that American policy entered its most isolationist phase. Roosevelt torpedoed the London financial conference in 1933, acquiesced in the passage of a Neutrality Act in 1935, and reduced military spending from the already low levels of the 1920s. But he also paid heed to what was happening in Europe. Roosevelt could understand German, and listening to Hitler's radio broadcasts, he developed at some point in the 1930s--by the time of the Munich agreement in September 1938 at the latest, his admiring biographer Conrad Black argues--the idea that the United States could not live with Nazi Germany.
Most Americans did not share that conviction; neither did some of Roosevelt's own appointees. That hardly deterred Roosevelt, however. Using his powers as chief executive, he increased military spending from hundreds of millions of dollars in 1938 to $6 billion in 1941. He instituted a military draft in an election year. He bypassed the Neutrality Act by providing destroyers to Britain in 1940. He declared the North Atlantic up to Iceland American territorial waters. He sped aid to the Soviet Union when Hitler's Germany attacked. And he cut off oil shipments to Japan. Tokyo responded by attacking Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941. Four days later, Hitler declared war on the United States.
Roosevelt could say that World War II was not a war of choice. Yet the choices he made before Pearl Harbor certainly helped to provoke an attack, and they were choices that his political opponents bitterly condemned.
"Absolute victory."Despite Roosevelt's preparations, the United States entered this war, as it had most wars, without sufficient forces or even a coherent, workable military strategy. Nor was there a clear idea of what the endpoint would be--beyond Roosevelt's assurance in his speech to Congress on December 8 that "the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory."
At that moment, it was far from clear how victory would be achieved. The Pacific Fleet was gravely injured (though the aircraft carriers, luckily, were safe at sea); the Philippines were indefensible (as Roosevelt admitted in a fireside chat in February 1942); the weak British and Dutch forces seemed unlikely to stop Japan from sweeping through East Asia and what now is Indonesia and establishing bases from which they could threaten, as they did, India and Australia; Hitler's Army was at the gates of Moscow and was sweeping into the oil fields of the Caucasus, while Nazi forces were poised to sweep across Egypt and occupy the oil fields of the Middle East.
The picture seemed dismal for the United States and its Allies. The U.S. military was still being expanded, and in initial battles, especially in North Africa, its forces proved poorly trained and commanded. War production had been vastly expanded since 1940, but Roosevelt's goals seemed wholly unrealistic to many, and the newspapers were full of stories of bottlenecks and snafus. Not until June 1942, at the Battle of Midway, did the United States win a significant military victory, and that was closely fought.
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