Barack Obama: The New Woodrow Wilson?

Barack Obama: The New Woodrow Wilson?

08/13/14

Doug Bandow

The Presidency, Military Strategy, History, United States, Iraq

Obama apparently hopes to make U.S. participation in Iraq inevitable through a time-honored bootstrap: keep Americans at risk and then intervene to save them. Wilson would be proud.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson stood before Congress and called for a Declaration of War against Germany. His eloquence carried an audience already decided for war, but his unreasonable policies regarding submarine warfare long before made America’s entry well nigh inevitable.

When President Barack Obama first spoke to the nation about Iraq, he sounded reluctant to be the fourth straight president to intervene militarily. He suggested a very narrow mission, saving trapped civilians and acting “to protect our American personnel.” However, the conditions he set on Washington’s participation guarantee a much broader and longer campaign.

President Wilson was a modern liberal in the Obama mold, a foreign-policy activist who took the nation into war after promising to keep the peace and sacrificed domestic liberties for the national-security state. Wilson’s partiality to the Entente powers was obvious, but he offered a juridically narrow justification for entering the conflict—Berlin’s submarine warfare. He told Congress: “I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States.”

That Wilson never criticized Great Britain’s illegal starvation blockade demonstrated he was more interested in results than principles. More important, he implemented a policy that ensured war would result if Germany used the only maritime weapon it possessed capable of contesting London’s overwhelming naval advantage.

Britain used passenger liners for war. They carried munitions and were ordered to ram submarines that surfaced to inspect their cargoes. Some were reserve cruisers and armed, and those were ordered to fire on U-boats. It didn’t take the Germans very long to start sinking passenger ships without notice. A great cause celebre was the Lusitania, which was listed as an auxiliary cruiser, had been fitted for guns, and carried bullets along with babies, some of whom died when it was sunk by a sub near the British coast in 1915.

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