Do Americans Owe Their Freedom to the Marines?

Do Americans Owe Their Freedom to the Marines?
Posted by Michael S. Rozeff on April 17, 2011 01:49 PM

If the Marines (and the U.S. military) had stayed home for nearly all their engagements, Americans would have been no less free. And for those few engagements that may be debatable, strong cases can be made that the U.S. government either drew the nation into war or could have avoided it. Many Americans do not believe this, however.

I give you Duncan Hunter who is a conservative Republican. In this video, he's being asked about the recent little budget impasse and his vote for it, rather than toughing it out with Obama. He makes clear that he voted for it so that the military would be paid. He explains why: "I'm not going to take a risk, and I'm not going to play chicken with the U.S. military. I owe them for my freedom more than I owe my constituents." [My added emphasis.] Hunter is an ex-marine who did two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. His bio says that "he and his fellow Marines were at the center of operations in Fallujah, Iraq."

Clearly he believes what he is saying when he says he owes the armed forces for his freedom. Although he may be accused of bias, being such a strong advocate of the military, I take his attitude as being rather common in America. For example, someone on Huffington Post wrote the following: "Bottom line is that we owe our Military the freedom with which we live and the very ground we stand on. If we cannot compensate them adequately and keep the promises that we make to them, then we, as a nation, are truly lost." For another example of this idea, see the web site of the "Defending Freedom" organization. For further examples emanating from top U.S. political officials, see here.

Now, it's ludicrous to think that Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan are bringing about freedom in America. Neither the Iraqis nor the Afghanis attacked the U.S. or even threatened it with attack. They could not amount an attack on North America, certainly not any kind of a sustained attack that represented a sustained threat to freedom on these shores. The Marines and other military units in those places can't possibly be defending freedom. If anything they draw, attract, and incite retaliations against Americans from some occupants of those lands.

It is not even clear that Congressman Hunter and others who claim that the military is providing us with freedom even understand what freedom is. After a century and more of foreign expeditions of the U.S. military, is the country actually more free today? Are our lives, liberty, and property more secure from the depredations of our own governments now than in 1895? Hardly. Have our governments even moved forward on programs of greater freedom for Americans, in confirmation that freedom is the aim of our many government? Clearly, they have mostly done just the opposite.

Let's be more precise. What engagements have the Marines actually been involved in? Where were they? When were they? Why did they occur? What if the Marines had been kept at home? For a tabulation of such engagements, see the web site of Dr. Zoltan Grossman. It is impossible after perusing this list to conclude that we owe our freedom to the Marines. Most all the foreign engagements are in pursuit of various special interests, but not the freedom of Americans.

Although the U.S. government had come to some sort of accommodations with Canada and Mexico as well as with Great Britain, France, and Spain by 1895, its expansion into the Pacific, its war with Spain, and its entry into World War I signalled its decision to girdle the globe, insofar as possible. It submerged this ambition beneath a rhetoric of peace, freedom, democracy, security, and humanitarianism to the point where Americans cannot recognize their own hypocrisy. In point of fact, the military expansion has diminished freedom at home. The military draft for most of the 20th century is hardly an institution of freedom, nor are higher taxes and inflation.

Various fighting forces on this continent might be useful in defending against attack. The Marines might be one of them. But that does not imply that we owe our freedom to the Marines as currently constituted or as they have been employed for the past 120 years. The main attack on the U.S. in this period from an organized state with substantial armed force was the Japanese attack on Hawaii, a chain of islands that the U.S. annexed in 1893, and this attack followed upon unnecessary and warlike U.S. provocations. If the U.S. government had acted differently, that threat to the freedom of Americans could probably have been averted. America could probably have been secured without entering a major war in the Pacific. Even in this case which is the main clear case of an attack on the U.S., it cannot be said that Americans owe their freedom to the Marines. Rather, they were the instrument of U.S. policies in the Pacific.

As for 9/11, this was not an attack by an armed foreign state. There is no state of war between the U.S. and any antagonist, terrorist or otherwise, held to be responsible for that attack. The reasons behind that attack trace back to U.S. interventions in foreign lands. Those are what brought about whatever threat to Americans such terrorism constitutes. There is no generalized threat or war against American freedom stemming from terrorist sources. The terrorists who might like to hit targets in America do not have an agenda of destroying American freedom here in America. The Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan are not keeping Americans free from terrorists in that sense because that is not what the terrorists are after. Their objectives are more to keep Americans from using force in Muslim lands and from supporting anti-Muslim governments in those lands.

The notion that Americans owe their freedom to the Marines (or military in general) is a simple-minded idea that reduces to blind support of the American military as a tool of the national government in its expansionist aims. It is simply a slogan in support of American empire. It is a false slogan. The opposite is more nearly true. Every dollar spent in support of  the empire's worldwide military is another dollar that is a tax burden on Americans, and this burden enslaves Americans. Since half of Americans no longer pay taxes, the empire has conveniently arranged matters so that most Americans do not care and do not question its policies.