The sweet smell of gunpowder

20100422 at 2205 in Armed Forces, International Relations, Military, Spain, US by Armando F. Mastrapa III

The Rough Riders by Mort Kunstler. (Kettle Hill, Santiago, Cuba. July 1, 1898)
The Economist’s book review of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898., by Evan Thomas:

WHAT he calls “eerie parallels” are drawn by Evan Thomas between America’s invasion of Cuba in 1898 and its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Both, he says, were “wars of choice”, neither of them vital to the national interest but ostensibly waged for broader, sometimes humanitarian, reasons. Just as the threat of weapons of mass destruction proved illusory in Iraq, so the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour, the pretext for intervention in Cuba, was not a Spanish plot but, he insists, almost certainly a shipboard accident. The publishers even suggest that a reader could mistake part of the book for the memoirs of Dick Cheney and that the Americans acquired the cruel technique of water-boarding in Cuba.

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The book provides an excellent account of how America’s declaration of war after the blowing up of the Maine hastened the demise of the once mighty Spanish empire, and of how within a year Spain had lost the Philippines as well as Puerto Rico and Guam. Unfortunately, however, “The War Lovers” is the sort of popular history that misleads as much as it entertains. The comparison between Cuba and Iraq is fanciful, and not only because it is preposterous to equate Roosevelt with either George Bush or Mr Cheney. The Spanish-American war enjoyed deep and broad public support, far greater than the support given to the invasion of Iraq.

The influence of men more moderate than Mr Thomas’s cast of five central characters is much underestimated. William McKinley, president at the time, is an important case in point. He was infamously and unfairly traduced in Samuel Eliot Morison’s magisterial “The Oxford History of the American People” as a kindly soul in a spineless body. In fact, McKinley shared the public’s horror of Spanish tyranny in Cuba but his memory was scarred by the slaughter he had witnessed during the civil war at Antietam, the bloodiest day in America’s military history. He tried hard and long to persuade Spain to relinquish its hold on Cuba and so avoid war.

Another moderate, Senator Redfield Proctor, was perhaps as influential. He went on a fact-finding mission to Cuba, convinced the horrors were exaggerated, and returned to report that they were worse than he could ever have imagined. The sinking of the Maine did not matter nearly so much to him as the native Cubans, “struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge”. Since Proctor was renowned for his scepticism, his words carried weight with the McKinley administration and Congress. But not with Mr Thomas. Thoughtful, influential voices are sacrificed in his book in the interests of a much racier tale.