History Lessons (on Bush and McCain’s Wars)

This is (a small part of a) cross-post (excerpted by permission) by THE ENVIRONMENTALIST‘s Managing Editor:

In her recent speech at the Conference on World Affairs, Rachel Maddow cited James Madison’s warning about the unitary executive, the propensity of an unchecked executive branch to lean toward war, whereas the legislature would be more likely to debate the issue before moving toward conflict.

Maddow’s supposition, that the Bush administration’s seeming incompetence, its torture memos, its rush to war, was by design — Bush and Cheney’s direct effort to shift power to the executive and, thereby, to shift the entire country to a more warlike stance — does have historical precedence.

I’m not referring to Madison, though he did warn of this, or Jefferson, who raised prescient concern about undue influence, but earlier in history to the systems that Madison and Jefferson used as the inspiration for their grand experiment: The Roman Republic of Caesar’s time and the Greek democracy of Solon.

This is not to say that George W. Bush is Julius Caesar or that any of his lawgivers (like the ones who approved that torture memo) are Solon. But there are interesting parallels to the way Caesar and his contemporaries used war to further their wealth and political ambitions, as well as to the actions that Solon’s contemporaries took to undermine codified law…

Highly recommend you link to link to the whole essay for the point it makes about Bush and McCain’s wars.

Illuminating and frightening.