Similarities Between the Iraq War and the Mexican War

Although I cannot remember ever hearing any reference to the "Mexican War" in any history class, it is a major point in the history of the United States, providing as it does a model for carrying out and naming later wars and also a model for resistance to those wars not on the basis of politics (such as resistance to the War of 1812) but on the basis of faith and morals.

I don't want to go into the historical background of this war, which you can track down at any number of websites or in any number of books, except to point out that the battle at the Alamo was not part of this war. The martyrs who died at the great Texas shrine to freedom, however, emphasize one of the themes of the U.S. War Against Mexico. Those martyrs died for one freedom, the freedom to own slaves, and that dubious freedom was a major factor in the Mexican War.
I am uncomfortable, however, doing so. I would rather call it the "War of Northern Aggression," as Mexicans call it, but on this side of the Rio Bravo (as Mexicans call it; here it is the Rio Grande) that name is reserved for the "Civil War." This war provided the template for naming the U.S.'s wars of invasion, conquest and occupation after the target country, as if in some way it were to blame for the decisions of the United States.

By the time of the Mexican War, slavery had divided the United States even more than do the red/blue issues of today, but slavery would not end for another generation. Since Mexico never allowed the slavery of Africans (although it has a terrible record of oppression, to the present day, of its indigenous peoples), slavery and the expansion of slave states were themes in the Mexican War. Another theme of this war was the U.S.'s sense of "Manifest Destiny," to seize as much land as it could, including, in this war, California, Nevada, and Utah. Critics of the war argued that it was an act of aggression and arrogance with no justification.

So, let's get this clear. In the nineteenth century, a war was fought for a natural resource, land; in the twenty-first century, a war is also being fought for a natural resource. Remember that the original label for the invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq, now "Operation Iraqi Freedom," was "Operation Iraqi Liberation," until someone noticed the initials.

During the opening weeks of the war, the United States was in frenzy. Men volunteered, and newspapers said that the war could bring liberty and democracy to the country under attack. (Which war are we talking about?) But, a small group of clergy, intellectuals, and abolitionists soon spoke out against the aggression aimed at a "poor, feeble, distracted country."

Clergyman Theodore Parker declared that if the "war be right then Christianity is wrong, a falsehood, a lie." Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, expressed open support for the Mexican people: "Every lover of Freedom and humanity throughout the world must wish them the most triumphant success."

Politicians were not united in support of the war. Henry Clay declared, "This is no war of defense, but one of unnecessary and offensive aggression." A freshman congressman called the war immoral, proslavery, and dangerous to the nation's values. In Congress, he proposed the "Spot Resolution."
When I first read that, I wondered if a dog might have been involved, perhaps an ancestor of Richard Nixon's Checkers. But the "Spot Resolution" demanded that President Polk identify the precise spot on which Mexicans had "shed American blood on American soil." Nowadays, the "Spot Resolution" has been used as a justification for the U.S. War Against Iraq, with the claim that Iraq was involved with the loss of life in the 2001 attack against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center - not that the claim can in any way be supported.

But, back to that young congressman.... Denounced as a "Benedict Arnold," he did not get his party's re-nomination, and might have sunk to the level of a footnote in history. But, his name was Abraham Lincoln, and his story must wait for another day.

Lincoln's presence in this story reminds us that this war was for his time as the Vietnam War is in our time. In recent elections, decades after the Vietnam War, the action or inaction of candidates George Bush, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry became issues. Similarly, by the time of the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican War was a defining issue behind such figures of the Civil War and other aspects of U.S. history as Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, George McClellan, Winfield Scott, and Zachary Taylor.

Before long, support of the war began to fade, as the war itself did not turn out to be the great heroic exploit that had been promised. No, the citizens did not welcome the invaders with outstretched arms. (Sound familiar?)

There were two main causes for loss of support of the war in the U.S. First, U.S. troops found that diarrhea, dysentery, and yellow fever were far more deadly than Mexican military might. Seven times as many Americans died of disease and exposure as died of battlefield injuries.
Another problem was the excessive brutality against Mexican civilians. If only a tenth of the horror stories were true, wrote General Winfield Scott, it would "make Heaven weep, & every American of Christian morals blush for his country."

Poet, essayist, and perhaps proto-hippy Henry David Thoreau staged the best-known act of protest against the Mexican War, after he was arrested for failure to pay the poll tax. The arresting constable offered to pay the tax for him, but Thoreau insisted that he refused to pay as a protest against Mexican War. Thoreau spent only night in jail, because one of his relatives paid his tax, much to his displeasure.

In response to his arrest Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience," an essay that became a source of inspiration for Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Every person, Thoreau argued, had the duty to protest a policy, even if the majority had approved it, if it conflicted with morality. If all citizens who opposed the Mexican War followed his example, the government could be forced to end the conflict. "Any man more right than his neighbor," he wrote, "constitutes a majority of one."

How should an individual protest a moral wrong? Thoreau described disobedience that disrupted the everyday workings of society and dramatized the moral issues at stake, without resorting to violence. Individual acts of protest, he argued, would awaken the conscience of those people whose consciences could still be stirred. (Perhaps that is the greatest weakness of his argument, assuming that some consciences can be stirred.)

For me, the most moving objection to the war was that of the Unitarian minister Andrew Peabody. In 1847, the bells of all but one Portsmouth, New Hampshire church rang out in celebration. The United States had bombed the city of Vera Cruz into surrender. (Shock and awe, anyone?) The bells of South Church remained silent, a silence that the Rev. Andrew Peabody explained in his sermon the following Sunday: "I pity, from the bottom of my heart, the man who can have so much as a momentary feeling of exultation at such horrors."

Peabody was not protesting the defense of America here, but rather the aggressive bombing of a foreign nation. He could not, in his study of the New Testament, he said, find any way to rationalize this systematic killing with the fundamentally peaceful teachings of Christ.

He did not stop at protesting the month-long bombardment of Vera Cruz (which means true cross). He posed the most controversial of all military questions: Is a soldier required to follow orders, if he considers them immoral? (Nuremberg Trials, anyone?) Peabody suggested that morality does have a place on the battlefield. War does not free the individual soldier of moral responsibility. Soldiers, Peabody said, should be encouraged to act on their moral beliefs, and rewarded for doing so, to ensure that when the U.S. fights, it fights for the right.

In the Mexican War, as in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, there was an unstated racial component. Certainly, white U.S. citizens in New Hampshire (one of the whitest of states) might have found it hard to identify with the Mexican victims at Vera Cruz. As in the Iraq War, U.S. news media did not have much to say about the civilian casualties on the other side, but Peabody did, asking the members of his church to look beyond their bigotry: "They have the same susceptibilities of suffering and anguish with ourselves."

But if these "foreigners" whose homes we are bombing, Peabody continued, are our enemies, then we have a mandate from the Bible to love and forgive them. He quoted this scriptural passage - "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink."

What Peabody read in the newspaper about the U.S. landing, siege, and bombing at Vera Cruz (unopposed by the Mexican Army), frightened him. While he openly honored America's Revolutionary War heroes and those who defended America against British attacks in the War of 1812, he felt that the Mexican War was different. It was, Peabody feared, the beginning of a culture of violence in this country.

Thoreau's essay brought the moral issues of the Mexican War to bear on the Mahatma Gandhi's campaign to free India as well as on Dr. Martin Luther King's campaign for justice in the United States. But the moral issues of that long-ago war echo in churches in the United States to this day. The hymn "Once to Every Man and Nation" is a protest song from that time.

Irish (needless to say, Roman Catholic) immigrants volunteered for military service, at a time when signs reading "No Irish, No Dogs" were common. They were members of a minority looking for work. (Sound familiar?) Shocked by the desecration of Roman Catholic churches by white Protestant U.S. troops, some deserted to the Mexican side, to form the San Patricio Battalion and fight against the U.S. army. At Churubusco, 65 members of the battalion (which also consisted of foreign nationals resident in Mexico) were captured. Fifty were executed, and eleven were punished with fifty lashes apiece and the letter D (for deserter) branded on their cheeks. In One Man's Hero, Hollywood recounted this episode, which reminds us of the religious dimensions of the current war.
I originally began this article as an adult Sunday school lesson. One friend asked, "So, you teach American history in Sunday school?" Hmm... if we can learn from our mistakes, perhaps we won't repeat them?

Another said, "You have some Scripture for that?" War? Peace? Could I possibly find any scripture for those topics?

New Testament quotes are obvious; it is not fair, however, to dismiss the Old Testament. Consider Jeremiah 4:19: "I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war."

And we can read one of the greatest passages in all of human thought, Micah 4:3: "And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

I suspect the market for pruning-hooks is rather scant these days.

On the other side, on the side of peace, the Old Testament has much to say. One passage is famous because it is alluded to in the New Testament, Psalm 37:11: "But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace."

By the time of the New Testament, peace has become more than just the absence of war. It has come to mean something deep within one's own heart and far, far within the mind of God, John 14:27: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

But, as long as there is no peace given by the world, our hearts are troubled, and we are afraid.