The War of 1812

The War of 1812 was also known as the Second War of Independence and last week we celebrated the bicentennial of the start of it. It is largely a forgotten war today for the two main belligerents, the United States and Great Britain. It is forgotten in the U.S. because it achieved little--the peace basically restored the status quo ante. It is forgotten in Britain because it was a sideshow, in entertainment parlance a spinoff, of the Napoleonic wars that were the main action. Only in Canada, where it was partly fought, is it remembered today. This is for several reasons. First, it is the last major war to be fought on Canadian soil. Second, the war also ensured that Canada would not be swallowed up by its southern neighbor. 

The war did have several important effects for the young American republic. First, it led to the destruction of the last Indian coalition capable of limiting the growth of the Republic--at the Battle of the Thames on Lake Ontario in October 1813. The Treaty of Ghent basically abandoned the North American Indians to the settlers. Second, because the Federalist Party was centered in New England, which was opposed to the war, it led to the destruction of that party and the end of the First Party System. There was approximately a decade of pause until the start of the Second Party System as the Republican Party split into opposing factions in 1825--the National Republicans, later to become the Whigs, and the Democratic Republicans who became the Democrats.

The war also produced the beginning of a seventy-year long tradition of war heroes at the national level. The American Revolution produced George Washington, James Monroe, and Anthony Wayne as politicians, but the trend quickly died out by the end of the 1780s except for Washington. The War of 1812 revived this with two Indian-fighter presidents: Andrew Jackson (1829-37) and William H. Harrison (1841). Harrison died after only a month in office but he was eventually followed by the last United States Indian-fighter president, Zachary Taylor, in 1849. Taylor also died early in office but he was followed by a number of Mexican War veterans for the United States and the Confederate States. Franklin Pierce from 1853 to 1857, Jefferson Davis from 1861 to 1865, and Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1877. Grant started a string of former Union generals who served as Republican presidents after the war that ended with Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of William Harrison, in 1893. So for a century from Washington to Harrison there were a series of waves of war heroes with each wave, except the first, ending with a veteran of one war who was also a veteran of the next war. 

Reproducing this national trend on a smaller scale was a similar one in Tennessee (the Volunteer State), which lasted from statehood in 1796 until the early 1840s. The first major war hero politician was John Sevier who fought the Cherokee in Virginia and Tennessee during and after the American Revolution. He was followed by Andrew Jackson who fought the Cherokee as a young lawyer in the early 1790s and then the Creeks in the War of 1812 and finally the Seminoles in Florida in 1818. Throughout the 1820s all state governors were veterans of the War of 1812, William Carroll and Sam Houston. This trend then continued on a less rigid basis up to 1842. There was also Congressman David Crockett who after serving two terms in Congress was defeated by another War of 1812 veteran. Crockett and Houston then supply the link to Texas, the other state in the 19th century that had many Indian fighters as politicians.

This American tradition gives us a reference point to examine the phenomenon in Israel where former generals have played a major role in Israel politics since the mid-1950s. If one accounts for the fact that Israel had major wars about three times as frequently as did the United States, then the phenomena are very similar.

Here is a link to another modern angle of the War of 1812, the war hawk phenomenon. The author provides another link to a summary of the effects of the war.

Ulster Unionist Race is a Two-Man Contest

I was wrong--or at least premature--when I said in my last post that the Ulster Unionist Party leadership contest would be a three-man race involving Danny Kennedy, Mike Nesbitt, and John McCallister. Kennedy announced on Friday that he would not be filing nomination papers for the position and would instead be backing Mike Nesbitt. Nominations for the race closed yesterday with only McCallister and Nesbitt having filed. The former UTV anchor/presenter has emerged as the establishment choice for the leadership with backing by three out of four UUP lairds (UUP members elevated to the House of Lords) including former liberal faction leader Ken Maginnis, now Lord Maginnis, and former Good Friday Agreement skeptic John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney. Because former party leader David Trimble is now a Conservative peer, he is not among the four lairds. Nesbitt has also been endorsed by the Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the unionist establishment. 

Kennedy's main aim was to protect his ministerial position in the Executive, which was threatened by McCallister's call for the UUP to form the opposition. Kennedy is not a personality who relishes confrontation and so was happy to make an implicit deal with Nesbitt, after having been approached by a number of party figures, under which he will keep his ministry and Nesbitt will get the leadership. Had Kennedy remained in the race he would have risked splitting the non-liberal vote within the party and throwing the election to McCallister and thereby losing his ministerial position in the long run.

This is reminiscent of the 1825 "corrupt bargain" in which Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams made an implicit but unwritten bargain. Both despised Andrew Jackson--whose father had emigrated from Ulster shortly before Jackson was born, the third rival in a four-man presidential contest at a point when the United States effectively had a single political party. Because no single candidate had a majority of electoral votes the election went to the House of Representatives to decide the election with each state's House delegation casting a single vote. Clay, who had come in fourth behind Jackson and Adams and a Georgia Treasury secretary was eliminated from consideration. So Clay threw his considerable support in the House behind Adams who won the presidency even though he had received fewer popular and electoral votes than Jackson. Adams rewarded Clay by appointing him as his secretary of state, which in the early nineteenth century was considered to be the stepping stone to the presidency. Jackson made a major issue of this "corrupt bargain" in the 1828 presidential election that laid the foundation for America's two-party system.  Jackson won and became one of the great presidents of American history while Adams entered into a second career in the House during which he opposed slavery from 1835 until his death in early 1848. 

As I indicated in my previous post, liberals do not generally win UUP leadership elections. There have only been two UUP leaders who could be classified as liberals: Ken Andrews from 1940 to 1943 and Terence O'Neill from 1963 to 1969. Both were before the trauma of The Troubles and the competition with the DUP. In January 1974 when UUP leader Brian Faulkner adopted an uncharacteristic liberal persona by supporting power sharing with the nationalist SDLP party he was forced out of the leadership and forced to resign from the party.

The leadership election will be on March 31 in an as yet unnamed Belfast hotel.

Israeli Interlocutor with the Palestinians Part III

In February 1983 the Kahan Commission, appointed by Begin under pressure by the Israeli peace movement and Labor following the massacres, held Sharon unfit to serve as defense minister and Eitan to serve as chief of staff. Sharon became minister without portfolio and spent the next fourteen and a half years in internal "exile" filling minor posts in Likud governments. Begin went into a deep depression and retired from politics in September 1983.

His successor was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Lehi underground movement and foreign minister under Begin. Shamir spent the next nine years making sure that settlement continued without stop on the West Bank--he met little resistance from Labor--and that no peace plan got anywhere. In 1992 after losing an election Shamir retired from politics and his designated successor, Moshe Arens, suprised everyone by retiring as well.

Shamir's successor then became an Arens protege, a scion, of a distinguished Revisionist and Israeli family, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. Sharon would spend the remaining fourteen years of his political life attempting to outflank Netanyahu from the right or the left. He joined Netanyahu in attacking the Oslo peace process. Netanyahu appointed him foreign minister in October 1998 on the eve of the Wye Plantation Summit to fortify his own right flank. Bibi signed a deal but upon returning to Israel lacked the clout to sell it to his coalition. His government collapsed and Sharon emerged as leader of the Likud, a prize he had sought since founding it a quarter century before.

In July 2000 the Camp David Summit ended with no agreement and Clinton failed to produce bridging proposals. Arafat prepared the Palestinians for a major uprising by stocking up on medical and food supplies, something that the Palestinian leadership had not done in 1936 or in 1948. Netanyahu, who had resigned his Knesset seat, looked to be preparing a comeback. The Likud voted in the Knesset for a law that would allow Netanyahu to become prime minister without being a deputy. Sharon needed to act quickly. He sought and won permission from Prime Minister Ehud Barak to visit the Temple Mount with a police escort at the end of September 2000. The visit lasted about an hour and provoked some minor clashes with Palestinian worshippers on the Mount. Arafat quickly exploited this to touch off the Al-Aksa (named for one of the two mosques on the Mount) Intifada. Barak called an election for prime minister for February 2001. Sharon handily won and then had to clean up the mess that he had helped to make.

The Al-Aksa Intifada quickly devolved into a contest between the Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Al-Aksa Brigades to see who could mount the bloodiest terrorist incidents. Unlike the mid-1990s, the Islamists no longer needed to fear any temporary jailing by Arafat. Arafat quickly returned to his true metier as leader of the "armed struggle." Attempts by Washington and Cairo to intervene got nowhere because Arafat was determined to improve his bargaining leverage and his popularity, seriously eroded due to the nature of his regime, and Jerusalem was determined to not allow Arafat to gain any advantage.

Sharon gradually adopted two main tactics. The first was "targeted killings" a euphemism for assassination of Palestinian terrorist and political leaders. The other was invasion of the areas of the West Bank from which the IDF had withdrawn in the mid-1990s under Oslo. After a major terrorist bombing in Netanya on March 27, 1992, Sharon sent the IDF back into the cities of the West Bank to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. Unlike in 1982, this time he had the complete sympathy of the American president who despised Arafat. After reestablishing control Sharon adopted the separation strategy proposed by Labor, but changed the boundaries. The separation barrier, a combination of electrified fence and high brick walls, ran along the Palestinian side of the green line or border and occasionally deep into the West Bank to include settlements like Ariel.

Sharon, who believed that a Palestinian state should consist of less than half the territory of the West Bank, began using the language of the Israeli Center-Left. He spoke of occupation and the suffering of the Palestinians. And he prepared a redeployment of the Israeli military to politically more defensible lines--he would withdraw from Gaza, abandoning the settlers who had lived there for a quarter century. And he abandoned four settlements in northern Samaria. The Likud bulked at this plan and Sharon had to turn to Labor for the Knesset votes necessary to win approval. The IDF carried out the redeployment in August 2005. Sharon then withdrew from the party, which he had founded thirty years before, two months later. Two months after that he suffered a massive stroke and his political career was over.

Sharon, except for the length of his political career, is typical of many of Israel's military politicians. He in many ways serves as a role model for military politicians in the Likud and Kadima such as Shlomo Mofaz and Moshe "Boogie" Ya’alon. Dayan had his first encounters with Palestinians fifteen years before Sharon in 1938-39 as did Yigal Allon. Ehud Barak had his about fifteen years after Sharon's in the late 1960s. His role in the assassination of Palestinian terrorist leaders in Beirut in 1973 helped to make his military career and establish him as Israel's most decorated soldier.

Except during Oslo in the 1990s and in 2008, most Israeli leaders have only dealt with Palestinians, either directly or indirectly, on the battlefield. In this they resemble Andrew Jackson who dealt with American Indians from 1788 until 1837, mostly on the battlefield or in one-sided peace negotiations. Jackson, like Sharon, also exceeded his orders in invading foreign territory in Florida in 1817. But unlike with Sharon, it helped his career. Maybe we can count Sharon's fourteen years in minor posts as a major advancement. Jackson, unlike Sharon, was able to carry out his dream of removing the natives. Sharon could only plan for this when he was a staff officer in Northern Command in the late 1950s.