Still largely unexplored are the many parallels between Lincoln's invasion of the Confederacy and Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Both vastly underestimated the cost of achieving their objectives. Both brought the United States army into a seemingly unending quagmire. Both, when the going got tough, justified their mistake by inventing a new motivation for the invasion after the fact (freeing the slaves, saving the victims of Saddam). In neither case was there a clear exist strategy -- U.S. troops had to continue the occupation of the defeated confederacy for over a decade after the war was over, and after they finally left the (KKK) terrorists took over the region anyway.

And yet, the peace-loving presidents who preceded Lincoln -- presidents who favored negotiation and compromise over confrontation -- get little respect even to this day.

The death rate was bad enough, but the Union in the 1860s had only had Progressives like ours to tell them that war is bad, so many of our surviving working-class young men might have escaped their horrible crippling injuries.

We Yankees should have known better than to imperialistically impose ourselves into the internal affairs of other states.

As a Southerner I have to say I am damn glad that y'all yankees meddled. The nightmare of slavery was ended, and while the peonage that replaced it lasted another 50 years and the subjugation of blacks continued for more than a century it would never have ended at all if it wasn't stopped by force.

As to the tragedy of an America consisting of two countries that were in inevitable conflict with each other that could have been even worse, there is no way there would have not been some sort of conflict down the road and with even more modern and deadly weapons.

In fact I think it could be easily argued that not intervening in 1861 would have been to the cause of abolition tantamount to promoting slavery and despite the initial motives of the 1860s Republicans, it would have been immoral to have not begun the war. Especially considering the prospect of civil war within the state of Missouri and the CSA invasion of New Mexico, war was going to happen unless the Union had just handed over everything to California to the CSA.

If this is your argument against Iraq, I would be very curious to know your opinion of FDR's Europe first strategy in 1942?

mohe:

As a Southerner I have to say I am damn glad that y'all yankees meddled. ...

Yeah, yeah, I've heard arguments like this from Christopher Hitchens, for what they're worth, about Iraq.

Fsilber, it is you who is waxing Hitchenesque in your interpretation of history. Amongst the only obvious working parallels are that both Presidents were Republican and that Union/US military leadership was execrable; I'll grant you that both the Union and the US overestimated their would-be success, although many millions of US citizens doubted the success of the Iraq war.

The Civil War was a war of rebellion by the southern states and it involved slavery in one or another from the get go. If you'll look in the Constitution, there is no "get out of the Union" clause, whereas the president does get special powers in time of rebellion/civil insurrection. This was not a war to take another country's resources, unlike the Iraq war.

The Civil War involved occupation, but it didn't involve much insurgency -- yes, there were "irregulars", but in general it was a war of field battles.

Iraq didn't start firing on Fort Sumter, either.

Alas, one non-parallel between the wars is that Lincoln was assassinated, while Bush has not been.

A telling non-parallel is the ratio of civilian to military deaths: in the Civil War 50,000/620,000 = 0.08, whereas for the Iraq War 300,000+/4,000- = 750 -- about a factor of at least 10,000 difference.

As for "peaceful" ante bellum presidents, are you referring to James Buchanan (#15), the worst president in US history until #43 came along? The Civil War resulted because JB was took week and wimpy to hold the Union together, doing nothing to dissuade secessionist minds in the south. During Andrew Jackson's administration, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union, and Ol' Hickory sent the S.C. legislature a telegram, threatening to send federal troops down to hang the lot of them if they were to secede. This was at a time when the North and the South were much more evenly matched, too.

Uncle Squinky you are pretty dead on, the war in Iraq has little to do with the American Civil War, and I think so any of these revisionists, of the yankee persuasion, don't seem to realize what a mortal threat the CSA was to the Unionists. The Southern revisionists realize this fully but for that sort that is not a bug but a feature. The Confederacy did not even start out peaceful, as soon as they seceded they began waging war on other parts of the Union. I think this ignorance is a consequence of the ignoring of "peripheral" and "unimportant" early segments of the ar particularily in the Western sectors.