Our Greatest Pre-emptive Strike

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The New York Sun

The presidential campaigns are locked in debate over the wisdom of pre-emptive wars, President Bush having elevated the idea to the status of official doctrine last year in a speech laying out the case that the best defense against terrorism is a good offense.


As many commentators have pointed out, Iraq isn’t the first time America has struck pre-emptively. From the 1846 invasion of Mexico to the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia – “we seek to prevent a wider war,” explained President Clinton at the time – pre-emption has been a robust part of the American national security tool kit.


Indeed, as the presidential candidates slug it out, substantial numbers of Americans are spending the dog days of summer celebrating one of the great pre-emptive military expeditions in history: the Lewis and Clark voyage to the West Coast and back.


The expedition is seldom seen in that light. Instead it tends to be celebrated as a mere exploration. Author Stephen Ambrose, in his best-selling “Undaunted Courage” a few years ago, salutes Meriwether Lewis as “the greatest of all American explorers,” for example. In reality, the expedition was about far more than exploration.


As Landon Y. Jones puts it in his more recent “William Clark and the Shaping of the West” (Hill & Wang), the voyage was “intimately connected to the larger agendas of international empire-building.”


The seeds of the expedition lay in fears that other powers might claim much of the West for themselves if America didn’t get there first.


In particular, President Jefferson was shocked by the 1801 publication of a book detailing an equally amazing expedition across Canada to the Pacific eight years earlier by a British trapper, Alexander Mackenzie. The book, in addition to chronicling the harrowing trip, talked frankly of opening a trade route to Asia and establishing British control over the Northwest. Jefferson was also concerned that the Spanish might press north from Mexico and the Russians expand inland from the West Coast.


So in January 1803, even before the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson dispatched a secret message to Congress demanding $2,500 to finance a voyage to the Pacific. Congress went along, despite the usual grumbling. Jefferson claimed he only wanted to investigate a commercial route to the Pacific, but this wasn’t the whole truth. Sound familiar? He had long expressed frankly imperial ambitions, though he was sensitive enough to democratic opinion to assert that what he wanted to establish was a continental-scale “empire of liberty.”


Jefferson had even earlier propounded the notion of a private expedition, but the Corps of Discovery was primarily military in character, aside from Clark’s slave York and an interpreter, and his Indian wife, Sacagawea, hired along the way. Lewis and Clark began their trip 200 years ago; they would return after nearly three years of arduous travel and minimal loss of life. Today, the only visible sign of the expedition is Clark’s inscription of his signature, with an 1806 date, on a sandstone pillar on a lovely site along the Yellowstone River near Billings, Mont.


But the consequences of the trip were enormous, as Jefferson surely realized. The federal government had staked its claim not just to the Louisiana Territory but to the entire West. Land-hungry Americans and immigrants soon began to trickle, then flood, across the Mississippi and over the Rockies, led by the fur interests that did the real exploring of the early West.


If you were a Native American, of course, the Lewis and Clark expedition may not seem an unalloyed good; the book by Landon Jones unflinchingly traces Clark’s subsequent role in formulating the “removal” techniques used to clear the Indians out of the way of the onrushing European-Americans. And nothing about Jefferson’s pre-emptive act means that the current war in Iraq is necessarily justified or that Mr. Bush was wise to elevate pre-emptive war to the status of a formal doctrine.


But there’s no denying that Jefferson’s preemptively created empire of liberty led to one of the largest, freest, and most prosperous nations on earth. And that’s something to remember as the doctrine of pre-emption is revisited during the current presidential campaign.


The New York Sun

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