The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars

by Robert Higgs

Franklin Roosevelt was, above all else, a liar. His name should be linked in the history books to lying as the name of Genghis Khan is to cruelty and Romeo’s to romance. And it was at Roosevelt’s school that all of our leaders have studied. Republican or Democrat, liberal or “conservative,” they all love and revere Franklin Roosevelt. From Roosevelt they all learned to lie to us for our own good: to lie about the Soviet “threat” in 1947, about Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and Bosch in the Dominican Republic; to lie about those Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin attacked “without provocation” in 1964 and about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967; to lie about our support of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, about the Korean jet liner, about the airstrip in Grenada, about Noriega in Panama; to lie about Iran and Iraq and more “unprovoked aggression,” and about “restoring democracy” in Haiti — just as they lie today about the murders in Waco and at Ruby Ridge. Ever since Roosevelt, it has been lying as a way of government in what was once the Great Republic of the West.