THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

A MAN WITH A MEMORY LOOKS AT "TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY" | 2003-03-01

No cliché is too silly for Americans to get their soldiers killed for. General Wesley Clark announced that he would cheerfully kill his men to keep any country in Europe from being what he calls "ethnically pure."

Clark is a pro-busing Democrat. He would like to call in his troops to force third world immigration into any European country.

See June 12, 1999 - BUSING BY BOMBER.

But being willing to kill for anti-racism is not a purely liberal trait. In fact, respectable conservatives want to be known for that. The reason Serbia invaded its former Yugoslavian neighbors like Bosnia was because someone in the first Bush State Department gave them the go-ahead.

Serbia was trying to restore the "territorial integrity" of Yugoslavia after it broke up. A Bush (Senior) appointee told them that the United States had done the same thing under Lincoln, so we would not object.

I am probably the only human being alive who remembers what Saddam said right after he had taken over Kuwait. He was asked in an interview seen by most Americans whether he would withdraw from Kuwait after Bush's warning that the United States would attack if he didn't.

Sadam didn't even mention Kuwait. He said that he would fight any attempt to break up the "territorial integrity" of Iraq, just as Lincoln had. Sadam referred to "the seventeen provinces of Iraq," Kuwait being the seventeenth.

You see, a Bush rep had also told Saddam that America wouldn't intervene if he invaded Kuwait.

Lincoln again.

After his visit to the White House, the Chinese president pointed out that Formosa was recognized as the southern part of China by the United States. He said we should either stop objecting to a Chinese invasion of the place or take down all those Lincoln monuments, pictures, and quotations.