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His answer to critics who charge that such an approach will foster an American Empire is equally revealing: “That's a misreading of Roman history. As classicist Victor Davis Hanson points out, by the 1st century AD, the legions 'were mostly non-Italian and mercenary, and the empire still endured for nearly another 500 years.' If only the Pax Americana were to last half as long!"
What can of freedom does Mr. Boot (wonderful name that) have in mind? Fortunately, one of the imperialist renamers, Walter Jones, has seen the light. It was Jones who invented the term "Freedom Fries."
After the imperialists started calling French fries "Freedom fries" and French toast "Freedom toast" we should have known they'd get around to reiventing the French Foreign Legion as a "Freedom Legion."
Perhaps the best analogy to what Mr. Boot wants was the British decision, due to the lack of popularity of the War in America among English dissidents such as Edmund Burke and the popular John Wilkes and his followers, to use Hessian mercenaries.
Preyed upon by American "recruiters," a third of the 15,000 Hessians went "Over the Hill" to marry Pa-Dutch girls. The Hessian general seems even to have been a "closet" Republican as were openly the Brit brothers, Adm. & Gen. Howe.
Mr Boot and Prof. Hanson seem to prefer Empire, no matter how corrupt or in decline. The great ideology of the American Revolution was the idea of a "Republic" in which the Americans had "Fifth column" sympathizers all over Europe. Even the French soldiers came back from the colonies infected with what Monarchists called, "the American Disease." That was never what George III or Louie XVI expected!
Based upn their study of Roman history and after, the Republicans detested the kind of volunteer, mercenary standing armies favored by Boot/Bush. Why, that idea was thoroughly "Un-American/"
Bush's attempt to push some crazy notion of Democracy by brutal "Shock and Awe" tactics, as a means toward Universal Empire, has proved a wonderful recruiting device in advancing the ideology of Al Qaida. Way to go, GeoII/43.
I did a column last year discussing Boot's essential ignorance of the history of the American counterinsurgency in the Philippines, when he was then advancing that as a model for Iraq. In the interim he seems to have become even more desperate. http://www.independent.org/.
Ah, the Legion, stocked even with some not so ex-Nazis after WWII, no questions asked. Would France have given them citizenship? Hardly!
Ck out: http://www.foreignlegionlife.com/
Rome was in such dire shape after the civil wars that destroyed the Republic that after the terrible defeat in the Teutoberg Forest in 9 AD, it could not replace the 3 Legions lost there. By intelligently taking a defensive posture (an idea unknown to today's Neocons) it was able under Trajan and Hadrian (both born in Spain) to extend the Empire against a weak periphery.
Meanwhile, at home subversive Christianity flourished until later taken over by the State, at an early point feeding 1500 widows and orphans in the City itself because, what with Circuses, etc., the State was unable to do so.
Just what America needs! a Welfare/Warfare State, or aren't we well on the way, already?
See my essay, "Surviving in the Interstices," from Reason, 1977, posted at www.independent.org/ and also www.billmarina.com/.