Abe Greenwald reminds us that neoconservatives have the historical understanding of five year-olds:

Among other things, the War of 1812 was an attempt to eradicate the evil of monarchic rule [bold mine-DL]; the Civil War, a push to eliminate the evil of slavery; World Wars I [bold mine-DL] and II, fights to destroy the evil of totalitarian ideologies; and the Cold War, a triumph over the “Evil Empire.”

Each of these claims could be ridiculed as the simplistic, ideological and largely anachronistic nonsense that it is, but I will limit myself to the most obvious errors. These are not only the most easily refuted, but they are also telling in that they show the extent to which neocons such as Greenwald will distort and do violence to the historical record to shore up their shoddy ideology. He could not be content with repeating boilerplate claims about the “Good Wars” of 1861 and 1941, which few would bother to contest because the mythology surrounding them is so well-established, but he felt compelled to extend his absurd reading of American history even to the War of 1812, which is remarkable in American history as a war that we formally started and lost completely without any real ill effects on our nation. After two years of failure, we negotiated a settlement at Ghent, peace returned and the world did not end. The conclusion of the War of 1812 is a good example of how negotiated peace and compromise concluded a foolish policy favored by War Hawks and this settlement allowed us to resume commerce and exchange with Britain. It is especially strange for a neoconservative to invoke the War of 1812, since the aftermath of that war showed that we could be completely defeated by a foreign military on our own soil, and this didn’t really have any long-term significance for the prosperity or security of the United States.

Put in the most favorable light that its own propagandists would have used, the War of 1812 was at most a belated, failed effort to halt British impressment and the violation of the neutral rights of American ships, and this was wrapped up in overblown rhetoric about a “second war of independence.” There was no notion of “eradicating” monarchic rule. More bluntly, the war was an attempt to exploit British involvement in the Napoleonic Wars to make a land grab in the Northwest. The War Hawks of that time were interested in expansion, and it is worth remembering that it was our government that formally declared war first. No doubt the War Hawks loathed monarchy as everyone in the early republican period did, but in the early nineteenth century there was no chance of “eradicating” monarchic rule anywhere.

The claim that WWI had anything to do with fighting “totalitarian ideologies” is comical. Anything recognizable as a modern totalitarian movement did not exist until after WWI. It is fair to say that the effects of WWI created or empowered totalitarian ideologies, but the war itself was the struggle of the established major empires to retain supremacy in Europe against the rising power of Germany and its allies. Allied propagandists portrayed the war as a fight variously for the rights of small nations, democracy or resistance to absolutism, but none of this had anything to do with totalitarianism or anti-totalitarianism. Neither did it particularly have much to do with combating evil. No doubt every nation involved convinced itself that its cause was righteous and the cause of the enemy was utterly depraved, which just serves as a reminder of how disastrous valorizing warfare can be. WWI was a catastrophic waste that destroyed much of the stable order of European civilization and ushered in at least seventy years of horror, oppression and actual totalitarianism across much of the Continent. During WWI, every belligerent on both sides claimed sweeping powers to police internal dissent and to some extent every government took on the character of police states. That was a product of waging mass warfare, and the wartime expansion of government powers applied to both Allied and Central powers.