My father, Harry Mensel, whose grandfather was a journeyman coach-maker drawn from Germany before the Civil War to work for Studebaker in Indiana, was never happy about American intervention in the two World Wars. He took very personally the loss of American blood in both. “There’s nothing across the two oceans worth the life of a single American boy,” he said more than once.
No less often he said that if the Europeans couldn’t settle their differences short of war, they should swim alone in their bloodshed. “We owe them nothing,” he said. Dad’s career, like his father’s, was served entirely in railroading.
If he were alive today, I know he’d agree with our gray-haired guide in Vienna who, when I asked her if there was a common view in Europe of the US intervention in Iraq, said, “Those tribes have been killing each other for 1,400 years, let them finish on their own.”
Dad felt that democracies were proving that they were largely wasted on the people who followed the founders. “They don’t care enough to make it work the way it should. They take too much for granted,” he said. After World War II, he came to the view that the only government that might work for the greater good would be one led by a truly just and benevolent dictator – if one should ever appear.
He felt most strongly that the worst mistake the United States could make in statecraft would be making war in Asia. “Its size and population are too big for any invader to hold for long. The costs would be too high,” he said. If he were still with us, he’d show bitter despair over American losses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, without saying outloud, “I told you so.” He’d be the first to applaud the abrupt reversal of the most senior Republican in Congress, Florida’s Bill Young, the most hawkish of hawks, who now wants us out of Afghanistan immediately.
Wars never in any way justified the cost in his view. They invariably led to heavy public debt, with never enough time between them to close it. He would have viewed the Bush-Cheney impetuosity toward war and flippancy toward debt as the gravest nightmare since Pearl Harbor, if not since the Civil War.
He wanted government that was never bigger than its revenue. He considered the national debt a public disgrace.
Frank Mensel – September 2012