Live by the sword, die by the sword. This bit of peace wisdom, and the many like it scattered throughout millennia of religious and secular writing, are apparently far too simple for the Bush administration as it prepares for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. Yet history informs that the realm of conflict between sovereign states is exactly where such wisdom of de-escalation proves most pertinent.

The Israeli-Palestinian crisis alone informs us that violence breeds violence and unspeakable cruelty. The fate of the Roman Empire magnifies and extends the lesson to include the fall of the “victorious” aggressor. Indeed, the historical legacy of war underscores the shallow and short-lived benefit of bloody victories. Sparta overcame Messenia only to be saddled with a burden that led to fear and stagnation. The Assyrian policy of slaughter came back around to torture the source. In terms of violence-oriented politics, a self-administering version of the Hammurabic code, an eye for an eye, seems most prophetically accurate. And that is ominous given the re-emergence of the label “empire” to describe the United States. Those skeptical about this labeling should check The New York Times Magazine issue for 2001 titled “The Year in Ideas,” and read under the entry “American Emperialism, Embraced.”

With its formidable military spread over the globe, America ought to be considering the similarities between itself and what England was, or Spain or Portugal or France, in their heydays. Ancient Rome and Sparta aside, look at the lesson the 20th century holds for Empire-builders, which is essentially this: violence combined with greed led to two world wars, which are the dual reasons why America is the only superpower now.

Despite the fate of the bellicose cultures from which we sprang, and despite our own record of sharp-bladed acquisitiveness, most Americans seem unaware of the negative reaction our foreign policy generates. Spurred by everything from distaste to outright rancor, citizens of other countries object to the presence of our military, and the rapes, accidental killings and general invasiveness that embarrassingly accompany it.

Even worse, huge numbers of innocent civilians die when we decide to take out a bad guy. In Afghanistan, we didn’t even get the bad guy, and the investigation continues into a U.S. missile attack that essentially wiped out an entire wedding party. During the Gulf War, bad guy Saddam Hussein was left in power and estimates indicate that hundreds of thousands of civilians died during the bloodshed or in the aftermath.

Perhaps even more scary, the bad guys, in many cases, used to be our allies. The CIA trained radical Islamic forces to fight a Holy War against the USSR in Afghanistan, and the bin Laden network grew out of that. Saddam Hussein received strong military support from the US in the 1980’s even while he used chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Manuel Noriega, our target in the Panamanian War, was on the CIA payroll when George Bush (our president’s father) was head of the agency. The list of tyrants and thugs supported by the United States goes on and on-and the accompanying advantages reaped by multinational corporations have been noted by our critics. Without doubt we should locate and punish murderous terrorists, but in the process we should not become blind to our own shortcomings, our own violent tendencies, and the danger inherent in them, the kind of danger that has toppled kingdoms not from without but from an internal lack of integrity and virtuous function.

Chris Crittenden is teaching a summer course in environmental ethics at the University of Maine at Machias.