The Green March- Illegal immigration and the strategy of unarmed invasion

Throughout history one of the key aims in warfare has been the successful implementation of a covert attack. Hannibal defeated and destroyed several Roman armies thanks to his masterful orchestration of battles that made his opponent the victim of such an attack. What he taught at the strategic level, the Romans mastered at the level of Grand Strategy, positioning themselves for the conquest of vast territories under the guise of interventions that seemed innocuous or even helpful to those they intended to dominate. They invaded and established strongholds of power in the midst of their intended victims camouflaged by declared purposes and intentions that concealed their strategic effect. Often it was only revealed when they exercised the domination it made possible. Their victims slumbered in the delusion of liberty, until the suave accents of diplomacy or arbitration gave way to the curt voice of arrogant command that signified its ruin.

Is this now to be the fate of the USA? In my latest WND.com article I characterized the reality of illegal immigration as a foreign invasion. I pointed out that the U.S. Constitution does not require U.S. government authorization before the government of one of the United States responds to an actual foreign invasion. I knew when I wrote it that some people would take exception to the notion that the peaceful mobilization of unarmed civilians can reasonably be called an invasion. They want to dismiss such language as inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole.

As is often the case these days, such offhand dismissals depend mainly on a condition of ignorance that my experience forbids me to claim. Every time I consider the implications of illegal immigration, somewhere in the back of my mind I remember a bit of North African History I encountered during my years at the U.S. Department of State. There has been a longstanding dispute over sovereignty about a region “called the Western Sahara, the Disputed Territory of the Western Sahara, or even the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.”

The dispute over this sovereignty between Morocco and the indigenous Saharawis has been going on since 1975, when more than 300,000 unarmed Moroccans converged on the city of Tarfaya in what was dubbed the Green march. This peaceful “invasion” was orchestrated by King Hassan II in response to the rejection of Moroccan and Mauritanian territorial claims to the region by the International Court of Justice, which recognized the Saharawis’ right to self-determination pending the imminent withdrawal of Spain after nearly 100 years of colonial rule. Prior to the court ruling, tens of thousands of Moroccans had already crossed the border into Spanish Sahara to back their government’s contention that the northern part of the territory was historically Morocco’s.

Of course, once experience frees our thinking from merely semantic conceptual constraints, we realize that Americans have no need to travel to Africa to comprehend the strategic power of unarmed invasion. In a sense, much of the whole history of European colonization in North America illustrates it. Many of the original American colonists came to the “New World” with no other purpose than to build peaceful life and livelihood in what they regarded as a wilderness. Their motive was therefore similar to the one many of their apologists cite as the main motivation of illegal immigrants today- the search for a better life.

As it happened, the “wilderness” was not uninhabited at all. Native Americans had a way of life that included their habitual claim to the territory on which it depended. The essentially peaceful motives of the European settlers didn’t alter the fact that their presence not only contradicted this claim, but damaged and disrupted the way of life with which it was connected. Settler families pushing into the “wilderness” might think of themselves as peaceful farmers innocently seeking to preserve their livelihood. But as they cleared the forest, plowed the fields, and gathered, stored and distributed the resulting harvest,  the jobs they did burdened and damaged the infrastructure which supported the Native American way of life.  This imposed costs that ultimately included the threat of death from starvation and serious disease.

Eventually, the pain and fear that resulted from their experience led Native Americans to respond to the “peaceful” invasion of their territory with armed attacks intended to destroy or drive away existing settlements and discourage new ones. In the course of a long and tragic history of intermittent war this armed response failed. Because it often involved the use of force against vulnerable and ostensible peaceful families and settlements, it attached a stigma of irascible savagery to people whose undisturbed way of life was far less systematically warlike than that which prevailed in Europe at the time.

Some version of what happened to the Native Americans can also be made out in the history of American states once within the political orbit of Spanish speaking America, like Texas and California. The more thoughtfully we consider the facts of American history, the more it appears that Americans should be the last people in the world to forget either the concept of unarmed invasion, or its strategic implications. Yet our present so-called representatives in positions of political leadership speak as if the ongoing invasion of the United States, by a force of humanity now numbering in the tens of millions, should be discussed as if it represents no strategic threat to America’s sovereignty and way of life.

At the very least, this bespeaks fatal incompetence. At worst, it gives evidence of studied hostility toward the national existence of the United States.  This hostility has become all too commonplace among the educated elites that are now relentlessly maneuvering to become the focus of decisive power in the regime that is displacing America’s constitutional, democratic republic.  Whether they pursue the communist shibboleth of dictatorship on behalf of the oppressed masses; or the authoritarian corporatist delusion of the hidden hand of unbridled materialism miraculously producing wealth for all; the result is an administrative tyranny intended to suppress the idea of responsible individual liberty and decentralized self-government that is the heart of the true American dream.

The power of that dream has drawn people to America from all over the world. Ironic that it now powers a strategy of unarmed invasion intended to facilitate the destruction of the very thing that brought and brings them here. Deceitful elements of the elite in all quarters and of all political stripes and persuasions are quietly working to make that happen.  Will we allow them to succeed?