Bush Does Polk

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Bush repeats Polk's war history, and the U.S. suffers

By JEFFREY MANKOFF
Sunday, May 14, 2006

An American president, using politicized intelligence, launches a war on specious pretexts. American forces occupy the enemy capital but cannot impose a political settlement or extricate themselves from an increasingly expensive and unpopular war. Meanwhile, on the home front, partisan and sectional rancor increase. Even though the United States is ultimately victorious, the war exacerbates already deep divisions, laying the foundation for civil war.

This is not some dystopian vision of the future course of the war in Iraq, but the actual history of the 1846-1848 war between Mexico and the United States. The president is not George W. Bush but James K. Polk.

Polk's deception about his reasons for going to war and his facile assumptions about an easy U.S. victory contributed to a massive public disillusion that precipitated a breakdown in American politics in the 1850s. Disillusion with the Iraq war stems from the same causes. While no one is yet predicting civil war, Bush's handling of the war is poisoning politics in this country and undermining American democracy.

As with Bush's claim that the United States invaded Iraq to rid the country of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Polk's obfuscation about the location of the ambushed American troops laid the foundation for charges that the administration had lied to the public and concealed the real reasons for going to war.

Polk sanctioned war to annex California and the Southwest, believing American exceptionalism would make this grab for territory morally different from European imperialism, which he condemned. Bush and his associates similarly bought into the notion of American exceptionalism, arguing that, despite Iraq's long history of foreign occupation, Iraqi civilians would welcome U.S. troops as liberators. Most Iraqis, like most Mexicans in 1846, thought otherwise, and popular resistance soon coalesced against the invaders.

more: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=481534&category=OPINION&newsdate=5/14/2006