LRC pick
The folly of empire
Mr Bush’s handlers are frighteningly like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson but those dreadful presidents seemed to learn from their mistakes — the people in power today seem not to or not to care

Indeed, the "national greatness" thesis propounded by the neoconservative founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose charter members in 1997 included Rumsfeld, Cheney, and more than half a dozen others who would occupy top foreign-policy posts in the Bush administration, derives directly from Roosevelt and his "imperialist" associates of the late 1800s.

To the administration's neoconservative boosters, Bush represents a synthesis of the wisdom of the two presidents – the Republican realist and the Democratic idealist – who are among the most beloved in the generally hazy historical memory of the nation.

But unlike Bush... both predecessors learned from their experience that doing so unilaterally and through the use of force was destined to fail.

The same reason Douglas MacArthur, the Cold War hawk of Korea, begged Lyndon Johnson to get out of Vietnam.

And although Wilson failed to bring the country into the League of Nations due to personal inflexibility and a devastating stroke, he had set the ideological stage on which 25 years later Franklin Roosevelt would found a new multilateral order designed in major part to dismantle the imperialism of the previous century.

Not so much. As MacArthur sussed in Korea, where he was in a new role as an ‘international officer’, like Iraq today it wasn’t really an international effort but the US (the continuation and indeed expansion of the British Empire after World War I per the Rhodes Group, now the CFR?) and also-rans/supporting players (as hilariously lampooned by Michael Moore on film re: Iraq this past year), really a new form of what HM Dominions and protectorates were in the old Empire (Australians at Gallipoli for example).

The UN, like American aggression definitely is, may simply be really imperialism in a new guise.