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. But like President Bush, 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.

Despite its victorious conclusion, the Mexican War was a fiasco that helped set the stage for the Civil War. It started as a"war of choice," when Polk ignored evidence that American forces had crossed into what was legally Mexican territory before being attacked by Mexican troops. As with Bush's claim that the United States invaded Iraq to rid the country of non-existent 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.

In both Iraq and Mexico, U.S. forces generally defeated the opposing army, but unexpected resistance forced them to occupy large parts of the country and confront a bitter guerrilla insurgency. The insurgency and the failure of U.S. forces to win a rapid victory intensified partisan rancor at home. In the 1840s, the opposition Whigs mostly opposed the war, as did a faction of Polk's Democrats. Today, the war in Iraq has deeply divided American opinion, providing, at last, an issue capable of uniting the fractious Democratic Party behind a demand to get US troops out.

The Mexican War and its legacy of territorial expansion, which upset the delicate balance between slave and free states, played a major role in fomenting the splits between Whig and Democrat and North and South that triggered America's slide into civil war in the 1860s. The war in Iraq is likewise hardening the divide between Republicans and Democrats as well as Red states and Blue states. Supporters of the war accuse their opponents of hating freedom, while critics charge the administration with massacring Iraqis to fill the coffers of Halliburton. Civil war may not be looming just yet in America -- in contrast to Iraq -- but there can be little doubt that the war has coarsened political rhetoric and injected an element of real hatred into politics on the part of both the Left and the Right.

The real tragedy is that much of this domestic bitterness could have been avoided if Bush had not repeated so many of the mistakes made by Polk in the 1840s. Misuse of intelligence deprived the public of the opportunity to debate the war on its merits. Lack of planning for serious resistance and guerrilla warfare allowed the war to drag on longer, and at higher cost, than its initiators foresaw.

It was Polk's and his successors' inattention to the domestic consequences of war that precipitated the slide into the Civil War, and Bush has proven no better. Healing the bitterness over the war requires an openness and honesty -- about the use of intelligence, the aims of the war, and the administration's lack of planning for the consequences -- that Polk never demonstrated and that, so far, neither has Bush.

In the last part of his presidency, Bush should recognize the damage his deception and lack of preparation have done to the American political system, and seek to rebuild the consensus about fighting terrorism that existed before the invasion of Iraq. Otherwise,"Mr. Bush's War" may prove nearly as damaging to American democracy as"Mr. Polk's War."

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This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

Even a graduate student can do better than this:

"Mr. Bush's War" may prove nearly as damaging to American democracy as "Mr. Polk's War."

The proposed parallel is way off, even by HNN's shabby standards:

1. Polk had a pretext "American blood shed on American soil" BY MEXICANS, not Tanzanians (e.g. 9-11 was not an attack by Iraq). Bush had no pretext, only BS.

2. We did not sign a peace treaty with Saddam in 2005, two years after the invasion of Iraq.

3. Polk did not come into office promising the opposite of what he did.

4. The Mexican War may have had a minor ancillary role in exacerabating North-South intentions leading to the Civil War. There was no lasting damage to American democracy, however. There is nothing undemocratic about the 13th 14th or 15th amendments.

glen loban - 6/11/2006

Mankoff, if not already, will obviously soon become completely unemployable in the private sector. The least the left could be is thankful for all the government jobs the rest of us are paying... sad state of affairs!

John R. Maass - 6/10/2006

If as the author states "the war has coarsened political rhetoric and injected an element of real hatred into politics on the part of both the Left and the Right," then why is it that only "Bush's handling of the war is poisoning politics in this country and undermining American democracy"?? Are opponents of the war doing nothing to poison politics? Mankoff seems to be dressing up a slam on Bush & the war with a few historical pointers--guess they don't mention what presentism is at Yale...

Lawrence Brooks Hughes - 6/10/2006

Speaking of Iraq, Mankoff says "misuse of intelligence deprived the public of the opportunity to debate the war on its merits."

That is not my recollection at all, but perhaps Mr. Mankoff is too young to remember the Clinton administration? It was they who resolved through the Senate, with a 95% affirmative vote, that the U.S. stood for "regime change" in Iraq. We debated this proposition for several years, in all.

Just before we finally invaded Iraq, there was additional debate which went on for weeks and weeks, both in Congress and at the United Nations, causing a delay which undoubtedly cost some lives of our fighting forces. And the outcome of all the debate was completely one-sided: Republicans and Democrats alike were in favor of the war. Not only Bill Clinton, but people like Carl Levin and John Kerry were on board. Nearly everyone agreed, including a unanimous UN Security Council.

Mankoff misstates the pre-war position of President Bush regarding WMPs, by the way, as all good liberals do. Bush actually said "we could not afford to wait until" Saddam had WMDs--a very sane position, which is no doubt why it was unanimously held, despite the necessity of launching a preventive war... Democrats have been lying about Bush and WMDs for over four years now, but if they did so for 400 years and it would not change the facts.

Thomas Bockhorn - 6/9/2006

However, if the U.S. claims that its aims is to spread democracy around the world, we are doing a terrible job. Iraq is just the lastest in this long string of caring only for our interest at the detriment of the local population. Previous to our involvement in removing Saddam, we supplied him with money and arms to confront Iran. When Saddam gassed his own people in Northern Iraq, we just let it slide since it was in our best interest to keep him there due to our feelings that Iran was a threat. How can we just go along and justify that allowing and supplying dictators is in the best interest in democracy. It is no wonder the arab world hates our involvment. We are a symbol of their slavery to their oppresive national governments that we support.
Now we are engaging in reconstructing Iraq to a "pro-democracy" government yet I will predict that we again will come short. The end result will be either an engulfing civil war that could spread to other countries like Yugoslavia, or if we are successful in forming a strong government there, we will see it rapidly transform to some sort of dictatorial and/ or oppressive system.

Jerry West - 6/7/2006

**...the neo-cons were considred**

It is irrelevant and is beside the point that foreign policy is based on the economic and political concerns of a country, not on any altruistic desire for liberty or democracy in other regimes.

**And I don't jest at all about the United States supporting both non-democratic and democratic societies. **

That it does so was never in question, why they it does so is. In fact, the fact that they do validates the view that foreign policy is based on economic and political concerns rather than humanitarian ones.

**Your attempt to make their foreign policy part of a seemless tale of corruption and hypocrisy is laughably wrong. **

Actually it is more of a seamless tale of self interest.

**
If you say you support a US foreign policy directed towards regime change in Syria, Iran, the Sudan and North Korea, then I will cease justly inferring from what you write that you are a de facto supporter of tyranny**

Whether one supports such a policy or not does not logically lead to the conclusion that one does or does not support tyranny.

It is possible that one could oppose tyranny, said regimes and US interventionist policies all as part of one unified package.

**American support for Canada is one of mutual benefit and gain; it is America's biggest trading partner.**

Whether the benefit is equal or not is certainly debatable. Not only is Canada the US's biggest trading partner it is its biggest supplier of foreign oil and a supplier of electricity. It also controls access to the Great Lakes and the secure, all season sea route to Alaska.

The question remains, who needs the other the most?

The other question is that if Canada pursues a more self interested and independent policy on trade that could reduce trade with the US and either reduce or raise the cost of the US's supply of energy, will it suffer the same fate of other democracies that displeased the Americans in the past?

John Atherton Bowen - 6/7/2006

1: George Bush is not in charge of anything. He is the figurehead of an oligarchy. Obviously none of you has studied very much history.
2: Contrary to the assertion that the oligarchy has forgotten history, it is obvious that they have an intimate understanding of it: the present situation is EXACTLY what they wanted to occur!!!

Jason B Keuter - 6/7/2006

You still have your facts off...the neo-cons were considred to be reckless and dangerous by the cold war "establishment" precisely because they advocated abandoning relationships with dictators out of Cold War convenience and argued that the US must pursue the rollback of communism. The cold war foreign policy of cozying up to dictators with sufficient anti-communist credentials was considered destabilizing and unrealistic to the neo-cons - and recent history has largely validated their view, which differs little from that of the left, except that the neo-Cons are not anti-capitalists. Thus, the rise of the neo-cons took place in a post-Cold War context, in which US support for dictatorships was no longer defensible. Present leftist "historians" wish to erase the Cold War context of past foreign policy; especially their own scathing attacks of the "realpolitik" of accepting tyranny and totalitarianism as inevitable. They must do this because that is precisley the basis of their attacks on present foreign policy.

And I don't jest at all about the United States supporting both non-democratic and democratic societies. The US has long provided military defense for all of Western Europe and is now doing so for eastern Europe as well - and the result has not been a roll back of democracy. Iceland doesn't even have the token militaries of most European socieites and is literally guaranteed its territorial integrity by US forces. Unlike say Soviet satellites, this has not been accompanied by wholesale purges of people who don't tote the American line. In fact, anti-American demagoguery is par for the course in European politics!

The other important point is that America is allied with all sorts of democracies and doesn't need to "support" them in the same way that Russia "supports" say Syria or the Hamas controlled PA. American support for Canada is one of mutual benefit and gain; it is America's biggest trading partner. European and American trade is huge as well and then there's Japan.

Russia, on the other hand, simply pours money into Hamas coffers in order to prop Hamas up. Hamas needs propping up because it cannot survive on its own and is incapable of entering into reciprocal arrangements that entail mutual respect of democratic sovereignty.

Your attempt to make their foreign policy part of a seemless tale of corruption and hypocrisy is laughably wrong.

If you say you support a US foreign policy directed towards regime change in Syria, Iran, the Sudan and North Korea, then I will cease justly inferring from what you write that you are a de facto supporter of tyranny who uses a nearly fantastical bogeyman of a perfidious US as a rationale for restraining its use of its power against the true tyrants of this world.

Jerry West - 6/6/2006

** The neo-cons say exactly that, which is why they want to depose dictators.**

What they say is PR and has little to do with what really concerns them. The only dictators that they want to depose are those that get in the way of or threaten their pursuit of power and control. When liberty and democracy threaten them they are just as happy to squash democratically elected governments as dictatorships.

Freeing people and democracy for neo-cons are feel good buzz words, their actual definition of these terms is pretty narrow and selective.

**You, on the other hand, are against deposing them in the present because we didn't depose them in the past**

BS sir, you can not logically conclude that from my statement.

There are few if any dictatorships in the past I would have preferred to stay in power, including Pinochet's in Chile. :)

**Unlike non-democratic super powers, the United States lends support to both democratic and non-democratic societies.**

Certainly you jest. :)

Democratic and non-democratic powers alike lend or withold support based on their own political and economic interests. The issue of the other society's political state is secondary if anything at all.

**Do you count Canada among the dictatorships that the US has supported?**

What does this have to do with anything?

Anyhow, in the case of Canada, what support? Currently the US has refused to cooperate and abide by trade agreements that it has signed in the case of softwood lumber despite numerous rulings against the US position, that can hardly be called support. Even after an agreement was reached the US wants the right to dictate Canadian forest policy. Never mind the goons that are sent to Canada as Ambassadors who lecture Canadians on what that they should do.

Interestingly Canada is a democratic country more in tune with the ideals of the US founding fathers than the current US government, and one that provides a better overall quality of life for its citizens. None of this thanks to the US, but more likely in spite of it.

Ben H. Severance - 6/6/2006

Jeffrey Mankoff's comparison is valid, for important parallels do exist, but I consider his essay overly harsh in his analysis of Polk’s rationale for going to war with Mexico and in his assessment of Polk’s leadership.

President Polk did not deceive America into war with Mexico, as Mr. Mankoff alleges. Rather the decision to go to war (one officially declared by Congress) was the climax of at least a decade of brewing tension that was no secret to the American public. Mexico never acknowledged Texas independence, which was widely supported by the American people, and for many years the Mexican government sought ways to re-subjugate its former province. Mexico also essentially declared a state of war after the United States annexed Texas in 1845. Finally, Mexico did indeed initiate hostilities in April 1846 when its cavalry ambushed a U.S. patrol along the Rio Grande, where Polk dispatched American troops under General Zachary Taylor to safeguard the territorial integrity of the nation. Contrary to Mankoff’s assertion, Polk did not cross over into land that was “legally Mexican,” for the actual boundary between Mexico and Texas was in dispute, the president accepting the Texan claim of the Rio Grande, the Mexican government insisting on the Nueces River farther to the north. Regardless, what Mankoff overlooks is that Mexico considered the real border between it and the United States to be the Sabine River in western Louisiana, so Taylor’s army would have been considered an invader no matter where it moved in Texas. But by 1846, Texas had become the 28th state in the Union, hence the responsibility of the president to defend.

Mankoff’s claim that Polk made “facile assumptions about an easy U.S. victory” requires qualification. The president did not resort to war hastily, but engaged in genuine diplomacy, including an offer to purchase the whole southwest for $30 million. That the nearly bankrupt Mexican government placed national honor over fiscal solvency in no way discredits Polk’s efforts at a peaceful solution. Mexico was quite belligerent in its rhetoric toward the United States, and many of its leaders actually wanted a war. When it came to war, the only assumption President Polk made was that citizen-soldiers led by professional officers could defeat peasant levies led by aristocratic generalissimos. The course of the war vindicated Polk’s faith in America’s fighting ability, for the numerically inferior U.S. army thrashed the Mexicans as soundly in 1846-1847 as it did the Iraqis in 1991 and 2003. All the while, Polk exercised firm control over strategy and proved to be an effective commander-in-chief. His decision to sack Mexico City in 1847 was bold and arrived at only after the Mexican government refused to submit following a series of U.S. victories along the Texas border. Mankoff unfairly portrays Polk as either ignorant or unconcerned by the possibility of guerrilla opposition. The president was well aware of the pitfalls of a lengthy occupation. After the fall of the Mexican capital, Polk speedily concluded a treaty that established American ownership of the southwest; he then withdrew the entire U.S. army in early 1848, before a full-blown insurgency emerged. In the process, the president rightly rebuked a group of over-exuberant politicians who urged him to take all of Mexico. In a return to diplomacy, Polk then generously paid Mexico $15 million, in part to assuage the disgrace of defeat but mostly to shore up the stability of the Mexican government. In this sense, Polk used the treasury and not the army to pacify his adversary; and it worked.

Why Mankoff contends that the Mexican War produced “massive disillusion” among Americans is puzzling, for a majority of citizens, albeit a declining one after the first year of the war, remained supportive. Tens of thousands of American boys volunteered to serve right up to the end (no stop-loss phenomenon here). To be sure, the Whig party lambasted Polk, a Democrat from Tennessee, but this criticism was out of step with the popular voice. After all, Polk ran his 1844 election campaign on an overtly expansionist platform, one that embodied the notion of “manifest destiny,” the widespread belief that it was America’s God-given right to spread its supposedly superior Anglo-Saxon democracy over the entire continent. Polk certainly used the war as a pretext to acquire as spoils the sparsely populated Mexican provinces of California and New Mexico, but while this may seem like a disingenuous change in war aims, one that perhaps betrays a land-grabbing intent all along, the president was only taking his party’s agenda to its logical conclusion.

Mankoff is on target when he emphasizes the Mexican War as an important causative factor in the American Civil War, but his attempt to blame the Polk administration is misleading. The war in and of itself did not upset what Mankoff calls the “delicate balance between slave and free states.” If anything, it theoretically maintained the balance of power by providing new lands for both the North and the South. Mankoff neglects to discuss Polk’s risky brinkmanship with Great Britain over the Oregon territory. In pursing expansion in the northwest, Polk enjoyed the support of most northerners and many Whigs, all of whom understood that Oregon was above the Missouri Compromise Line (the arbitrary demarcation between free and slave states), which meant that politicians from the free states would eventually subdue the political influence of the slaveholding South. The acquisition of California and New Mexico, however, opened up vast territory for settlement as potential slave states, thereby serving as a political counterweight. As a slaveholder himself, Polk appreciated the historical patterns of statehood and fully expected the Missouri Line to run across to the Pacific. Unfortunately for him, northern politicians introduced the Wilmot Proviso as an obstacle to slavery’s extension into these new territories. Though this measure failed to pass, it did polarize the political climate. Therefore, it was fallout over the Proviso, and not Polk’s expansionist policies, that triggered the sectional conflict that brought the Civil War. Counterfactually, had he not died shortly after leaving office, Polk probably would have opposed the later secession movement.

James K. Polk was a nationalist in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Like them, he believed that territorial expansion was crucial to the survival of republican liberty, for expansion meant land, and land meant property, and property meant economic independence, and economic independence was the only way a man could exercise his political rights as a citizen. That this idea of a nation of farmers seems quaint and unrealistic to Americans today in no way minimizes its centrality to the thinking of average Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In fighting Mexico, Polk was acting on the general will of the people; the war was relatively swift and successful, and the long-term outcome was beneficial to the nation. In this sense, Polk’s foreign policy perfectly reflected the character of the country at the time. This is arguably the lesson that President Bush has not learned with his gambit in Iraq.

Jason B Keuter - 6/6/2006

The neo-cons say exactly that, which is why they want to depose dictators. You, on the other hand, are against deposing them in the present because we didn't depose them in the past; so, if you were to go back into the past, you would support keeping dictators in power.

Also, your reading of the history of US foreign policy is horribly slanted. Do you count Canada among the dictatorships that the US has supported? Or Belgium? Or Costa Rica? Indonesia, yes. France, no.

Unlike non-democratic super powers, the United States lends support to both democratic and non-democratic societies. Its foreign policy has not been one uniform act of counter revolution. That is because the United States is an open, diverse, democratic society and such socieities do not follow ideology to some preconceived end result. So the US supported Somosa in Nicuragua, then withdrew their support, gave partial support to the Sandinistas, then withdrew it and supported the contras and then supported the moderate government that replaced the contras. There is little consistency to be found here; perhaps you might stop try looking at the American election cycles for an explanation...

Jason B Keuter - 6/6/2006

That without the Mexican American war, slavery probably would have gone on much longer, as the newly acquired territory forced a revisitation of the Missouri Compromise. Arguably, the most significant legacy of the Mexican American War is the end of slavery. The author of the post doesn't seem to be disputing this. He seems to be saying it was an undesirable result.

Jerry West - 6/5/2006

We can certainly debate the merits of Mankoff's comparison of the Mexican War with the Iraq War, but the following statement one would hope was made tongue in cheek:

***
President Bush led us into War with Iraq in order to free the people of Iraq from an oppressive dictator who was killing his own citizens by the thousands, and to prevent him from killing people outside his borders by the millions through the development and implementation of weapons of mass destruction.
***

That is the official propaganda of course. Reality, however, may not closely conform to the fairytale.

Opposing dictators and combatting oppression have not been the strong suit of US foreign policy over the past 50 years. In fact the opposite is closer to the truth.

Steve Sagarra - 6/5/2006

Mr. Jaggard, you beat me to the punch. I was going to say the same thing.

For my two cents, "politicized intelligence" indicates that one political party or another manipulated and used information for its own benefit. This is not the case at all with the intelligence used for going to war in Iraq. It has been said ad nauseam - both conservatives and liberals, both Republicans and Democrats, believed the intel gathered by both non-partisan domestic and foreign intelligence services. It matters very little whether such intelligence panned out in finding actual WMD, because Hussein thwarted, lied, and obstructed UN inspectors in searching for them time and again. And if you read ex-Iraqi General Georges Sada's book, "Saddam's Secrets," you'll know that Iraq had the weapons , had used them in the war with Iran during the 1980s, and hid them prior to the U.S. invasion. But I guess fact-checking and research is not taught at Yale.

Tom Jaggard - 6/5/2006

The comparisons that Mr. Mankoff makes between the War with Mexico in 1846-1848 and the War with Iraq going on today are based on a faulty understanding of the facts.

President Polk led us into the War with Mexico because he wanted to take territory from Mexico that they had refused to sell to us.

President Bush led us into War with Iraq in order to free the people of Iraq from an oppressive dictator who was killing his own citizens by the thousands, and to prevent him from killing people outside his borders by the millions through the development and implementation of weapons of mass destruction.

These two motives are very different, indeed.

Also, the American Civil War was caused by the debate over whether or not to allow slavery to spread into our new territories. Whether we acquired the new territories through peaceful or warlike means, this debate would have continued and the same result -- Civil War -- would have ensued.