The Folly of Empire

As I read this brilliant and historical reading called “The Folly of Empire I came to realize that the article is about past president Bush and his administration that has failed to learn from past attempts at American imperialism. This is representing the past presidents in quite a shameful way through American imperialism as a prime instance of and through president Bush. You know in history politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but as far as Bush’s analogy to Iraq suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revision of the history of the Spanish-American War. Bush has made many mistakes through ignoring past ones and has cause the Country some people just like this author has thought many headaches and pains if he would have just thought and paid attention to history. First, according to the article and reading if president Bush would have just applied the lessons and rules to the American plans for invading Iraq and transforming the Middle East, it might have not went the way it did in that manner if he at least did it more carefully and it might have went on more cautiously and in a good movable way, than the way he did it. People say he was either unaware of them or just down right ignored them and did what he wanted to do within his own mindset. You know in a big way the Spanish-American War and its aftermath signified a turning point in American foreign policy. You know in a very sad and confused way by going to war against Spain in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and by establishing what it thought of as a stepping-stone to the China market, the United States of America I feel in this way had abandoned its own fine isolation and thrown itself into the worldwide struggle through the result of the willful disregarding of history from Bush. Next, you know according to the author in the article “history is not physics.

The study of the past doesn’t produce permanent laws that allow one to predict the future with the same certainty that a physicist can chart the route and speed of a falling object. But historical experiences do yield lessons that convince peoples and their leaders to change their behavior to avoid predictable, and undesired, penalties”. Which to me means that we cannot just take things in history lightly we must study it and remember it, to move off and make a better and greater country, there is no way to know what is right from wrong until you make the right and wrong mistakes, and it is only by trial and error that the United States can move forward with it’s past mistakes in history through chaos. Another lesson the author accuses Bush of ignoring is the one that the Secret Service had warned Bush about, that it was not safe for him to remain overnight in the “first Democratic nation in Asia.” You know as many Philippine critics commented afterward, Bush’s interpretation of Philippine-American history took very little relation to fact and he continued, in his own way of doing things. Then, another lesson and example the author blames Bush of ignoring is his concern for the Cold War was over long time ago. The end of the Cold War created the conditions for finally realizing the promise of Wilson’s foreign policy. The great powers could now, as Wilson had hoped, form a “community of power” to manage and resolve these remaining conflicts. You know with this being said, in a clever way the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton understood the innovative chance that existed. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush built a influential alliance through the United Nations Security Council to drive Saddam Hussein’s services out of the Gulf kingdom. Some people would say finally America is finally free of peace years going by represented a triumph of president Wilson and of the lessons that America had learned from the Spanish-American War, two world wars, and the Vietnam War but these lessons were entirely lost on the administration of George W. Bush that took office in January 2001. Like the Republicans of the 1920s, the Bush Republicans were determined to forget rather than build upon the past.

They strongly advocated using America’s military and economic power to transform countries and regions in America’s image. They were a regression to the Republican imperialists who had agitated for the United States to occupy and annex the Philippines at the turn of the last century. With this advocating eventually brought on one of the biggest terrorist attacks in the world and in America in 2001 causing 3,000 deaths on the attack of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City. In Conclusion, you see some people say things like this will have never happened if us Americans just would have minded our business or things would have never happened this way or that way if we just have been on the same page rather democrat or republican and chose wisely among each other than we would have been better off. It is a famous quote that we were all humans until, race disconnected us, religion separated us, politics divided us, and wealth classified us. You know our past presidents have made the mistakes of listening to the people and ignoring the world around us and us as citizens and it has I truly think brought hardships to this country just like any other country who does these things. You see if past president Bush or past Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s important neoconservative, had been aware of the vicious war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s disasters in Mexico, or of the ruined history of Western expansionism in the Mideast, they might still have attacked Iraq but in a way they also might have had second thoughts about what Bush, resounding Beveridge and the imperialists of a century ago would call an important chance to change the world.