Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.
Emerson was right on both points. It was the first U. S. foreign policy effort where invading and conquering a country was much easier than dealing with it afterward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quoted in Zeitz, Joshua. Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image (Kindle Locations 406-407). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Critics of his position observe that the Islamic fundamentalists will never allow girls to go to school even if they were built and they might blow up any school that might be constructed if the allies did not have enough troops in Iraq to protect them and suppress the terrorists. When the Taliban fundamentalists controlled Afghanistan before the coalition drove them out, neither little girls not big girls could acquire education and women were not even allowed to work.
See {633152} for more of the reasoning for this point. “Neocon” is a shortened form of “neoconservative”. At the time the neoconservatives were advocating use of military intervention in the Middle East. Munich was the German city in which British Prime Minister notoriously tried to appease Hitler and the Nazis. This led to WWII and has become the historical icon for appeasement of a powerful tyrant and the cost of such.
See {636935}for the policy decision that triggered this order.
See {637208} and {637209} for examples of some of the excesses.
The Polk Administration wanted War with Mexico but felt it would not have public support if the Unites States was the aggressor. So the Army was sent to the border to provoke the Mexicans to attack first. The strategy worked and President Polk had much more support since he claimed that Mexico had attacked American Soldiers and retaliation was necessary. In the aftermath of the Mexican War, the United States obtained much new territory including the Southwestern States and Mexico was destabilized.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
