Are you a domestic terrorist?

[Occhidiangela]

It may be a mistake to do this

It was. Next time you want to imitate a seagull, try crapping on somebody else's car.

@ Jester:
What color is the sky in your world, I wonder?

Mexico was obviously not happy about Texan independence, and never fully reconciled themselves to it.

Cry me a river. When you lose a war, you don't tend to get to dicatate terms. Blood and iron is still one of the few methods of border reconcilliation that seems to get universal acknowledgment in practice, rather than in theory.

But tell me: why the deliberate dishonesty here? Why do you use this artifice? You divorce the government of a nation from the nation. Sorry, it doesn't work that way, in practice.

I'm not sure I'd tie that all into culture, as opposed to economy,

Sorry that you choose to be so myopic. (As I understand it, you are a student of economics?) Trying to isolate politics and economics from culture is a failed perceptual game, and IMO a foolish one, as the three (and more factors) continually interact.

Well, yeah. Their leadership was terrible.

You didn't quite catch the point. The root of that leadership problem is cultural.

What mix are we talking about now?

Please keep up with the series of posts, to include the first one when I barged into your teapot tempest with kandrathe. This goes back to feudal states, feudal social institutions within a culture, and how they inform, corrupt, and otherwise influence politics. You can keep up, you are one of the few with the wit to do so.

A century? How about a decade later? During the Civil War, the US put to field over three million men. They didn't just all pop into existence in the 13 years between the two wars, nor did the organizational capacity to militarize them, nor the economic capacity to pay and arm them.

Actually, in relative terms, the two armies of the Civil War did indeed just "pop" in to existence, and with bloody consequences for a lot of ninety day volunteers, draft riots in New York, and more problems that both side's staffs and commanders were beset with. That is how Custer became a General in a very short period of time, from being a junior officer: the armies inflated at a rapid pace.

But beyond that, you once again miss a salient feature of Ameican history: from day first, the political unwillingness to keep large standing armies was imbedded in the cultural and political assumptions. The Civil War was an abberation, not the status quo. The break from the continual tradition came in WW II, and its aftermath.

I don't think those problems are "somewhat similar". Scott wasn't pondering marching back to Washington DC to stabilize the government. I doubt the thought ever crossed his mind - whereas I'm sure it preoccupied the Mexicans nearly as much as the war itself.

Perhaps. Similar but different problems between the civilians and the generals on both sides. Scott did have the advantage of distance, and thus the long time between communiques from Washington. Thus you can, if you like, argue that he had some freedom of action that our current commanders dont' enjoy, amd maybe Santa Anna didn't either due to closeness. McClelland had similar frustrations with Lincoln. ON the flip side, Santa Anna's tendency was to take charge and act, much to the frustration of his various political allies and enemies, shows me that he enjoyed sufficient freedom of action to have succeeded. (As OPFOR for the exercise we ran, I won as Santa Anna, but that was a war game, not a real campaign.)

I'm not sure I'm actually guilty of that - what I've said is all factually true

No, it's spun, with little relationship to the tactical and operationsl, not to mention strategic, problem of trying to win a war by resorting to a flying column. It doesn't always work. See Napoloen to Moscow and French in Viet Nam and a few African scraps.

However, you seem to have no qualms about making gigantic anachronistic reaches between "latinates", be they WWII Italians, the Sicilian Mafia, 19th century Mexicans, whatever. Does that not trouble you, who are insisting on such rigorous chronology?

It's a matter of grasping the constraints of the feudal cultural ccontnuum, thanks for trying to keep up.

Fail.

If they hadn't been Liberals,

Those Liberals are not well related to what now passes for that category, which is a shame, as Western Liberalism has been, in the main, a boon to my country and some other parts of the world.

The problem, as usual, was in applying an idea when the underlying cultural assumptions never changed.

They still have not, to this day.

See also trying to impose democracy on third world nations, pick one of a few dozen over the past forty years, via performing electallatio on them, and seeing "democracy" fail time and again. It has to grow from the ground up.

It is the same old story. I don't think it will change in my lifetime.

Occhi