Are you a domestic terrorist?

[Jester]

They got into a war they very much begged to have, thanks to the Mexican actions for nine years along the Nueces Strip. (I happen to live in that still debatable territory.)

Mexico was obviously not happy about Texan independence, and never fully reconciled themselves to it. (Something the US would learn a thing or two about in the decades after.) The US, having freshly annexed Texas, suddenly became very bold about border claims and the enforcement of "treaties" signed by (who else?) Santa Anna to save his own butt, that had never actually been ratified by Mexico, and moved troops to claim the Rio Grande as the border. Mexico hadn't even started the fight with Texas, let alone the fight with the whole United States of America - but it's the war they ended up having to wage, and unsurprisingly, they lost badly.

Santa Anna ran into a particularly nasty problem: he faced an army with a cadre of professional officers, and some professional non coms. Back to my point about the his and Mexico's cultural problem, our culture (and that would include the culture in Canada) isn't and wasn't inflicted with the dead weight of Mexican culture in terms of how to raise and run and Army.

I'm not sure I'd tie that all into culture, as opposed to economy, politics, technology, or (perhaps most importantly) human capital development, but it is certainly clear that the effective organizational capacity of the US in terms of a large, deep body of skilled officers, and the infrastructure to raise and support and army, was much higher than Mexico's.

Perfectly good soldiers badly lead.

Well, yeah. Their leadership was terrible. Didn't I already say that, to your protestations that Santa Anna was a smart cookie? Huge blunders, both tactical and strategic, cost the Mexicans enormously. I don't blame that on the average Soldado. I blame that on Santa Anna.

Funny, that is exactly how another Latinate Army was described by both British and German observers: the Italians, who yes indeed are still in the mix.

What mix are we talking about now?

Those nasty Puritanical virtues of leadership and professionalism had immensely more to do with that campaign's success than your allusion to "bigger and stronger" country, given how bloody small America's standing armies have always been historically until AFTER WW II. Ya know, about a century later.

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. The Confederacy alone, clearly the weaker of the two halves economically and in population, could have drawn up an army to blow Mexico's clean out of the water, if push really came to shove. It's all well and good to say the US had a smallish standing army, but that's only a tiny fraction of the strength they could (and did) draw on through volunteers, which was itself only a fraction of what it could conscript. Mexico could not match the US' 1846 capacity to field, replenish, supply and equip an army, not in 1846, not in 1860, probably not even by 1900.

That Santa Anna had problems with the political maneuvring in Mexico City isn't trivial for his efforts, no, but funnily enough, Scott had somewhat similar problems plaguing him in re the civilian watch dogs Polk (and anti Polk) factions sent along for the campaign.

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.

But what do we see here? Funny old dog, you insist on an anachronism as your model: the US behemoth in the late twentieth century as the unbreakable model, actual history be damned.

I'm not sure I'm actually guilty of that - what I've said is all factually true of the situation between the US and Mexico in the 19th century. I try to avoid anachronism, and I've not seen anything except your assertions to say that I haven't. The US was not "unbreakable" - 1812 didn't go that well. But the US usually took on weaker opponents - and won wars consistently, if not always the battles. But that was fine, since this was the 19th century, and the world was still full of relatively weak opponents to take land from. All the major powers played this game.

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?

That the Mexicans had gifted themselves with what you describe as perpetual revolution is certainly close to the truth, once again a cultural problem, part of their inherent cultural rot, and FWIW, a gift of European Liberalism to Mexico in the early nineteenth century.

If they hadn't been Liberals, it would have been less problematic that they were Latins and Papists? This whole line of reasoning strikes me as simplistic essentialism. Protestant = organized and efficient, Catholic = corrupt and backwards. I don't buy the Max Weber argument, but even if I did, it would only confirm my point - the US vs. Mexico fight in the 1840s wasn't even close to a fair matchup. The US was perfectly aware (perhaps arrogantly, but correctly) of their superior force, and started the war with the express purpose of seizing California. Polk was elected for more or less this exact purpose - expansionism at its finest.

-Jester