US War Against Mexico: Prelude To Empire
The 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico — popularly, if misleadingly, dubbed the Mexican-American War — must rate as an acute pivot point in the young nation’s history. The Mexican-American War, seen in the context of America’s current contemporary never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East, is more relevant than ever. Constituting the first successful conquest of another country (Canada had been unsuccessfully invaded twice), the war in Mexico included the U.S. Army’s first major amphibious operation and its first experience with prolonged occupation duty. The war, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was also sold to a naïve public on demonstrably false pretexts. The blowback from that realization, along with the conflict’s mounting casualties, coalesced into America’s first-ever widespread anti-war movement.