Manifest Destiny Revisited

Manifest Destiny has been thoroughly discarded and discredited by the elitist educational institutions and those who teach US history in the 21st century. It is a throwback term from the mid 19th century which required two now politically incorrect intangibles, national pride and a belief in destiny. The phrase has been attached to the racist policies of the time period which saw native Americans and the fresh minted Mexican state as secondary to the destiny and will of the American (euro-caucasoid) peoples.

When the US went into Afghanistan and later into Iraq, the charged phrase was again leveled at the Bush administration and particularly at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney who were members of The Project For a New American Century which was formed during the failed policies of the Clinton Administration. If we look at the mission statement we come to the four core principles of the organization's beliefs:

• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;


• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;


• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;


• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

It seems fairly obvious that these principles are sound and hardly racist at all. Indeed the second bulleted point encourages political and economic freedom for other peoples, not just Americans. How is it that the left in America can twist true freedom into oppression and teach a freedom which truly is oppression in disguise? These questions are answered when we look at the agendas that pretend to be in the interests of others but which really are concealed manifestations of sustaining power for the few.

Communism and socialism, for example, despite loud protestations to the contrary, are flawed philosophies which enforce false equality in an attempt to equalize the masses only to really empower a few - the few who are behind such a political or economic drive and have positioned themselves to benefit from it.

The left screams about the oppression of the masses in Iraq. US presence is tantamount to oppression. Never mind that it is the US forces that has displaced a regime of terror that took reigns of power with grim massacres in 1979 or that US forces are what keep the nation from a bloody civil war between Sunnis and Shiites or Kurds and Sunnis. US presence in Iraq is supposedly another sign of the revived Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz Manifest Destiny agenda. Muslims, in this leftist interpretation of US foreign policy have replaced Mexicans and native Americans as the inferior masses to be eliminated.

These are the sorts of obstacles the US faces as it tries to bring political and economic freedom to Muslims and Iraqis. When seen in perspective one realizes these folks in other nations who decry George Bush's foreign policy are actively attempting to thwart this effort for their own personal and national gain.

The US does have a Manifest Destiny. It's destiny was determined when the Declaration of Independence was signed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Note that it does not just say "Americans are created equal" but "all men". Indeed the Declaration of Independence could be seen as a road map for US nation building with the consent of the oppressed peoples in nations around the world. Saddam's government like many others certainly existed in violation of our founding fathers deepest held beliefs. In my view, when the Kurds came to the US with a delegation, representing hundreds of thousands of Kurds, to ask for the overthrow of Saddam's regime for inhumanities to their people, it almost immediately brought legitimacy to the US effort to remove him from power. Our Declaration of Independence, our most sacred document declares that all men have the unalienable right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Our efforts in the cold war were clearly following this destiny our nation's founders set into motion. We always stand for liberty and we always will. When it is in our power to bring freedom to people on earth - we will do it. That's the real Manifest Destiny of the United States and it is a very good destiny. It's about time others understand it and the left globally should not be allowed to distort the US foreign policy to serve their own agendas.