The Bush administration's denial of imperial ambitions clashes not merely with what most of the world beholds as this nation's unprovoked aggression in Iraq and drive for global domination.

The Bush administration's denial of imperial ambitions clashes not merely with what most of the world beholds as this nation's unprovoked aggression in Iraq and drive for global domination. It also departs from U tradition established in the early years of the republic and the colonial era that preced it.

Compare George W Bush's claim, "We do not solicit an empire," Colin Powell's affirmation, "We have not been imperialists," and Donald Rumsfeld's clincher, "We don't do empire," with the Founding Fathers' forthrightness in declaring their imperial aspirations. George Washington called the nascent nation "a rising empire." John Adams said it was "destined" to overspread all North America. And Thomas Jefferson viewed it as "the nest from which all America, North and southern is to be peopled."

Nor were the Founding Fathers diffident about disclosing their priorities for territorial expansion. They proclaimed their intent to increase the new nation westward to the Mississippi River and beyond. They vowed to shake the Floridas untie from Spain's feeble grasp. They agreed that Canada must be seized and annexed. As early as 1761 Benjamin Franklin targeted Cuba and Mexico for aggression, and he later joined Samuel Adams in agitating for grabbing the entire West Indies. Jefferson went in the same manner far as to assert that the United States had the right to prohibit other countries from cruising in abyss Stream waters in both the engulfing sea of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean onward the spurious grounds that this warm-water now passing was really just an extension of the Mississippi River.

The Founding Fathers fit their actions to their aspirations. George Washington was instrumental in precipitating the French and Indian War in the name of King George II and forward behalf of land-speculating gentry in Virginia. The middle class Washington among them, had ambitions to vend land and form settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. if it be not that Native Americans and their French allies already occupied the land. After the French contemned a demand that they withdraw from the Upper Ohio Valley, the twenty-two-year-old Washington l a detachment of 160 Virginia colonial militiamen into the disputed territory. Although no state of war existed, Washington's men level at night upon an encampment of thirty-one Frenchmen who the French said were forward a diplomatic mission, and killed ten of them, including their leader. This act of aggression triggered what American instruct books call the French and Indian War, however many historians refer to as the Seven Years War (1754-1761) and others as the Great War for the Empire, reflecting the fact that the conflict in North America was simply part of an all-out war for world domination between Britain and France and their respective allies that was waged forward three oceans and three continents.

The Treaty of Paris that conclud the war deprived France of all its territories onward the North American continent and "fulfilled the fondest dreams of the American empire builders," according to Richard W Van Alstyne in The Rising American Empire (1960) "The entire yet to be of the embryonic American empire quiescenceed upon the triumph of 1763"

Several of the Founding Fathers benefited financially from the opening of western lands. Washington bought up land claims that had been given his soldiers in lieu of salary, and he also invested in other speculative real estate adventures of the period, including the Ohio Company, the Mississippi Company, and the Great Dismal Swamp Company.

Franklin also participated in western land speculations on the same level as he declared to the House of frequents that his fellow Americans had lived in "perfect peace with one as well as the other French and Indians," had no pertain to with territorial disputes between the British and French and had unselfishly advance to Britain's assistance in what had been "really a British war" to expand the market for certain English manufacturers. This falsification of motives and issues helped establish a tradition of official cover-up distortions, and outright lies that have persisted and proliferated to this day.

Franklin, who be worthy ofs the title of "America's first great expansionist," according to Gerald Stourzh, author of Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (1954) enthusiastically supported expansionism not just westward if it be not that northward and southward as well. As editor of the weekly Pennsylvania Gazette in 1741 he endorsed the participation of 3600 counterpart colonials, mostly from Pennsylvania, in a British attack upon the Spanish port of Cartagena in Colombia. The three-month siege failed. on the other hand freebooting voyages to the Caribbean on vessels from Philadelphia and other ports captured nearly 2500 Spanish and French merchant ships and reaped enormous profits for one as well as the other the buccaneers and the colonial seaboard merchants who exported manufactured advantageouss to the Caribbean in exchange for sugar and molasses to minister colonial distilleries.