Rustic: Wilhelm II was the last German Kaiser. He did not really control Germany in the sense GWB controls the United States, but he did have real power and was Germany's chief of state and spokesman. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion he sent of a detachment of German troops to fight in China, and gave a speech telling them to make themself feared and respected, like "the Huns." That expression later came back to haunt him.

The course Germany pursued before World War I was not consciously aimed at world or European domination. But that would have been its outcome if it had been successful. The German battle fleet was supposedly not aimed at England, but was ostensibly only supposed to be large enough to deal with Russia or France in case of war. But the English rightly saw it as a threat, and began an extremely expensive course of fleet building in response. Germany thus antagonized England, which otherwise would have been Germany's natural ally. The analogy with America's Strategic Missle Defense, which allegedly is not aimed at China or Russia, seems pretty clear.

Germany's contingency plan for war, the Schlieffen Plan was even more disastrous, and unnecessarily brought France and England into a war they would have preferred to stay out of. That story is much to long to post on Mudcat, but the outcome was horrible for Germany, England, France, and just about everybody else.

The Kaiser almost certainly believed all these things were being done to make his country secure, a type of denial one often sees in the United States today. I am not so sure GWB and his people are in denial. I suspect that unlike "Kaiser Bill," they may really have world domination in mind. I have heard it said that the idea has been fermenting in "conservative" think tanks, but have not yet got up enough energy to hunt it down. I very much doubt anyone really intends to bring democracy to Iraq. That would be "nation building," or the idea that the United States should treat third world countries benignly. And idea that "conservatives" have in the past treated with the greatest contempt.