Response by the People of the U.S. , We appreciate humor as much as the next Country, and find your recent correspondence quite funny indeed. To ease the way for transition, we are sending the entirety of Chicago, Il. parts of Arkansas, and most of the State of New Jersey to you for liaison training. By this action We, the People of the U.S. hope to demonstrate why the Good Citizens of England, should count their blessings, consider the Re annexation of Canada instead. As a conciliatory gesture, please accept as our gift to you, the State of California. You are most welcome to it. (Except for Craig Ferguson, we’ll keep him, and Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles ) Kindest regards, America. :mrgreen:
Understand I am no great supporter of Bush or Cheney but “unrivaled ignorance and stupidity”?
I must wonder what advanced degrees do you hold and from what schools? What bussiness and political experience do you have to qualify you to make this statement?
It’s my opinion, Muscogee, to which I am entitled as you are to yours. I stand by what I said: “unrivaled stupidity and ignorance.” I believe that history has already borne me out. I expect you to stand by your opinions…
Loved “Dear Citizens of America”. One caveat - nobody who has tasted Heineken or Carlsberg (mass-produced European beers) could truthfully be so positive on that subject. At one point, one of our major horse races was sponsored by the former - the joke was that the stuff was pumped directly to the bars from the stable yard …
Regarding the ignorance of Bush and Cheyney (not to mention Blair), the desire to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan was perhaps understandable in all the circumstances. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the temptation should have been resisted. The recent history of Iraq shows two things very clearly - that it is an internally fractious artificial entity; and that the only thing that has united the populace up to now (to some degree, anyway) is having a foreign occupier/enemy to turn on. And as for Afghanistan …! Blair is an intelligent, educated man. Had he never heard of the Retreat from Kabul ? Imperial Britain, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union - all have had their asses bloodily and expensively kicked by this “nation” (if that is the word) of fiercely independent, fiercely particularist goat-sh*****g warriors, another lesson of history which I confidently expect to be repeated. As the local warlords and the Taliban well know, all they have to do is wait - when the infidels depart, they can get back to their millenia-old internal squabbling, and the only result of foreign intervention will have been great waste of treasure on the part of the infidels, and great suffering on the part of ordinary soldiers and the Afghan population. None of this should have been a mystery, even twelve years ago. The literature is ample. Indeed, I know from British news sources that I was reading some of the same books as was Blair in the lead-up to his contribution to the disaster. Of course, this is absolutely no reason to “hate America” and, indeed, I do not. Not by any means. However, the road to Hell really is, sometimes, paved with good intentions. Also, it is unfortunate that at least one “lesson” coming from the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle is that there is no “world’s policeman” any more. The Soviet “adventure” in Afghanistan more than hinted at this; it has now been amply confirmed. Not sure that any of us should feel safer at the thought. Best regards, JR.
Iraq and Afghanistan are separate events with different factors requiring different responses.
Afghanistan was a viper’s nest which, after 9/11, had to be eliminated. The way to do that was a crushing raid. Leave the offending parts of the place in ruins, with the message that this is what will happen every time you harbour those who attack us. No troops on the ground, and none of what has been endured for the past dozen or so years by nations which were involved in Vietnam and learnt nothing from it.
But, as usual, the Americans in particular and its allies in general had to justify necessary action against Afghanistan with some sort of Western democratic moral virtue based on unnecessary ground involvement focused on the usual idiotic rhetoric about nation building and democracy and winning hearts and minds etc etc. The Americans in particular and their allies in general seem incapable of grasping the simple fact that, as would Americans be if the Soviets imposed communism on them as an occupying force, nobody on the planet likes being invaded and forced to submit to the will and foreign values of the invader.
Iraq had none of those features. Any utterly convincing reason for its invasion will forever elude anyone of modest intelligence and knowledge, as indeed it did Colin Powell during his embarrassing attempts to confect his own public belief in the need to invade Iraq. At least until relevant papers are declassified in however many years to tell us what really happened.
Can’t really disagree with any of that, RisingSun*. As regards Iraq, the particular problem that does not seem to have been faced up to (and something, up to a point, that it has in common with Afghanistan) is that the modern state is a sort of product of a long series of colonial and post-colonial political accidents which has imprisoned three historically antagonistic communities imprisoned within its borders - the Shi’ite majority, the Sunni (former élite) and the Kurds. The late (Sunni) dictator, the unlamented Saddam Hussein, managed to keep control over this powderkeg for many years by means of the good, old-fashioned South American style of terror-dictatorship, reinforced by the more-or-less automatic support of his minority Sunni community, combined with the standard induced paranoia. The intervention of “democracee” in this situation, in the form of the “Allied” conquest, has let the lid off the powderkeg. It seems quite clear that, while things may stay more-or-less stable for the time being, there is a distinct possibility that internecine conflict may destabilise the country in the medium term, with potentially disastrous results.
Afghanistan ? Well, that is different, although it is also a default state that came into existence in its present form only to fill the gap on the map that arose from (originally) the failure of Russia and Great Britain to fill it in. For as long as anybody can discern, it has been divided on sub-national, particularist tribal grounds, and successively the source of, and/or a problem for surrounding dynasties and countries. The record of the powers surrounding this area (“country” seems an exaggeration) in attempting to regulate or control it is absolutely abysmal, punctuated by military disasters. The situation that gave rise to these failures is essentially unchanged. The only way that the US could “stabilise” Afghanistan would be to convert it into a large plate of nuked glass. Not an acceptable solution in this day and age (I hope …).
As to the legacy of all this for the US - a grizzly bear is an impressive, fearsome beast, but less so with its foot stuck in a trap. Let alone two feet stuck in traps. Nor is the bear likely to restore its credibility by ripping its feet out of the traps if it ends up walking with a permanent limp. The outlook is not good … Best regards, JR.
RS, JR: good posts. When I was in New Delhi many years ago, I saw a bronze plaque affixed to some wall. The plaque commemorated the “heroic defense” of a colonial outpost in the latter part of the 19th century. The outpost was massacred. It was located in Afghanistan. Things have not changed much. Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme…
As for Iraq, we owe the ascendancy of Iran to the fact that the US, in effect, won the Iraq-Iran war in favor of Iran by defeating Sadam Hussein, such is the hidden dimension and unintended consequence of ignorance and stupidity.
Agree entirely.
And here’s my theory on why these situations occur with monotonous regularity at, very roughly, about twenty year intervals, in exactly the same way that we have major domestic and or international financial / economic crises at the same very rough intervals: It’s because the advisers and decision makers in the current generation are too young to have experienced the last disaster as adults and old enough to think that they live in a different age where the basics of warfare, trade, stock markets, and even physics have somehow altered so fundamentally that the past is no longer an indicator of the future.
Q. What sort of congenital idiot could not have seen that lending money to people who couldn’t make their payments (laughably titled "sub prime mortgages) was doomed? What sort of improved congenital idiot on steroids could not have seen that bundling them up and flogging them off to congenital idiots without the benefit of steroids was going to end in tears?
A. Financial experts employed by large and small private and government bodies.
Q. Where did these financial experts acquire their knowledge of the new world of finance that defied the previous law that losses aren’t profits?
A. Universities etc and associating with other similarly educated experts who think that a loan book should be judged on the nominal value of the loans rather than the value of the mortgaged property and the prospect of the loans being serviced by borrowers.
What makes anyone think that there is a higher level of understanding of the consequences of events like Afghanistan and Iraq among the wunderkind who come up with similarly idiotic ideas which fly in the face of experience and history?
I’ll just say it, the hard core Middle East hates our culture and all the freedoms that we grant our women.
Here in Philippines, there are many Americans and they are friendly. Maybe the others just don’t know Americans and they are just judging them? Just my opinion.
Hate is often a temporary uprising of impotence.
People react to situations. Sometimes these situations don’t get better…
America, the United States, although admired by some as the defender of the West, is in fact a very mixed culture. It is a place of extremes and differences, bound by a certain need to be “different in unity”. It is a (at least sort of) democracy, with its inherent countradictions and individual expressions. In that way, I adore America while opposing it the same time. And I really think many many many fellow non-Americans share this feeling. The world needs an America. I’m sure of that. Yet, the question remains: what kind of America? and does “the West” need to be a big copy of America to endure? Or just different kinds of western culture next to America?
Yes, many cultures, especially the deeply religious ones (inlcuding western sectarian groups!), tend to diminish the rights of women sometimes completely oppressing them.
Yet, I do need to emphasize that even in our Western world, women often reach what we call “glass ceilings”, where men still tend to get more chances. In many regions, women still earn smaller wages for the same jobs.
Again, the US is the synthesis of the most liberal (equality) AND the most conservative - often christian inspired - ideas (gay issue, role of women…).
I’m not saying we “in the West” are as bad, I’m just saying that putting to much confidence and focus on the female rights might just make us very vulnerable to intelectual counterstrikes. It is foul to think that all non-Western cultures are aggressive towards women.
Exactly.
I think that what used to be much more widespread admiration for America came from its long history of great achievements in all areas of human endeavour and its espousal of noble principles of liberty and equality, and a great generosity in many aspects of humanitarian aid to less fortunate countries. Those positive attitudes have been steadily eroded, probably since the Vietnam War era, by increasing dismay at its hypocrisy in failing to live up to its principles in many fields of human endeavour when upholding those principles conflicts with baser instincts such as trade advantage and unwillingness to allow democracy in other countries to elect governments which the US regards as undesirable for its purposes.
That doesn’t make America different to any other country, except that its power has allowed it to impose or try to impose its will, through trade and military power and other forms of power, on far more countries on much more of the globe than any other nation since WWII, which has made it a vicarious imperial power of greater reach than even the pre-WWII British Empire. This has also succeeded in pissing off far more people in far more nations than any pre-WWII colonial power ever managed, and pissing off vastly more people outside those nations who disapprove of America’s conduct, as with general European and wider opposition to the unfounded invasion of Iraq.
Plus the usual issue of resenting the biggest kid on the block who throws his weight around without regard to the interests of others as the, from my perspective and that of probably just about everyone else outside America, crazy Republicans are presently doing for narrow domestic and vindictive political purposes in refusing to raise the debt ceiling with the risk of plunging the rest of the planet into another economic disaster as bad as or worse than the GFC (thoughtlessly brought to the rest of the planet by American financial ****wits who, among other genius ideas based on Enron accounting principles which flew in the face of commonsense and honesty, thought that lending money to people who couldn’t service the - sub-prime :shock: 
- loans and onselling them to the rest of the world was a brilliant idea.)
I guess it is a combination of
- a certain disguise in the older days: America’s interests on the inside brought certain “noble” decisions on the outside that were most welcome in Western countries and America’s interests were often and nowadays still a bit very similar to many countries
- America was the major funding source of the liberation of Nazi Europe, whether it was passive or active
- America was the major funding source of the cold war effort aggainst the communist world.
It is all changing.
There is even a discussion possible whether the Untited States have actually shifted from centrist to laissez faire. It is not that clear whether the US always have been that anti-etatist. Many problems and daily internal economic struggles in the US are far away from some point in history where the railroads and airlines where florishing and many economic structures were bound to gouvernment decisions. Many call Obama a communist, but if he truly is one, the US had many periods of “communism” in history, including the struggle against the real threat of communism. And those periods went hand in hand with economic and wealthy GROWTH as well as adoration by the Allies. The reason behind those economic succeses was the fact it wasn’t communism at all of course.
I always felt as if - since Reagan - The US started using free market and foreign actions in order to destroy stability and grasp, while it used to use stability and foreign actions in order to defend wealth and free market.
I think that what used to be much more widespread admiration for America came from its long history of great achievements in all areas of human endeavour
At the time Hitler was booting out the Jews, USA was race discrimination against the Blacks…double standards right there. What achievements? USA stole every technology advances from Germany after WWII.
Fair point, but I don’t recall any death camps in America which killed millions of blacks at any time (although the treatment of prisoners during the Civil War by both sides left a lot to be desired by any standards, although that applied mostly to whites) nor any death camps at all, nor death camps for Japanese or Germans during the war, unlike the conduct of the Japanese and Germans in their countries and occupied territories.
Such as atomic weapons and high altitude bombers which Germany chose not to use when on the verge of defeat? :rolleyes:
And the Soviets didn’t ship a good part of Germany back to the USSR to help, but not necessarily advance, Soviet technology.