well there not rockets r they
if they where they would of done better
it was the germans that worked it out
Yes, they were. The strict definition of a rocket is any device propelled by combustion gases which carries both it’s own fuel AND oxidant on board. Thus, any device propelled by the combustion products of gunpowder is strictly speaking a rocket.
Actually, it was largely the work of pair of chaps some time earlier - Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, a Russian who died in 1935 and who laid the theoretical foundations of rocketry and Robert Hutchings Goddard, and American who died in August 1945 and built the first practical, controllable liquid fuelled rockets.
Hermann Julius Oberth (a Romanian of German ancestry) did make some contributions to rocketry, but not quite as great as the previous two - he did more by way of publicity than actual work. Von Braun gets a lot of the credit, but was in reality a rather morally dubious character (he must have known rather a lot about the death rate among the slave labourers who built his rockets, but he kept quiet about it and his reputation was whitewashed during the cold war) who didn’t do all that much. The whole reason the allies didn’t do much work on rocketry during WW2 was simply that rockets aren’t actually very useful weapons - MLRS systems (which the Allies made better use of than the Germans) were widely used, but anything larger was a waste of resources.
What the hell? This topic isint about damnd rockets!
Haha, who cares? Yesterday I posted a picture of the modern german machine gun MG3 in the photo section of the site and we ended up discussing about mustaches, sideburns and sheds-o-love! Right, Navyson? :oops:
Yeah! The threads rarely seem to stay strictly to topic. That’s what keeps you coming back to them mostly:D! Always something intrigueing to read about.
Oh my! It is even worse than I expected!
Are you saying there actually had not been any reason what so ever? That is rather … erhhh… spontanious… don’t you think?
I think Europe as overall won against the dictatorship , US too as it became real major power , so we should be happy there is no more dictatorship , no more wars for some stupid ideological views and Europe is going on her own way of being together and finally united but not under the rule of a single country .
…especially the first subset of your statement sounds strange as it was written by a bulgarian or any other eastern european. Agreed about the U.S. establishing as a leading military power though.
Who did realy win WW2,every one has forgotten the Passenger liner troop ships.
They where a big part of WW2 by deploying american troops in too Europe,and also deploying troops from England to Australia and Australia to Europe.
Planes could not of done what the Passenger liner troop ships did.
I think they help alot too win WW2.
To my (limited) knowledge…There were several rules/sanctions that were set after the first Gulf War by the UN that the Iraqi’s were not following. Just according to that, it gave the UN authority to go into Iraq to make sure that these were followed. Then there were weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam Hussein used on the Kurds of northern Iraq after the first Gulf War to quell their rebellion for independence/autonomy. So we know that Iraq had wmd since they used them. Obviously there was faulty information on the amounts that Iraq had since they haven’t been found. And then there was information (faulty or not) about terrorist training camps that had moved their base of operations from Afghanistan to Iraq. And Husseins supposed supporting suicide/homicide bombers by paying their families “compensation” for their acts. As for oil, we have plenty of oil in Alaska and off of our coasts that we should be getting, so why would we want/need to invade a country on the other side of the world, in the middle of a hotbed of anti-americanism, costing thousands of soldiers lives, and billions of dollars EACH DAY just to get their oil? We aren’t getting oil from Iraq for free or even at a discounted price.
Edit: Sorry for getting off of thread topic.
Actually, both countries pillaged the vast number of German patents, not only in technology, but also in medical and drug fields, and both countries used German scientists after the war. While Americans and Russians are capable of technological advance and certainly had their own, they certainly didn’t hesitate to take advantage of defeating the Germans to get more. Geez, the Russians couldn’t even make a decent motorcycle and copied the BMWR75 and Zundapp KS750 and that is a fact!
And this BS about whether this country or the other should be ruling the world is precisely why there was no real winner of WW2, except maybe the Jews who ironically were finally able to get their own country! The struggle for power between Russia and the US is still going on, albeit the absence of communism.
Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, Franco was a trained general (actually the youngest in the pre-civil war Spanish army and at some time, before he was sent to the Canaries by the Republican government, who suspected him of planning a coup d’etat, but couln’t prove it, commanding officer of the Spanish military academy. He also had combat experience from the colonial war in Spanish Morrocco during the 1920s).
I’m quite sure that he saw all the flaws in Hitler’s plans and decided that he would have no part in it. He happily took Hitler’s and Mussolini’s aid to get to power, as he used the Spanish fascist movement of the Falange Espanola and the Carlist monarchists from Navarra, but in the end he was an archreactionary, who wanted to bring Spain back to a glorious isolationism under the old aristocrat elites and the Catholic church, preaching an ideology called “Hispanismo”.
Fascist revolutionary ideas were strange to him, he gave in a little bit to keep their support, but during the civil war he made e.g. no move to have their leader Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera liberated, who was captured by the Republicans shortly after the start of the civil war and shot after a trial.
Similarly he used the Division Azul of Spanish volunteers (mostly Falangists) to get rid of potential troublermakers of the revolutionary fascist movement (who were killed in Russia in large numbers).
As a payment for Germany’s help during the civil war, Germany received some coal mines and steel mills in the northern Spanish region od Asturias.
Hitler was quoted after the meeting with Franco in 1940 that he’d rather have all his teeth pulled than to negotiate with Franco again.
Jan
Maybe you didn’t, but it was still about oil.
There is an opinion that it was to save America from an economic disaster which would occur if oil was traded in euros instead of dollars. The invasion of Iraq followed its decision to be paid for its oil in euros instead of US dollars.
First you need the background.
The aggressive policies of the 1960s, however, put an increasing pressure on the US dollar. The US economy experienced a cumulative reserve deficit. In particular, the dollar supply was relentlessly increased to finance America’s war in Vietnam. Financially the Vietnam War was a real mess. The US printed and spent more money than their gold reserves allowed. By 1963, the US gold reserve at Manhattan had fallen to alarmingly low levels — it barely covered liabilities to foreign central banks. By 1970 the gold coverage had fallen to 55%, by 1971 22%. Before the Vietnam War, the US had $30 billion in gold reserves, but it spent more than $500 billion on the war alone. By this time, the post-war reconstruction period had come to an end, and the European and Japanese economies had improved their economic position relative to the US, which had increased pressure on the US dollar. The strain on the US financial system became evident in 1965, when French President de Gaulle demanded gold from the US in exchange for $300 million in debt.
The situation reached a crisis point in 1970-71 when more foreign central banks tried to convert their dollar reserves into gold. In response to a massive flight from the dollar, the US government defaulted on its payment on 15 August 1971 by cutting the link between the dollar and gold. This was because it seems that there was no other choice - the US government would not be able to buy back its dollars in gold. If governments and foreign central banks tried to convert even a quarter of their holdings at one time, the United States would not be able to honour its obligations. Hence the Bretton Woods system was ended. This was a serious crisis inspired by a significant loss of confidence in dollar. As a result, the dollar was left ’floated’ in the international monetary market, which weakened the position of the dollar as the hegemonic currency. Now the dollar had no firm backing other than the ’full faith and credit’ of the US government. From that point on, the US had to find a way convincing the rest of the world to continue to accept every devalued dollars in exchange for economic goods and services the US needed to get from others. It had to find an economic reason for the rest of the world to hold US dollars : oil provided that reason, and the term petrodollar became the crucial link in this.
A petrodollar is a dollar earned by a country through the sale of oil. In 1972-74 the US government concluded a series of agreements with Saudi Arabia, known as the U.S.-Saudi Arabian Joint Economic Commission, to provide technical support and military assistance to the power of the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only US dollars for its oil. This understanding, much of it never publicised and little understood by public, provided Saudi ruling family the security it craved in a dangerous neighbourhood while assuring the US a reliable and very important ally in OPEC. Saudi Arabia has been the largest oil producer and the leader of OPEC. It is also the only member of the cartel that does not have an allotted production quota. It is the ’swing producer’, meaning that it can increase or decrease oil production to bring oil draught or glut in the world market. As a result of this situation, Saudi Arabia practically determines oil prices. Soon after the agreement with Saudi government, an OPEC agreement accepted this, and since then all oil has been traded in US dollars. Hence the oil standard became the dollar standard.
Now why would this matter so much ?
Oil is not just the most important commodity traded internationally. It is the key industrial mineral, without which no modern economy works. If you don’t have oil, you have to buy it, and if you want to buy it on the world markets, you commonly have to purchase it with dollars. Other countries buy and hold dollars like they buy and hold gold because they cannot purchase oil without dollars. In 2002, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia told a committee of the US Congress : ’One of the major things the Saudis have historically done, in part out of friendship with the US, is to insist that oil continues to be priced in dollars. Therefore the US Treasury can print money and buy oil, which is an advantage no other country has.’This system of the US dollar acting as global reserve currency in oil trade keeps the demand for the dollar ’artificial’ high. This enables the US to carry out printing dollars at the price of next to nothing to fund increased military spending and consumer spending on imports. There is no theoretical limit to the amount of dollars that can be printed. As long as the US has no serious challengers and the other states have confidence in the US dollar the system functions.
This has been the situation and the essential basis for the US economic hegemony since the 1970s. Needless to say, this system enables the US administration to effectively control the world oil market.
The petrodollar is one of the key foundations of the modern world economy that inescapably filters through geopolitics. While this has produced undeniable benefits for the US political and economic elites, it has left the US economy intimately tied to the dollar’s role as global reserve currency.
In this situation, dollars rapidly accumulated in foreign banks, particularly those serving petroleum-exporting countries. These petrodollars created an additional financial issue, because unlike Western Europe and Japan most of the oil-exporting countries had limited possibilities for domestic development and consumption. The Nixon administration responded by coaxing these countries into buying up US Treasury bills and bonds, which has since that time been the primary strategy for the US administration to deal with its colossal trade deficits. For the oil exporters investing these petrodollars straight back into the US economy has been possible at zero currency risk. “So long as OPEC oil was priced in U.S. dollars, and so long as OPEC invested the dollars in U.S. government instruments, the U.S. government enjoyed a double loan. The first part of the loan was for oil. The government could print dollars to pay for oil, and the American economy did not have to produce goods and services in exchange for the oil until OPEC used the dollars for goods and services. Obviously, the strategy could not work if dollars were not a means of exchange for oil. The second part of the loan was from all other economies that had to pay dollars for oil but could not print currency. Those economies had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to pay OPEC”. (David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony : Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1999, p. 121)
For a long time everything worked smoothly. But the end of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of a new single Europe and the European Monetary Union in the early 1990s began to present a completely new challenge to the global position of the US power. Especially with the creation of the euro in late 1999, an entirely novel element was added to the global financial system. ’The introduction of the euro is the most important event for the global financial markets since the United States abandoned the gold backing for the dollar in 1971’. In just a few years after this, the euro has emerged as a real alternative, establishing itself as the second most important currency in the world’s financial markets.
If a significant part of petroleum trade were to use euros instead of dollars, many more countries would have to keep a greater part of their currency reserves in euros. According to a June 2003 HSBC report, even a modest shift away from dollars, or a change in the flow, would create significant changes. The dollar would then have to directly compete with the euro for global capital. Not only would Europe not need dollars anymore, but also Japan, which imports more than 80 percent of its oil from the Middle East, would have to convert most of its dollar assets to euros. The US, too, being the world’s largest oil importer, would have to hold a significant amount of euro reserves. This would be disastrous for American attempts at monetary management : the US administration will be compelled to significantly change its current tax, debt and trade policies, all of which are severely unstable.
continued
Today Americans spend 700 billion dollar a year more than they produce, so they have to borrow that 700 billion. This means that in average each US citizen enjoys $3,000 more imported products than he/ she earns. They get this large amount of money from the Central Banks of China, Japan and European countries, because they keep dollar reserves. China is currently the largest holder of US currency reserves with $853.7 billion, and Japan is the second largest with over $850 billion in dollar assets. So the rest of the world are sellers - China, Japan, India, and the EU. The rest of the world invests, produces, exports to the US, and they lend more and more to the US. The increasing fragility of the US economy is underlined by the 2005 report from the IMF. This report pointed out that the US economy is increasingly being supported by what the IMF report called ’unprecedented borrowing’ from foreigners. The report went on to saying that the US deficit is unsustainable in long-term. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the US, warned of the US’s deteriorating financial situation, on 14 March 2006, saying that ’too many Americans - from individual consumers to elected officials - are spending today as if there is no tomorrow. Many Americans, like their government, are living beyond their means and are deeply in debt.’ What does all of this have to do with Iraq and Iran ?
The 2003 Invasion of Iraq
The interplay between the reserve currency role of the dollar and link with the oil producing countries can be observed in the recent conflict in Iraq. On 6 November 2000, while Americans were distracted by the controversial Florida presidential vote count, the Iraqi government announced that it was no longer going to accept dollars for oil sold under the UN’s Oil For-Food Program and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export currency - hence launching the so-called ’secret weapon’ of Iraq. This was the first time an OPEC country dared violate the dollar-price rule. And since then, the value of the euro has increased and the value of the dollar has steadily declined. Libya has been urging for some time that oil be priced in euros rather than dollars. In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the euro for all their oil sales. Iran , Russia , and other countries also indicated that they would like to denominate their petroleum in euros. Since the oil trade is a central factor underpinning the dollar’s hegemony, all these are potentially very significant threats to the strength of the US economy, and US global hegemony.The US , in alliance with Britain , intervened in Iraq militarily in March 2003, and installed its own authority to run the country. The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq may well be remembered as the first ’oil currency war’. There is now a wealth of evidence to suggest that the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam’s WMD programme and certainly less to do with fighting international terrorism than it has to do with gaining control over Iraq’s oil reserves and in doing so maintaining the US dollar as the dominant currency for the international oil market. In June 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then US Deputy Defense Secretary, was asked why Iraq , which didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, was invaded, while North Korea, which claimed to have a nuclear deterrent, wasn’t. Wolfowitz said that ’the most important difference between north Korea and Iraq was that economically we had no choice in Iraq’. There was, of course, a complex of forces and motives which impelled the US government toward war on Iraq . Among these factors, it seems to preserve the U.S. dollar as the leading oil trading currency was a leading motive — perhaps the fundamental underlying motive, even more than the control of the oil itself. Two months after the invasion, the Iraqi euro accounts were switched back to dollars, and it was announced that payments for Iraqi oil would be once again in US dollars only. Global dollar supremacy was once again restored. But the story does not end there. Wars often don’t work out as planned. Ironically, the invasion of Iraq with its ’thousands’ of ’tactical’ mistakes — as recently admitted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — was meant to solidify and ensure the US ’s post Cold-War global dominance. Paradoxically, despite all these military and political advances and the rapidly increasing grip of US military power in Eurasia, for a variety of economic and political reasons, a growing number of oil producers in the Middle East, South America, and Russia are talking about openly trading oil for euros instead of dollars, or trading oil in a ’basket of currencies’. To do so would accelerate the US dollar’s fall, and boost the euro’s claim to become the world’s second reserve currency. If a nation’s economy is only as good as its currency, and the dollar continues to lose value, the US economy would be headed for a steep fall under these conditions.
Superior military forces of the US and other Western states may take but cannot hold Iraq’s (and Iran’s) oil. Far from staving off the downfall of the US dollar, their aggression and arrogance may instead compel OPEC to ’go euro’ en masse. Since 2001, member countries of the OPEC have sharply increased deposits in euro’s and placed less in dollars. US dollar-denominated deposits fell from 75 percent of total deposits in the third quarter of 2001 to 61.5 percent in the last quarter of 2004. During the same period, the share of euro-denominated deposits rose from 12 percent to 20 percent.
In the meantime, many people will be hurt and killed. In Iraq, for instance, ’the civilian death toll has risen inexorably for the entire duration of the US-led military presence. following the initial invasion’. Those who have hoped that a U.S. military victory in Iraq would somehow bring about a more peaceful world must be in for a rude awakening. Figures released by the Iraq Body Count project (IBC) on 9 March 2006 show that the total number of civilians reported killed has risen year-on-year since 1 May 2003 (the date that President Bush announced ’major combat operations have ended’). Back in February, the Bush administration renamed its ’Global War on Terror’ to the ’Long War’. In its Quadrennial Defence Review to Congress, the Pentagon now produced yet another hyperinflated ’threat analysis’, claiming that the threat from worldwide Islamic militancy has escalated to a ’generational’ time frame requiring a large-scale war of long duration fought on many fronts, hence the name change.
Bulent Gokay
Dr. Bulent Gokay is a Reader in International Relations, School of Politics, International Relations and philosophy, Keele University, United Kingdom.
http://contreinfo.info/article.php3?id_article=150
That’s really thought provoking Rising Sun, thanks for posting that article.
And they won’t get the deserved credit.
Be careful, I made similar comments on this same thread and my post was dumped.
Never trusted the Russians and the same for the Chinese.
You’re welcome.
It makes the most sense of any arguments I’ve heard for the real reason(s) for invading Iraq, because the others just don’t and at the time didn’t stand up as sufficient reason for the US leading the charge for going in there. But when the whole American economy risked disaster, that was a compelling reason for doing something that otherwise wouldn’t be worth the trouble. If that argument is correct, the choices facing Bush & Co were pretty much between the collapse of America’s economy, and America to a fair extent, and sacrificing Iraq. When it comes to survival, everyone will sacrifice the other guy if they can.
Pity they can’t find another guy, apart from American taxpayers, to sacrifice in the current economic crisis.
BTW, if that oil currency argument is right about Iraq, it also explains why Bush & Co are (supposedly) wound up about Iran’s nuclear ambitions but nowhere near as concerned about N. Korea, which is definitely more of a rogue state.
Defending dollar hegemony (Feb 2008)
So, how important is it that oil continues to be denominated in dollars? Would the United States really wage war to defend the dollar’s status as the world’s “reserve currency”?
The answer to this question could come as early as this week, since the long-awaited Iranian Oil Bourse is scheduled to open between now and February 11. According to Iranian Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari “All preparations have been made to launch the bourse; it will open during the 10-day Dawn (the ceremonies marking the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran) The bourse is considered a direct threat to the continued global dominance of the dollar because it will require that Iranian “oil, petrochemicals and gas” be traded in “non-dollar currencies." [Press TV, Iran]
The petrodollar system is no different than the gold standard. Today’s currency is simply underwritten by the one vital source of energy upon which every industrialized society depends – oil. If the dollar is de-linked from oil; it will no longer serve as the de facto international currency and the US will be forced to reduce its massive trade deficits, rebuild its manufacturing capacity, and become an export nation again. The only alternative is to create a network of client regimes that repress the collective aspirations of their people so they can faithfully follow directives from Washington.
As to whether the Bush administration would start a war to defend dollar hegemony, that’s a question that should be asked of Saddam Hussein. Iraq was invaded just six months after Saddam converted to the euro. The message is clear: the Empire will defend its currency.
Iran switched from the dollar in 2007 and has insisted that Japan pay its enormous energy bills in yen. The “conversion” infuriated the Bush administration and has moved Iran to the top of the White House’s target list. In fact, even though 16 US Intelligence agencies issued a report (NIE) saying that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons; and even though the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, found that Iran was in compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation (NPT) Treaty, a preemptive US-led attack on Iran still appears likely.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2919.shtml
Interesting that Venezuela is also a proponent of breaking away from US dollars for oil, which could be one of the factors in American hositility to it.
Not that I’d want to find another guy to piss on but IIRC, each taxpayer is supposed to eat 3000.00 dollars in taxes for this. Ugh…
It will be interesting times supposing a Democratic president gets elected. If policies are continued along the thread of these articles, it would certainly give credence to them and not just some “Bush war mongering” as some people think.