IS AMERICA A BULLY?

That's a tu quoque fallacy, a case of the pot calling the kettle black. How badly England, France, Spain, Portugal or Germany have behaved neither justifies nor excuses American behavior.

You are correct, Setanta.

But my focus is on the comparison...rather than attempting a justification.

All powerful nations have thrown their weight around...and we do. I am merely saying that RELATIVELY speaking...we are handling things better and in a more restrained way than previous. We are part of the "growing up" process...that never really comes in a flash of light.

As an American, I am especially upset with our ongoing program of drone strikes. Unmanned attack drones are irresponsible and immoral. They are good at killing people with no risk to American lives, but a remote camera with no human for hundreds of miles around leads to mistakes and civilian deaths with no accountablility.

As long as the Drone Strike program is going on, the term "relatively decent" is meaningless.

Hmmm.....different times, different ways. I'm sure if the USA was in place and powerful at the time, it would have probably acted just like the rest. If you think about it, they had it all 'in house' when you think of the sugar canes and the cotton fields.
In those days the powerful were usually bastards towards the poor, even in their own country.
We had the workhouses, people dying of starvation in the street, all the awfulness and the worst of humanity as portrayed by Dickens. The British (not just the English) rich and powerful grabbed what they could from their own people as well as those in other less developed countries.
That also goes for the rich and powerful Spanish, French, German and American 'businessmen' of the day.

I will try to find an interesting article I read recently regarding Spain, which basically said that Spain has been cushioned from hardship for the past 400 years on the back of the massive gold etc hoard that it amassed during the time of Pizzaro and mates. It apparently has just about been spent, and this is one of the many contributing factors towards the trouble it finds itself in today with regards to its economy.

Each generation we go back, we find ourselves ever so slightly more bastardlike.

You might want to explain that to the people of Libya and Serbia...

Max...are you actually saying that the kinds of things done in the past...had less chance for mistake...and put fewer civilian lives at risk than drone strikes???

Are you saying that what the British Empire did in all sorts of places; the Germans did in Africa; the Spanish did in Central America...were cleaner and with less civilian damage?

I don't see it that way at all...and I think all those things considered...the words "relatively decent" (and relatively restrained) hold up very well.

Yup to that last point...and that really was my point.

I think America's use of its force in today's world is much, much, much less excessive than the European power's use of their force when they were the dominant forces.

Huh???

You might find this article of interest.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/14/usa-worlds-policeman-school-bully


Personally the one thing I'm most proud of is when the House of Commons voted not to bomb Syria.

The invasion of Iraq was without any justification whatsoever.

The picture got worse after the 19'th century. So long as the U.S. was merely acting in its own interests, the damage to other countries was minimal. The problems arise when the U.S. has to deal with really big problems like the cold war and the communist empire, acts as an agent of "New World Order(TM)" ideals (Kosovo) or international banking cartels (Libya 2011).

IzzythePoop:



For anybody elswe who might have missed this...

Saddam Hussein was provably involved in the anthrax attacks which followed 9-11. That means that George Bush had very few options unless you call letting somebody poison the US senate office building with anthrax and just skate an option, which is brain-dead. He could do what he did, which was try to take the high road, eliminate the Hussein regime, and try to construct a rational regime in Iraq both to prevent further attacks and to provide an example of rational government in the region, or he could do what I would have done, which would have been to level both Mecca and Medina, and ban the practice of I-slam not just in the US but throughout the world.

Most people would probably want to try what W. did first.

Oh, yeah, I know, most of you guys don't believe Hussein had anything to do with 9-11 or the anthrax attacks which followed...


The first case of anthrax after 9-11 (Bob Stevens) showed up about ten miles from where Mohammed Atta himself had been living, i.e. the short drive from Coral Springs to Boca Raton.

The last previous case of anthrax in a human in the United States prior to 9-11 had been about 30 years prior to that.

There are other coincidences. For instance, the wife of the editor of the sun (where Stevens worked) also had contact with the hijackers in that she rented them the place they stayed.

Atta and the hijackers flew planes out of an airport in the vicinity and asked about crop dusters on more than one occasion. Indeed, Atta sought a loan to try to buy and and modify a crop duster.

Atta and several of the hijackers in this group also sought medical aid just prior to 9/11 for skin lesions that the doctors who saw them now say looked like anthrax lesions.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-24/news/0203240066_1_dr-christos-tsonas-cutaneous-anthrax-hijackers

Basically, you either believe in the laws of probability or you don't. Anybody claiming that all these things were coincidences is either totally in denial or does not believe in modern mathematics and probability theory.

While the anthrax in question originally came from a US strain, it isn't too surprising that Iraq might have that strain since that strain was mailed to laboratories around the world years earlier. That is, it wsa mailed out for the purpose of allowing other nations to develop medicines to cure it, not to make weapons out of it...

Nonetheless, it was highly sophisticated, and went through envelope paper as if it weren't even there; many thought it to be not only beyond the capabilities of Hussein but of anybody else on the planet as well including us. Nonetheless, later information showed Husseins programs to be capable of such feats:


http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html





Basically, the anthrax attack which followed 9/11 had Saddam Hussein's fingerprints all over it. It was particalized so finely it went right through envelop paper and yet was not weaponized (not hardened against antibiotics). It was basically a warning, saying as much as:




There is no way an American who had had anything to do with that would not be behind bars by now. In fact the one American they originally suspected told investigators that if he'd had anything to do with that stuff, he would either have anthrax or have the antibodies from the preventive medicine in his blood and offered to take a blood test on the spot. That of course was unanswerable.


The basic American notion of a presumption of innocence is not meaningful or useful in cases like that of Saddam Hussein. Even the Japanese had the decency to have their own markings on their aircraft at Pearl Harbor; Nobody had to guess who did it. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, is like the kid in school who was always standing around snickering when things went bad, but who could never be shown to have had a hand in anything directly. At some point, guys would start to kick that guy's ass periodically on general principles. Likewise, in the case of Saddam Hussein, the reasonable assumption is that he's guilty unless he somehow or other manages to prove himself innocent and, obviously, that did not happen.


At the time, the US military was in such disarray from the eight years of the Clinton regime that there was nothing we could do about it. Even such basic items as machinegun barrels, which we should have warehouses full of, were simply not there. Nonetheless, nobody should think they would get away with such a thing and, apparently, Hussein and his baathists didn't.

Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" documents some of this:



I mean, we didn't even have fricking machinegun barrels anymore. A friend of mine called up several barrelmakers about a barrel for a target rifle in the early spring of 02 and was told they were working 24/7 making machinegun barrels and didn't have time for any sort of civiliam firearm business.

A country with any sort of a military at all has to have warehouses full of that sort of thing and we had ******* none. We basically needed to go into Iraq the day after 9-11 and we were not able to due to the state Slick KKKlinton had left the military in, it took two years of building.


In the case of nuclear weaponry there appears to have been a three-way deal between Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Libya in which raw materials from NK ended up in Libya to be transmogrified into missiles pointed at Europe and America by Saddam Hussein's technical people and with Iraqi financial backing (your oil-for-terrorism dollars at work), while Kofi Annan and his highly intelligent and efficient staff kept the west believing that their interests were being protected:



Muammar Khadaffi has since given the **** up and renounced the whole business.

The Czech government is sticking with its story of Mohammed Atta having met with one of Saddam Hussein's top spies prior to 9-11 and there are even pictures of the two together on the internet now:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/539dozfr.asp

Then again as I mentioned, there's the question of the anthrax attack which followed 9-11. Saddam Hussein's the only person on this planet who ever had that kind of weaponized anthraxs powder.

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html

Moreover it does not take hundreds of tons of anthrax powder to create havoc.

The sum total which was used was a few teaspoons full. In other words, a lifetime supply of that sort of thing for a guy like Saddam Hussein could easily amount to a hundred pounds worth, and I guarantee that I could hide that in a country the size of Iraq so that it would not be found.

The question of whether or not Hussein had 1000 tons of anthrax powder is simply the wrong question. The right questions are, did the guy have the motive, the technical resources, the financial wherewithal, the facilities, and the intel apparatus to play that sort of game, and the answers to all of those questions are obvious.

Anybody who is vaguely interested in how the world's biggest ever empire came about....and it is quite fascinating... should find a spare hour or two to view this, from Jeremy Paxman.
He doesn't pull any punches and is no way jingoistic. The story is remarkable, well researched and presented in a remarkably non biased form, bearing in mind he is British.
Here's episode one.....

In the case of Libya, we took down what was probably the best government in the muslim world for the benefit of one George Soros and an international banking cartel:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

Yugoslavia in 1999 was a lot worse than that. In that case we bombed a totally innocent Slavic Orthodox Christian nation for 80 days and nights including Easter Sunday for the sake of an oil pipeline and a bunch of narco terrorists, and to take that Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation and Chinagate off the front pages of U.S. newspapers and journals.

Sorry, Gunga...I gotta say "huh?" again.

Despite your bullshit, the invasion of Iraq was without any justification whatsoever.

When I set up this thread about reparations for the Kenyan victims of British imperialism, all of the detractors were American.
http://able2know.org/topic/215727-1

That wasn't about guilt or recompense though, it was an objection to taxpayers money being used to pay the ompensation.
Never mention taxpayers money to an American of a certain political persuasion, as it usually distracts them from anything important that may be around at the time.

It's a bit like when someone shouts "Squirrel" in the film 'UP'.

Allow me to applaud this loudly, Lordy! You hit the nail squarely on its head with that remark!

I cannot go along with the claim that the sins of the United States are comparatively less than those of other nations--that Americans are "not as bad." During the Second World War, the United States Army Air Force fire-bombed more than 60 Japanese cities (using an ordnance mix they learned about from the RAF). It might be pointed out that the United States was attacking Japan, who had begun a war against the United States. That doesn't alter, though, that the targets of the raids were civilians. The USAAF commander, Curtis Le May, told his staff aide, Robert McNamara, that if they lost the war, they would be hung as war criminals. Le May, at least, had on illusions about what he was doing. The Japanese committed horrible atrocities in that war, and began doing it four years before the United States entered the war. The does not justify or excuse subsequent American actinos. That the United States carried out such attacks does not justify nor excuse what the Japanese did in that war.

Totaling up the butcher's bill is a difficult exercise. I see no good reason to suggest that the United States has exercised a restraint that other nations have not shown.