IS AMERICA A BULLY?

You do say platitudes in a very outspoken way ! Like this one:

Quote:

If a majority of the government thought Gitmo should have closed...it would be closed by now.

and if Mr de Lapalice was not dead, he would still be alive !

You ask permission to think to your government, if you think that it is presumptuous to disagree with them...

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.

I see no good reason to suggest that the United States has exercised a restraint that other nations have not shown.

I find it quite uncomfortable to be flayed by our compatriots and yet it is imperative that the US end it's flawed state-building efforts.

Ok so YOU can speak out against the government but others can't, or they are presumptuous? Explain that to me.

Keeping innocent kids in perpetual bondage, and torturing them day and night just to keep them alive, is abject. And to justify such a crime, as you do...

is simply disgusting.

Your government stinks to heavens' high for not closing Gitmo. You and they are just a bunch of heartless and scared bureaucrats who don't know any better.

Forgive them Lord for they don't know what they do. Or just send them all to hell. See if I care...

If 18th century Great Britain had taken control of Iraq the way we did...they almost certainly would have added it to the British Empire as conquered land.

Frank Apisa wrote:

If 18th century Great Britain had taken control of Iraq the way we did...they almost certainly would have added it to the British Empire as conquered land.

If 18th century America had taken control of Iraq ...they almost certainly would have added it to the American Empire as conquered land.

Mexico is a precident, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico.

Stop comparing 18th Century states with 21st Century ones.

I am not a monster, Olivier.

OmSigDAVID wrote:

That 's OK.
U have your sovereignty; we have ours.

No we don't, not while there's American troops on our soil.

Whichever way you want to look at Frank, you can't deny that Guantanamo Bay has been Al Qaida's greatest recruiting sergeant.

About half a million people died in Iraq as a result of war-related causes between the US-led invasion in 2003 and mid-2011, an academic study suggests.

The United Kingdom began a military intervention in Sierra Leone in May 2000 under the codename Operation Palliser. Although small numbers of British personnel had been deployed previously, Palliser was the first large-scale intervention by British forces in the Sierra Leone Civil War. In early May 2000, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)—one of the main parties to the civil war—advanced on the country's capital, Freetown, prompting the British government to dispatch an "operational reconnaissance and liaison team" (ORLT) to prepare to evacuate foreign citizens. On 6 May, the RUF blocked the road connecting Freetown to the country's main airport, Lungi. The next day, British soldiers began to secure the airport and other areas essential to an evacuation. The majority of those who wished to leave were evacuated within the first two days of the operation, but many chose to stay following the arrival of British forces.

After the effective completion of the evacuation, the mandate of the British forces began to expand. They assisted with the evacuation of besieged peacekeepers—including several British ceasefire observers—and began to assist the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and the Sierra Leone Army (SLA). Despite the mission expansion, it was not until 17 May that British soldiers came into direct contact with the RUF. The rebels attacked a British position near Lungi airport, but were forced to retreat after a series of firefights. On the same day, the RUF's leader, Foday Sankoh, was captured by Sierra Leonean forces, leaving the RUF in disarray. After deciding that the RUF would not disarm voluntarily, the British began training the SLA for a confrontation. During the training mission, a patrol returning from a visit to Jordanian peacekeepers was taken captive by a militia group known as the West Side Boys. Negotiations achieved the release of five of the eleven soldiers, and three weeks into the crisis, British special forces launched a mission codenamed Operation Barras, freeing the remaining six. The success of Operation Barras restored confidence in the British mission; one academic suggested that its failure would have forced the British government to withdraw all its forces from Sierra Leone.

The overall British operation was mostly completed by September 2000. The RUF began to disarm after political pressure, and later economic sanctions, were exerted on Liberia—which had supported the RUF in exchange for conflict diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leonean government eventually signed a ceasefire with the RUF that obliged the latter to enter the Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) process. By September 2001, when the British training teams were replaced by an international force, the DDR process was almost complete. British forces continued to be involved in Sierra Leone by providing the largest contribution of personnel to the international training team and advising on a restructuring of Sierra Leone's armed forces. A small force was deployed to the area in 2003 to ensure stability while several indictments and arrests were made by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The success of British operations in Sierra Leone vindicated several concepts, including the retention of high-readiness forces. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was keen to see Western interventions in other conflicts, and—along with France—supported the creation of several European Union Battlegroups for the purpose. As it happened, political opposition and later British commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq prevented further British operations in Africa.

If Tony Blair were looking for anything to bolster his belief in his Africa mission, his visit to Sierra Leone has provided it.

The people in this devastated and extremely poor country love him.

They love him for helping end the decade of civil war that has destroyed their country.

They love him for pledging never to turn his back on them and their attempts to cement their new democracy.

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

The fact that we are rich and powerful is also an important recruiting tool.

I'm amazed that people are still credulous enough to believe that the Pentagon actually thought Iraq had WMDs immediately prior to invasion.

I agree, Panzada, but I still think we have been showing greater restraint than previous world powers showed when they were at their most powerful.

A monster you are. A bored, weak-hearted, cowardly, oh-so-normal monster, happy to stay misinformed, happy that crimes be committed in your name as long as you don't hear the victims scream.

Europeans are happy to just "get along" with the Muslims, acquiescing to Sharia law, etc.