To be happy and well.

Oh and to win the Lotto

Worse things we ever did, give them the vote, and let them drive.

Well I have to hand it the company I work for, an email went around this morning with a meeting reminder attached, this flashed up on our PC screens at 10.59 and at 11;00 am the phones fell silent as did the office. Very commendable.

The middle east won’t get any better until the US takes it’s politics out of the equation !!!!

I believe Sydney Australia is going one further and banning smoking from all public access places including the Street. The only place people will be able to smoke is in the privacy of their own home.

When it comes to imperialism, I’ll gladly cede that the U.S. takes a distant back seat to the centuries of advancement made by the U.K. (Your profile bravely doesn’t say where you’re from but I’ll take a guess).

I’ll even go out on a limb saying a lot of the U.S.’s misadventures…like Iran, was for the sake of good (i.e. trying to keep the USSR at bay) rather than blatant explotation such as we saw bythe European powers in Africa, Asia, Central and South America.
I’ve heard everyone in Ireland, Scotland, India, the aborigines in Australia, all loved being under British rule.

And don’t forget the Falklands, only the most recent (and bloody) example of a once great power trying to hold onto property. For those critical of Blair’s actions in Iraq, how many U.K. forces were killed, (not to mention thousands of Argentinians) were killed trying to hold onto god-forsaken pieces of rock where sheep outnumber people?

I’ll admit the US is far from perfect, but unless you’re Swedish or Swiss, few Europeans and no one in England, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands….has the right to be sanctimonious about U.S. actions overseas.

The US and if I remember right a coalition of 32 countries didn’t invade Kuwait with any thought for the people, that’s just pure propaganda, the Allies went in to protect Oil supplies pure and simple.

Admittedly the UK’s imperialist past is not unblemished, but many of the former imperial countries owe a lot of their modern day infrastructure to their colonial roots, including that large country on the other side of the pond. For one thing the US’s has the UK to thank for it’s legal system which is based on the English Common Law.

The Falklands war was no more bloody than the US’s present attempts to quell the militants in Iraq, in total British Forces lost 250 servicemen and the Argentineans 649. The Falklands were and are a British colony / protectorate with a predominately British population, I guess the US faced with the same situation would have left them to their fate. The Falkland Islanders no longer relied just on sheep farming, which was very mush in decline at the time of the 1982 war. Since the war The Falkland Islanders have become per head of population amongst the wealthiest people in the South Atlantic, due in the main to the fishing rights that they have been freely allowed to sell. Argentina also benefited by the deposing of a despot dictator, who took the country in to a misguided war in an attempt to prop up his failing regime.

And I hate to point out that Scotland has never been under “British” rule at times dating back several hundred years it was under English rule. Scotland is part of Great Britain, and the United Kingdom, it is has a power base in London, but now has a certain amount of autonomy. In fact today England is more under Scottish rule, Blair, Brown to name two Scots in power.

India is the largest democracy in the world today, sorry the US isn’t !!!!. Again it’s legal and political systems are largely based on the system it inherited from it’s former Colonial rulers, ties with the UK are strong with a lot of trade moving to and fro between the two countries.

As for the native Australians, Australia has been a self governing Dominion since 1900 so it wasn’t British “rule”, that has been discriminatory against them, it was/is white Australians from many national back grounds who have discriminated against the native Australians for decades. And again Australia is a thriving country with a judicial and political system based on the English system.

There is not doubt at times Ireland suffered under British rule, large chunks of this suffering can also be laid squarely at the feet of the Irish themselves, however several thousand Irish citizens were willing to fight for the British during both World Wars, 190 VC having been awarded to Irishmen since it’s inception. Again where did their judicial and political systems come from?

Yes the British may have some dark spots in their Colonial past, but to the greater extent when they withdrew from their various colonies they left them in reasonably good shape. The Commonwealth

It funny how the Commonwealth survives today considering that it is founded on British imperialism, Today the Commonwealth is an association of 53 countries. Its 1.8 billion citizens, about 30 percent of the world’s population are drawn from the broadest range of faiths, races, cultures and traditions. Members range from vast countries like Canada to small island states like Malta. But of course they all have recourse to despise what the British brought to their various corners of the world, even though they gain through the Commonwealth active representation in a number of key areas through the Commonwealth organisation, including development; democracy; debt management and trade.

So…politics, to you, revolves around guns and fighting? Shoot first and let god sort ’em out, kind of thing?
That answers a few questions.

Flood

I think his Forum title sums it up, he’s from another………….

I think you’ve got you history wrong.
One of my university majors is in American history and I’ve never heard Wilson called isolationist. He got America into WWI, a stickly a European war between Imperialist powers, then tried to establish the League of Nations, an early UN-type body. That was shot down by an isolationist Republican US congress.
I wasn’t aware the US invaded Iran….or N. Korea for that matter, or Sierra Leone. In Korea (back in 1950) , the US went in at the request of the UN….same for Kuwait.
You forgot Kosovo…we went in at the request of NATO.
Hardly the stuff of Imperialism.
Good luck on the GCSEs… 🙂

Wilson took America into WW1 for several reasons including the usual economic ones, at that time the British and France Allies were America’s biggest trade partners. From 1914 to 1916 trade with the Allies grew from 825 million dollars to 3.2 billion dollars. If the Allies were to lose the war American trade would have be threatened.

Following Germany’s violation of the 1916 Sussex Pledge, and the Zimmerman Note to the Mexican goverment in early 1917 the Americans had no choice but to declare war on the Germans, they had to protect their interests.

The USA went to war in Korea for three reasons.

The first reason was the ‘Domino theory’. Salami tactics in eastern Europe was not the only place where Communists were coming to power. In the Far East, too, they were getting powerful – China turned Communist in 1949. Truman believed that, if one country fell to Communism, then others would follow, like a line of dominoes. He was worried that, if Korea fell, the next ‘domino’ would be Japan, which was very important for American trade.

The second reason was just to try to undermine Communism. President Truman believed that capitalism, freedom and the American way of life were in danger of being overrun by Communism. The Truman Doctrine had been one of ‘containment’ – stopping the Communists gaining any more territory. In April 1950 the American National Security Council issued a report (NSC 68) recommending that America abandon ‘containment’ and start ‘rolling back’ Communism. This led Truman to consider driving the Communists out of North Korea.

In Korea the US was already involved in the war before the UN asked for support from it’s member countries, Truman realised the USA was in a competition for world domination with the USSR. By supporting South Korea, America was able to fight Communism without directly attacking Russia.in reality Korea was just a front for the two major Powers to act out the battle theories with out entering into a hot war between them.