Quote Bernard Reply#193
My view remains that:
- Such an attack would be mostly a political act tightly connected to the interest of the US abroad and their connections with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Israel,
Unquote
I heard John Kerry on TV a few days ago in a speech referring to "America's security interests". When you consider that Syria is thousands of miles away why would America feel threatened by them? Bernard gives the answer above. Hidden agendas. America trying to get at Russia via Syria and vice versa and America knows all about chemical weapons.
And you think there exists a university in any city whose lecturers don't? I should imagine that Glasgow would be perfectly capable of producing any of them, which hardly makes the Scot. Nats. possible terror exporters... but given the Irish example, the undeniable links between the two Irelands and Scotland, who knows what the future might hold for us all?
Empire is, in my view, a totally misunderstood term.
We had an Empire in recent history, and I lived in a part of it whilst it still was part of our Empire. If anything, it was an object lesson in what empire really means: responsibility. It faced the Greeks as it eventually did the Romans and every other extraterritorial power too. You have no empire anymore when you don’t control it to your advantage, and to do that you need to depend not on force but upon the positives that you, as the top of the pyramid, can bring to the party. As all the others before discovered, tying up legions and muscle and finance only serves to leave the home base less well protected and itself open to attack.
And I believe that in the world of today, the greatest threat and disadvantage to the concept of empire and its continuation is finance. Can you imagine the state that Britain would be in today if it still had responsibility for what was India? We would be bankrupt. Africa? We could afford to keep troops there to separate warring tribes? The best thing we ever did was to abandon the whole concept of empire. We might have conceived better solutions to peaceful withdrawal than we did, but I suspect that the true scale of the drain on home resources that empire was ultimately seen to be post-WW2 made heads think very seriously.
I’d be quite surprised to discover that the States have an interest in creating an empire of their own. I would be even more surprised to think that the States didn’t want to have influence overseas. The two are by no means the same thing at all.
Solutions and aids to peaceful coexistence? More trade. It’s as simple as that. I’m led to believe that the EEC was supposedly set up to stop events like WW2 from being possible ever again; instead of concentrating upon trade that is of mutual benefit to all parties engaged in it, they corrupted the concept into one of federalism, causing the schism now threatening to split the entire thing asunder. How effing blind! They only had to consider the big players in the original concept: Italy had a boom, but Italy was not even a single country until very, very recently and the north still resents feeding the south; Spain, too, is bedevilled with factions wanting back their old independences and resenting the taxation payments that go elsewhere to support the hopeless cases; Britain? has anyone forgotten factions within Northern Ireland and Scotland and possibly Wales, too, seeking self-governance? France? As split as the rest, and as ever between ‘Paris’ and the Midi. Germany, the current top gun? Until they suddenly found themselves responsible for the eastern part, Soviet long enough to destroy the work ethic, they had few problems. Now they face all manner or domestic crisis and also the product of having had to import labour willing to do ‘menial’ work. It’s the American south and the plantations all over again, but with other players. You can’t send the ‘guests’ home again, they become you, but different. Hasn’t empire proved that in Britain, too?
Old countries are like old dogs: we are bad at new tricks.
I think the U.S. model works for them because they are new and managed quite quickly to get to a stage where there exists a common language; that that is seriously under threat is another story, and maybe selective lessons from the old countries might be worth learning.
Rob C