What plunder pray? You may not like this but the simple fact is that the Yanks invaded Iraq because they thought it was the right thing to do. That’s also why we helped them.
The real villains in Iraq are the French and Russians who broke the blockade and the UN with it’s corrupt officials.
Your posturing is giving us Europeans a bad name!
You know, if we have to be stereotyped, there are worse ones. I’ve always liked this, that people do believe we’re generally well-meaning. Gives hope for the future. Sure, it makes us look like marks and saps, but it’s hard to truly hate someone who you expect will try to work with you.
I often wonder if threads like this actually accomplish anything thing other then kicking up a hornets nest and generating bad feelings. Is there something constructive to debate or should this thread just be moved to IMHO or better yet The Pit?
Let’s start some other fun threads. How about “What Americans think of Europeans” or “What Americans think of What Europeans Think of America?”
Marc
If you really wanted to get things going you could do “what europeans think of each other”
We’ve had millenia to get pissed off with our neighbours - you’re just new kids on the block.
Were you opposed to the medium range nuclear weapons coming to Europe in the 1980’s?
Did you think the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a bad idea?
Did you disagree with Reagan walking away from Gorbachov in Iceland in the late 1980’s?
If any of the above answers are “yes” than perhaps you’ll see my point.
Why was it necessary to do anything at all?
The threat from WMD ?
Bollocks, there was no threat.
Saddam was EEEvil?
Sodd that too, were’s the involvement with other humanitarian hot spots?
Take these two away and what exactly was the reason for war???
With no answer, all I saw was rebuilding contracts being handed out to Yankee firms. And how big does the Halliburton elephant need to be?
Why your poodle jumped in so readily is still a big question mark.
As is why the Dutch are in. Our % of the population that was anti-war was even bigger than Britain’s. Yet there we are, on the ground. How did that happen??
I have no idea why the Dutch are there - that’s for them to work out (to be brutally honest I wasn’t aware the dutch WERE there - that’s my ignorance though. Did they do any fighting?).
Why are we there? Because our friends and allies the Americans asked for our help. When the chips are down we know that our interests and values broadly resemble those of the yanks.
The people of Britain get a chance to get rid of Blair in four week’s time (and God willing they will), that’s a luxury the Iraqis never had with Saddam.
Is the Conservative Party still the main opposition to Labour in the UK?
Yes. By quite a long way.
That’s all very noble but it doesn’t answer why there was a war in the first place.
Btw, wasn’t it only just recently that Britain fulfilled its last payment for the help it received from its friends and allies the Americans during WWII?
I guess that Americans are allowed in this thread, because the second part of the OP asks if we feel uncomfortable in Europe. I’ve been in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in the last 18 months and my answer is: only in France, and I don’t know if every single meal we ordered had a problem and every single night we were locked out of our hotel rooms because A) some of us were American, or B) some of us were Israeli, or C) the French are completely incompetent. Everywhere else people seemed to be completely uninterested in us and there were no problems.
I would also like to quietly, without vitriol, point out what several European posters have already noticed: Americans are frequently being criticized for not knowing anything about the rest of the world, and yet quite a few of the opinions about Americans expressed here reveal that the Europeans who hold those opinions know nothing about America, aside from what the media tells them.
And we don’t understand your humor because it isn’t funny. 
For the most part I’m going to stay out of this thread. I don’t want to inject my own comments or thoughts on what others are writing but truely just want to watch the discussion. Its been very insightful so far…I appreciate all the comments. Keep em coming. 
I think its worthwhile to get an outside view of what others think of our nation. It helps put things into perspective and shows where there are disconnects between what we perceive as reality and what others do. I wasn’t trying to kick a hornets nest over or provoke bad feelings, but I DID want honest answers…even if they were painful to me and my fellow American’s on this board.
As for the choice of forum, this seemed most appropriate to me. If the mods think it should be in IMHO then they are free to move it there. I HOPE this isn’t bound for the pit…that would be truely dissapointing to me.
-XT
War of 1812 - Well, we had just told the Brits to sod off, and managed to make it stick. We had been a free country for less than 50 years, yet the brits kept kidnaping our men to serve on their naval vessels. Kidnaping is not the kinder, gentler manner of getting sailors.
War of 1848, Mexican-American War - Texas had ceeded from Mexico in 1836 to become the Republic of Texas and had been accepted into the US. Mexico wanted the land back, we decided to keep it. IF you accept that a territory can ceed from a country and make its own decisions, then you must allow that territory to maintain its freedoms, including letting it decide to joining a larger and different union. If not, then the US and many other countries would still be colonies.
Oddly enough, ‘manifest destiny’ tended to keep us more or less busy in the continental US rather than going to other parts of the world and getting into scrabbles. Almost every military action we did overseas was in response to problems involving our merchant fleets, or our citizens overseas. As to the treatment of natives, I might point out the colonial agressions found in aftica, australia, asia and india…pot, kettle. It was originally started by the Brits when they first came over to the americas in the US, the spaniards and portugese were no strangers to genocide. I might also point out that the slave trade in aftica was well established LONG before the US was any sort of entity. Blacks were selling blacks to us, we simply bought a commodity to make our lives more easy. We did not just show up in africa, bash people on the head and load them into ships. We bought them ‘fair and square’ in slavers markets.
There is no country that is totally removed from this, all countries derive from historical political arrangements. The whole world is not responsible in the present for actions that occurred 500 years ago, or even 75 years ago. I cannot hold my friend Christian [german, retired military pilot] responsible for bombing London, or for Auschwitz, and he cannot hold mrAru responsible for the finances of the state of New York in the 1700s making it necessary to push the native americans west to gain agricultural lands. I can’t hold my friend Yuki responible for the death of my father’s cousin in Bataan, and she cant hold me responsible for the oppression of the anglo-saxons in the 1200s, despite our getting given lands by William the Bastard. It just does not work that way.
[Moderator Hat ON]
This is more of a poll asking for people’s experiences, so I am moving it to IMHO.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
What are you, some Frog? A Kraut? Some Brit with bad teeth? We saved your ass in WWII and couldn’t care less what you think!!
Like I said, I grew up in the U.S. I spent twelve of my first twenty years there, and I still consider it home a lot of times. I still love the U.S. and most Americans very much, but some things have me worried.
I have been doing some more thinking and the four main things that have me worried are the following:
The gradual worsening of education. Just a generation ago the rate of literacy was higher than it is now. Too many children are getting a bad education and the children really are the future. What will happen another thirty years from now, when the general population knows even less about the world than it does now?
The growing gap between rich and poor and the shrinking middle class. In the early twentieth century there was also a lot of poverty in the U.S, but by the end of that century almost all households had a TV, a fridge, plumbing, etc. The middle class was huge and the future seemed to be bright. Now, those that haven’t made the next step in economic prosperity are being left behind.
The culture of fear in the U.S. I don’t think it will ever lead to fascism or ultra-nationalism as I have seen some posters speculate in other threads, but I think it will lead to more gated communities, more seperation between the well-to-do and the poor.
The fact that very little thought is given to the future. Everything needs to be done now and here. Very little thought is given to the environment and the immense debt. It’s like the Americans are all saying: “Ah what the heck, let our grandkids worry about that crap.”
Now, it’s not like I think everything is going to hell in a handbasket right now. There is till time to correct these problems, and I think a lot of people are becoming more and more aware of these things. I think the future for the U.S. is still very bright, but just not as bright as it might have been thirty or even twenty years ago.
As an American, I’ve never at all felt uncomfortable in any other country because of my nationality (except maybe in Paris, but it seems even other French people sort of feel that way about Paris. And there were plenty of nice people there too.) In fact, I’ve never felt more welcome anywhere in the world than at the Hungarian National Museum when I (perhaps un-Americanly) showed a lot of interest in the history and culture. Then again, the dollar spends real well against the forint.
I didn’t at all want to hijack the thread, which is really interesting, but I have to ask, what’s American hair? Because I’m scared I might have it and I need to know.
I haven’t been to Europe in 35 years, so I can’t bring anything to the discussion about current attitudes.
But 1969 was a bad year to be an American in Europe. There was anti -U.S. graffiti sprayed on walls in every city we visited. We had rocks thrown at our tour buses when someone discovered we were from the U.S., and there were well-meaning Europeans who actually advised us to answer “Canada” if someone asked where we were from.
Of course, that kind of knee-jerk bigotry no longer exists on the Continent, does it?
Next time there is a major terrorist attack in the US, I won’t care much.
How do I feel about America? That’s a huge question, you know. The short answer is: Mixed. The long answer would be incredbly long, so 'll just share some random impressions.
I visited USA once (In 1990. For two weeks. ) and found the people friendly and nice to be around - including the girl who tried to convert me to her brand of Christianity, and seemed to have an incredibly naive view of atheism, but was willing to listen and remain friendly when I described my view of Life, the Universe and Everything. When meeting individual Americans, I’m prepared to like them.
Many of my favourite authors and favourite musicians are American. My bookshelves have more books in English than in Norwegian.
I’m very, very glad Norway is an ally of USA. But that’s not because I see your country as a good friend, it’s because I see it as a very, very bad enemy. (Yes, I can hear you muttering “We saved your ungrateful asses from the Nazis” over there. Well, so did the Russians. Can’t say it gave me warm and fuzzy feelings towards the Soviet Union.)
I grew up close to a local NATO headquarter outside Oslo. When I was fourteen, more than twenty years ago, I once woke up in the middle of the night having heard some loud noice. For a split second, I was absolutely certain that the Russians had dropped the Bomb on the NATO grounds, and that in a moment I’d be dead. I wasn’t even afraid, more of a resigned “Oh. That was that, then.” Growing up as a neighbour of USSR and an ally of USA during the cold war didn’t make me feel safe, it was scary.
When playing GURPS (a roleplaying game produced in USA) recently, one of the players said this about Norway’s prime minister: “Bondevik has his tongue so far up Bush’s ass that he’s tickling his tonsils.” There were general nods of agreement around the table.
In March 2004 I participated in a LARP (Live Action Roleplaying, a bunch of people dressing up in costumes and playing “let’s pretend”). The setting was a modern, slightly alternate reality, the topic was terrorism, the genre was action sliding into catastrophy. Everybody were portrayed in a negative light - the European terrorists were completely psycho, the Israeli undercover agent was ice cold evil, the Norwegian police and government were spineless cowards - even so, I felt that the portrayal of the American soldiers was unfair and unrealistic. Torturing people just for fun/because of breakdown in discipline? Come on - I may be a rabid Euro commie, but that’s a bit too much to believe, even for me.
A few weeks later, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.
These days, if I notice that a product I’m about to buy is made in America, I’ll look around a bit for an alternative. I never did that before the Iraqi war.
The occupation of Iraq started 9th April 2003. That date is a special one in Norway - 9th April 1940, Norway was invaded. I know that it’s just a coincidence, but it’s still chilling, and extremely weird to know that Norwegian soldiers have taken part in an occupation of another country. (I’m not sure if they’re still in Iraq - last time I looked it up, there were a symbolic handful left.)
Before I ventured out on the wide, wild Internet, I used to believe that Americans and Europeans were, despite everything, basically similar. Same cultural background, joined in enjoying a wildly unfair portion of the wealth of the planet, all that. But when grazing various message boards, I discover every now and then some angle that make you seem completely, utterly alien. Not neccessarily bad (although I’m chauvinistic enough to, generally, see my own culture as best ), but completely different in an unexpected way.