Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn’t happen again
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then…
–T. Lehrer
luci, at least some of your usual comrades are scratchin’ our heads here. The CW for the past 8-ish years has been that ObL was the ultimate father of the events of 9/11 and that he was being sheltered by the Taliban. To the best of my knowledge, this thread is the first time you’ve gone on record as questioning those axioms. Can you give us a sense of when you decided to not accept them?
More goalpost shifting. They are mad at us because we fought the Soviets in Afgh…I mean because we have bases in Saudi Arabia. At least you are closer to being correct on your second try.
Yes, but again goalpost shifting. One minute all these countries have been suffering for their sins, due to failed colonial policy. Bottom line, colonial policy wasn’t a failure if you look at it in terms of the benefit of the colonial parent states.
Just so happens to be a fact. India is a product of the British East India company, before them there was never such an entity as India in all of history. India’s bureaucracy is based off of the Raj. I am sorry that this is a problem for your ideological meanerings.
Yes, that is true, but India is a fabrication of a British corporation, it did not exist prior to colonialism in any form.
You might as well be pissed off that history has occurred.
Wow you really don’t understand do you? Al Qaeda considers the Saudi Regime to be a bunch of corrupt and decadent sinners (for want of a better word) who are usurping and despoiling the holy land. Osama offered to bring the Afghan Mujahideen to Saudi Arabia to defend against Saddam, and when the Saudis said no thanks, that’s when he turned on the Saudi regime.
Yeah. Selah. Of course they are corrupt, they are in bed with the infidels from the West, The Great Satan, come to think of it. Why would they cooperate with the likes of their cast-out-son when life is so much easier with us?
Well he wasn’t cast out at that point. His rejection of their alliance with the Great Satan is what caused the rift. He wanted them to be self-sufficient and to create a Muslim empire. That wasn’t what they decided on.
I don’t really understand their motives considering they need to get their arms from external western sources. They are incapable of developing advanced weaponry themselves.
Well for the people, not for the royal family. In Saudi Arabia about 100,000 people are fabulously wealthy and everyone else lives in grinding poverty.
If you’ll stop seeing “the mujahediin” when I write “the people of Afghanistan” you’ll see quite clearly there is no goalpost shifting. Different people can be anti-American for different reasons, you know.
That benefit came at the expense of the colonized populations. Definitely not a win-win situation all around.
And therefore what, the Indian population itself was incapable of forming nation-states? The only way they could possibly hope to be a modern civilization is by having it introduced by the noble white man? Paternalistic bullshit.
And how, exactly, would you feel about foreign troops being stationed along the East (or West) Coast on an indefinite basis as a part of a war effort the US wasn’t directly involved in?
If Saudi Arabia were a representative democracy instead of a monarchy unaccountable to the populace, your point might have some validity. If you had as little say in the decisions made by US government as most Saudi Arabians do with the decisions made by the House of Saud, would you still feel a foreign military presence is acceptable?
That’s not true, and isn’t really true of any of the Gulf states. Unemployment is high, but that’s because Saudis don’t really need to work. Every citizen gets a monthly stipend paid via oil revenues which is more than enough to live on, and there’s an extensive social welfare system.
20% of the population does live in poverty (though generally not the grinding kind), but those are temporary foreign workers, mostly from South and Southeast Asia.
What is true is that “poor” Saudis are unlikely to become wealthy, since there are few opportunities for economic advancement.
It’s not unreasonable to suggest that there wouldn’t be a united India without the British. The Indian subcontinent is more diverse in terms of (native) language, ethnic and religious divisions than any other single on earth, and without European colonization there would probably never have been an impetus to unite under common leadership.
How India would be doing economically without the British is impossible to say.
I understand what you’re getting at here, but I as an individual American have about as much influence over what the US military does as an average Saudi citizen has over their military. And even though I get to vote, is “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” really all that much different than the what the Saudis have in terms of a monarchy?
This is strictly limited to this argument, of course. Let’s not go into the “women can’t drive, lopping off the hands of petty thieves” arena.
Not what I’m arguing here. The point is whether the rise of a modern nation-state would have been possible without British imperialist influence. To assert that this is so does not take into account how European nation-states arose without the benefit of being imperialist outposts for someone else - that is, without relying on some theory of racial superiority.
And how is this a problem? Given the amount of communalist violence going on in India, for example, it’s hard to accept that uniting under common leadership has done them any favors. So there might have been a dozen or more smaller countries on the Indian subcontinent (as there were prior to colonization). Big deal; at least the locals would have been more in control of their own destinies.
Well, they’d have had more control over their own resources and industry and had more decision-making power over how to develop and progress. That’s a pretty good start.
To try to bring this back towards the central theme of the discussion, the British had to keep India under strict control, using local leaders who were friendly to British interests. Obviously, British and native interests were bound to collide; when they did that gave rise to resistance and rebellion. Which was met by further oppression, spurring on yet more resistance and rebellion until we get to 1948.
Iraq has oil (including some of the biggest fields on the planet). Afghanistan is ideally situated for a pipeline that can bring natural gas from the former Soviet Central Asian republics to India. Control over these resources and this potential infrastructure is vitally important to the United States, and the only way they can be sure they have that control is by keeping their thumbs on the region via compliant local and regional leadership. Same methods as the British used in India and elsewhere. They thought they could achieve that with Saddam Hussein in Iraq and kept trying to see if the Taliban would play ball. That failed, so now they’re in there bombing the bejesus out of everything and trying to see if the likes of Maliki and Karzai will suit. In Iraq they’re certainly hedging their bets, offering support to both Maliki and the Sunni Awakening groups he opposes. In Afghanistan Karzai’s had to make concessions to the Taliban and - as I understand it - the Northern Alliance, so he’s performing a highly dangerous juggling act between US interests and those of the local powers.
He took a oath to obey orders from his superiors, defend the constitution etc etc etc. So now he only wants to follow the orders of the person/people he personally approves of? Then how dare he expect his subordinates to obey his orders?
He broke that oath. To hell with him.
Wow, you guys do know how to take a tangent and run with it!! :eek:
Getting back to the OP for a minute:
Cook v Obama was dismissed as moot on July 16. This is because the Army rescinded the order to deploy. The “birthers” are claiming that this vindicates their position; the Army’s action is a tacit admission that Maj. Cook is correct. :rolleyes:
Note from the article that Gen. Childers says that he signed a “motion” filed by attorney Orly Taitz regarding unsealing specific personnel records. Ms. Taitz asserts she had a signed consent form from Gen. Childers to join the lawsuit by Maj. Cook. “Probably it’s some kind of mistake,” Taitz said. “I don’t know what happened.”
Now, I’m not one to think that this sort of silliness didn’t exist in the good old days (you know, when we all were more civil and such :p), but the Internet sure makes it easy to find out about this sort of thing and latch onto it, doesn’t it? :eek:
I had paid very little attention to the issue of then Sen. Obama’s birth certificate during the campaign; I considered it pretty silly to assert he wasn’t a citizen based upon what I read about his life. But goodness, this silliness just doesn’t go away!!! (video link) :rolleyes:
