Re: Pakistan launches offensive on top Taliban leader

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article <C2efm.1110$nh2.38@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter Cole <peter_cole@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Your post appeared to conflate standing US military deployment in bases around the world following WWII with deployment created since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There has been no change except expansion.

There has been no "standing down" after the collapse of out #1 enemy (USSR), or the change of our #2 (PRC) into our trading partner and investor.

In case you have forgotten, the various nations that made up the USSR have not stood down and most are not yet allies. Most also retain possession of a much larger total nuclear arsenal than our own, a situation perpetuated by the Republicans scuttling treaties based (ironically) on Ronald Reagan's goal of elimination of nuclear weapons.

NATO has expanded to now include: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Albania. Membership is also planned for Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia. An air defense system for Poland and the Czech Republic is also in the works. NATO spends 70% of the world budget for military activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Nuclear_arsenal_of_Russia

"Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a number of Soviet-era nuclear warheads remained on the territories of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Under the terms of the Lisbon Protocol to the NPT, and following the 1995 Trilateral Agreement between Russia, Belarus, and the USA, these were transferred to Russia, leaving Russia as the sole inheritor of the Soviet nuclear arsenal."


No decline in budget, only a continued expansion of US military presence around the world.

The facts differ. There was a 20% troop reduction during the GHW Bush administration and a further 19% reduction in troop strength under Clinton.

As a percentage of the federal budget, defense spending is exactly where it was when the Berlin wall fell.


Expansion of NATO into former SSR's? Why? Why isn't NATO being disbanded rather than expanded? It was, after all, supposed to be a cold war institution.

NATO has become primarily a way to diplomatically tie nations together into a common cause.

Which is?

Expanding it into former Soviet satellite states is a "divide and conquer" strategy aimied at maintaining isolation of Russia, which still has aims of regaining its superpower status.

It is a violation of the agreement reached with Gorbachev over the reunification of Germany.

And which still has a large military, many nuclear weapons and a generally aggressive attitude among its politicians.

Who is really being "aggressive"? Who is trying to continue the cold war?


US troop presence isn't popular almost everywhere they're stationed. Don't forget, the explanation given for the 9-11 attacks was the presence of US bases in Saudi Arabia.

Military bases always result in mixed feelings in the surrounding areas. The economic benefits are appreciated, but the often rowdy behavior of young men and women can be annoying. It's not much different than how most neighborhoods around colleges feel.

Those bases were installed as part of the first gulf war, but once the US moves in, they never leave.

Well, that last part is not literally true since we have closed military bases in other countries.

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/empire-of-bases

"According to the Pentagon's own list, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory."

"the United States has 227 bases in Germany"

"It is also inevitable that, from time to time, U.S. soldiers--often drunk--commit crimes. The resentment these crimes cause is only exacerbated by the U.S. government's frequent insistence that such crimes not be prosecuted in local courts. In 2002, two U.S. soldiers killed two teenage girls in Korea as they walked to a birthday party. Korean campaigners claim this was one of 52,000 crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea between 1967 and 2002. The two U.S. soldiers were immediately repatriated to the United States so they could escape prosecution in Korea. In 1998, a marine pilot sliced through the cable of a ski gondola in Italy, killing 20 people, but U.S. officials slapped him on the wrist and refused to allow Italian authorities to try him."

While there have been closures of U.S. bases in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Kyrgyzstan, many more new bases have also opened.


Your rhetoric has steered strongly towards "America is an evil empire" in this thread. My comment that "Reflexive hatred of one's own race, country, religion, etc. is also arrogant" was a general one and not intended to attribute the issues of race or religion to you; that was unclear and I apologize for it. However, you seemed to be indulging in a reflexive hatred of your country in your language.

What I hate is jingoism and imperialism. I don't think those two things define my country.

What was typically American, up until the post WWII era, was a strong streak of pacifism, non-interventionism, isolationism, and distrust of the military. The US, unlike many other industrial nations, had a very small military up until that time.

Indeed, it was those very qualities that helped allow Hitler to gain the foothold in Europe that he did. WWII raged in Europe for over two years before we bestirred ourselves to help directly (initially with the Lend-Lease Act in 1941 supplying was material to England and militarily in North Africa in 1942, IIRC). Afterwards it became known that Hitler had drawn up plans for the invasion and conquest of America once Europe was conquered.

We didn't enter WWII until Pearl Harbor (12/41). There was a strong non-interventionist mood in the US, as I said.


Even WWII has a much more complicated history for those who care to study it.

Indeed. But what WWII had was a clear, unquestionable ending. Japan surrendered unconditionally. Germany and Italy were utterly defeated. In subsequent wars (e.g., Korea, Viet Nam, the Gulf War, etc.) the endings have been "ragged" without decisive victory and unconditional surrender. The PNAC saw this as a blow to American military prestige and wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein in order to clean up the "ragged ending" of the first Gulf War. They were urging this long before 9/11; the various UN resolutions and 9/11 became just a pretext.

Immediately after WWII ended, our enemies became our allies and our allies our enemies. What does that say? WWII awoke American ambitions for empire and global economic dominance. It was sold as "defense", but it was offense -- economic offense backed up with military aggression.

Take virtually any issue: bank bailouts, Middle East peace, health care, the war in Iraq, and you'll see polled opinion way left of policy.

Depends on who's doing the polling and how the questions are phrased. It's very easy to shape responses in polls to push the trend one way or another.

It's also easy to lie and spread propaganda. "Death tax" and "socialized medicine" to name a couple.

Apply that to Iraq and health care. You think the majority of Americans still want to be in Iraq and don't want a national health care policy?

Debate in the media is inevitably between centrists and the radical right -- that's known as "balance".

Debate in some media, not all. But I agree that there is a strong conservative bias that has crept into many of the information channels available to most Americans (e.g., newspapers and TV news).

Because they're owned by conglomerates. There was a huge amount of consolidation in those industries in the last decade or so.
.

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