Well, Germany supplied the gun in your M1 Abrams tank (designed by the Rheinmetall Corporation of Germany , and the U.K. the Chobham armour. Our degeneration might not be quite as extreme as you seem to think.
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Whereas your thinking is merely ill-informed.
Your economy is starting to look healthier at the moment, now that the dollar only buys 0.83 eurocents - a 33% devaluation over the past year. You've still got a massive (and growing) balance of payments deficit with the rest of the world, which is one problem that the European "basket cases" don't seem to have to deal with. Your budget deficit of 3.5% looks better than the 4.2% in Germany and France, to anybody whose economic education stopped before the lecturer got onto John Maynard Keynes, but you've still got to tackle that balance of payments deficit before your oil suppliers turn off the tap.
As for the unfortunate and undesirable rash of Jew-bashing incidents in Europe - the problem seems to be a bunch of irritated and upset second-generation Arab immigrants in Europe who are reacting irrationally to the perceived anti-Islamic activities of the U.S. and its right-wing allies in Irak and Afghanistan. The French and the Germans would have liked you to have taken the time to acquire a U.N. fig-leaf before you invaded the Iraki oil-fields, and the epidemic of Jew-bashing is just one of the prices we are paying for your rashness.
But it would be unrealistic to expect you to grasp that sort of complication.
The Rhine used to be a bit whiffy, but French, the Germans and the Swiss are progressively cleaning it up. By the time it gets to Nijmegen (where it is called the Waal) it smells fine.
Our route from Nijmegen to Burgundy lies rather to the west, initially along the Meuse (called the Maas in Netherlands) and we've not noted any particular stinks along the way. Alsace smelt fine the last time we visited it, but that must be more than ten years ago now.
You probably do, but the absence of effective controls on electoral expenditure favours the rich, who have a short-sighted preference for a low tax regime that lumbers them with an under-fed and under-educated working-class, who end up in a lot of expensive prison cells for want of adequate social security.
I know that you find Will Hutton heretical, but those less vulnerable to the Republican Inquisition might risk importing "The World We're In" - order it from
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- and take the chance of exposing their immortal souls to some rather unpalatable facts about God's own country.
ROTFLMAO! John, Would you please get off the fence ?:-)
...Jim Thompson
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
We don't really have to buy Iraq's oil, but it is the US style of doing things.
The current devaluation of the dollar is the best thing that could happen for the US (and the worst that could happen for Europe.)
The ethical problem that you apparently have: the oil wasn't Saddam's to give away. It was pretty much owned by the Iraqi people/government. This is where the lefties tend to convieniently ignore the evils of the despots that they love.
It is the usurpers like Chiraq's (sic) France that were essentially funding Saddam (and his dictatorship) by paying HIM the money for the oil. At least, the money will be better directed (away from those who you obviously support.)
I read in sci.electronics.design that John Fields wrote (in ) about 'Interesting Letter-to-the-Editor', on Sat, 6 Dec 2003:
It would certainly have provoked China, and the least reaction would probably have been to invade Taiwan. Rapid escalation.
Lord Macaulay, the historian, wrote of John Hampden (Parliamentarian, mid-17th century England), 'He knew that the essence of war is violence and that moderation in war is imbecility.'
The trouble today is twofold:
- we have too many PC imbeciles advocating moderation;
- we have weapons of violence far beyond the imagining of Hampden.
These conflicting pressures have pushed the strategy again towards the sort of long-term struggle that occurred in Vietnam. Of course, the opposition in Iraq is far weaker, but it doesn't need to be very effective to fuel the fire of the critics of the US and UK governments.
'Shock and awe' is the *preferable* strategy; paralyse the enemy with fear quickly and you minimise casualties on both sides. What was done was not shock-creating and awe-inspiring enough, early enough.
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Agreed, especially early enough. The haranguing in the UN allowed
Saddam to see the noose slowly closing and bought him enough time to
allow him to escape with (as reported by the media) four _truckloads_ of
money worth about $1E9. Not a good thing.
If it were up to me, I probably would have MOABed the perimeter of the city. In particular, at night when it would have been very visible. The concussions and light show would have done 90% of the job in the first 20 minutes.
Sorry, Bill, but the Euro's a crock of shit. Recent example being the decision the other day to let France and Germany off with their huge public spending deficits. The forex markets will not forgive so easily.
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Are you trying to compete for the John S. Dyson Prize for the terminally ill-informed? The foreign exchange markets seem to have been infiltrated with Keynesians, who see the 4.2% public spending deficits as appropriately directed to stimulating depressed economies, and have been bidding the euro up against the dollar.
Central banks are not run by Keynsians, more's the pity, a fact that Keynes long ago discussed and deplored. Bankers have their attention firmly fixed on the currency, not realising that their job is the control of the (much larger) pool of credit that actually runs the economy, and they do make a foolish song and dance about ostensibly inflationary moves to stimulate the economy.
The 3.5% budget deficit in the U.S. is similarly aimed at stimulating the U.S. economy, but because most of the money is going to the rich, it isn't going to work nearly as well - the rich aren't under any compulsion to spend the extra money as soon as they get it, and tend to hang onto it until they can find some poor struggling depression-crippled entrepreneur whom they can buy up from the receiver for ten cents on the dollar. The poor don't have this freedom, and the extra cash they get goes straight into stimulating the economy.
The U.S. economy is seeing the benefit of the 33% devaluation against the euro over the past year, but since the U.S. trade deficit has risen from $500 billion to $600 billion over the same period, it doesn't look as if there has been any structural improvement in the situation - a devaluation ought to improve the balance of trade, by pricing imports out of the home market, and strengthening exports, but the U.S. oil consumption - one third of it imported - seems to be pretty price-insensitive.
Don't be like that - you too loved Saddam before that unfortunate misunderstanding about Kuwait, and your affection for similar despots, like Musharraf in Pakistan, Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Franco in Spain shows that this is no fleeting emotion.
We know that you are jealous because Chirac's France displaced you in Saddam's affections, but bear up - the path of true love never ran smooth. We know that you would have loved to buy Iraki oil from Saddam with your slightly dodgy dollars, just as you were willing to buy Iranian oil from the Shah of Persia (another evil despot, much to your taste) once he'd been democratically installed by a CIA-instigated miliary coup.
The money that you do spend on Iraki oil won't be spend on fomenting right-wing coup d'etats in previously democratic countries - Chile is the most recent example to come to mind - and in that sense it will be better directed than it might otherwise have been.
You seem to be no better informed than John S. Dyson - those flying lessons were taking by Saudi citizens and paid for by Saudi dollars, earned by shipping Saudi oil to the U.S.A. A few of the al Qua'eda crew may have spent some time in transit in Hamburg (Germany) and their dollars may have been exchanged for euro's in the process, but Saddam's oil euros were locked into the UN administered oil-for-food deal, and not directly accessible for your hypothetical Iraki subsidy for al Qua'eda.
So much for your disavowals of piracy. "Sure, we'll pay you for the oil - at one bead per barrel, with a complimentary blanket thrown in for each complete tanker load".
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Disney made a mini-TV series about him in the 1950's which got to Australia whie I was still at school, but not before I'd read most of the Cambridge series on American history ...
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Leslie Nielson has gone on to higher things in the "Naked Gun" films, but Disney weren't too behind-hand in exploiting his comic skills - presumably unintentionally. It was pretty hilarious nonsense if you knew anything about the subject.
Not irrelevant to - nor stupider than - the analogy you were drawing between Irak and Japan, where you checkmated a much more heirachical society by capturing the emperor. In Irak you haven't managed to capture Saddam, and even if you succeeded, it wouldn't have remotely the same impact - the Ba'ath Party isn't anything like as heirachical (not having had some forty generations in which to work on it).
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld - I know I don't know - which gives me an advantage over you, becasue you are unaware of the extent of your ignorance.
I am making it difficult for you, aren't I. Gullible non-thinking must be *so* much easier.
A nice little irony there. Dubbya has hijacked al Qua'eda's greatest success and used it to attack Saddam, who wasn't exactly al Qua'eda's favourite person.
Why not invoke Pearl Harbour as well? It has got exactly the same historical relevance to your attack on Irak.
An argument that you made to the U.N., where it went down like a lead balloon. An argument based on a number of forged documents, whihc your intelligence services knew to be forged, and your stupidy services cited anyway.
Pull the other leg. It's got bells on.
As opposed to the web you've woven for yourselves, with your lying justifications for unnecessarily provocative behaviour.
"Kiss my ass" does seem to be your idea of "reasoning". But then it does seem to represent the upper limit of your "reasoning" capacity.
No thanks to you or the football-loving academic rednecks of Austin. I subscribe to the "obstacle course" theory of post-graduate education, and getting a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in her subject was widely seen as a triumph over a particularly unhelpful environment.
My wife is rather more diplomatic than I am, but the lecturer for one of her compulsory courses was more than usually unhelpful, and she ended up skipping his lectures and his intermediate tests, confident that she could still ace the final examination, as she did. His compulsory course ceased to be compulsory in fairly short order ...
She left the town immediately after her Ph.D. examination, and has been back only once since then, for what should have been a farewell get-together in honour of her Ph.D. supervisor, when he was moving on to slightly higher things (a Deanship in Florida ... he's white so he still gets to vote) but the faculty managed to sabotage it.
Well if you can avoid disparaging the Dollar for one minute and look at things dispassionately for once, you will have to concede that if, as you say, the markets are taking the view that F&G largesse is good for growth, it still doesn't mitigate the fact that they've essentially torn up the Stability Pact. They've had to run a coach and horses right through it because it was crippling their economies. Why? Because the Euro was crystalised at a moment in time when the politics was right; not the economic fundamentals of the participating countries' economies which was what *really* mattered. If the markets are bidding up the Euro, then I take a more cynical view. I believe it's a short term bet that markets make caused by the belief that the failure of the Stability Pact will necessitate a rise in Euro interest rates. That's all, Bill. Not out of confidence in the underlying economic prospects for F&G or EUrope as a whole. Sorry.
--
"I expect history will be kind to me, since I intend to write it."
- Winston
Churchill
They recovered most of it. The last number for the outstanding cash is
132 million. Don't you remember the reports of finding sheds full of cash in Bagdad, and of stopping trucks full of cash and gold on the way to the border. The CPA took charge of it. "Walking around money", I guess.
Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Washington State resident
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