America - not the greates country in the world? (Page 4)

UrsusAdiposimus - 2013-03-01 8:34 PM

powerman - 2013-03-01 10:26 PM Well if we can't figure out teams are going to crash planes into buildings, and we can't watch a county for 10 years and confirm what they have and whether we should invade... Then obviously we are not the greatest intelligence community in the world. Perhaps we should stop invading countries if that's the best we can do.

That is not a bad suggestion at all Hopefully we have learned our lesson. We hopefully won't repeat a lot of the same mistakes we've made over the past 12 years. But 10 years from now we'll be making new ones. As Einstein supposedly said - the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that intelligence has its limits. Never underestimate peoples' ability to find new and innovative ways to $%ck up.

I have even more respect for Einstein now.

Let me offer a different tack. I think Bush did not need the WMD tack as a pretense to invade. We knew then as we know now that Saddam had the ability to manufacture chemical weapons as they have phosphate plants that make all of the ingredients of Mustard gas. But almost every country has that capability. The case should have been that Saddam was unique in his ability and willingness to use those weapons often. He had used them 13 times by the time we invaded. And it is a solid argument to say that between he and Uday/Qusay, chemical weapons would rain down on someone given time.

In an immediate post 9/11 world it made sense that a van of mustard could sneak its way into Baltimore or Charleston, or New Orleans on a cargo ship and that it could be rigged to blow and depending on the direction of the wind could kill and wound a few thousand. It wasn't the vast stockpiles that were needed, it was one a-hole with a van. Just like in Oklahoma City.

By invading and removing Saddam, Uday, Qusay, Chemical Ali, and co, we removed the most likely users of chemical weapons in the planet and sent a message that we mean business.

The message was misguided from the get go. It wasn't about WMD, it was about removing a clear and present danger to America and our interests.

Where both wars failed was in winning the peace. We eventually got it, but we should've looked at true occupation vs what we did there which was a minimal force necessary.

What the Surge did was it got us off the bases and into villages where Saddam didn't ever have troops. We were like an uber police force. We lived with the villagers and protected them from influences from Iran and Syria. When people saw that, they knew they could go to us when some jerks moved in across the road. One of my buddies moved his company into an area in Afghanistan and told the villagers "see that hill, that's where we are, tell the Taliban." First night, massive firefight, but he had good interlocking fields of fire, good indirect fire support, etc. next day, same village leaders came to him and said "Taliban won't be back." No greater friend, no worse enemy.

We used to be a country that had a majority of our elected officials were veterans so they understood risks in the world and costs. Now we have jerks who come out of college with their hand on the throttle trying to find any angle into the elected class. That makes for some pretty terrible decisions when they are put in charge. I think that more than anything is a risk to our future as a country.

Gordon Sinclair offered an interesting observation

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.

As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.

They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help... Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans.

I'd like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.

Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star or the Douglas 107? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?

You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times ... and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them ... unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.

When the Americans get out of this bind ... as they will... who could blame them if they said 'the hell with the rest of the world'. Let someone ELSE buy the Israel bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbors have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke.

This year's disasters .. with the year less than half-over… has taken it all and nobody...but nobody... has helped.

You can't be serious. Why in the world would we care about chemical weapons when WE were the ones that SOLD them to him. We sure as heck didn't care about him using them on his own people before 911.

We went to war with Iraq because Powell made the case Sadam was trying to make nuclear weapons from intelligence from Britain... and they were wrong. Yellow cake does not equal a nuclear bomb... and no, he was not trying to but it. I won't call it a "lie", but it was questionable at best. Iraq was never a threat to the U.S. period, end of story. He was contained, he was on a leash. Oil was flowing. He had nothing to do with 911. It was the wrong war, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. The POTUS, Congress, the intelligence community, and the press sold the American people a bill of goods that was false, and we invaded a country and as a result hundreds of thousands of people died all without a declaration of war... if that does not scare the living crap out of people, then nothing will. We did not learn from Viet Nam, we built on it, and it will happen again. I'm not cool with that, and I'm not giving it a pass.

Fixed it...

And it was about our interests... our interests in the Middle East.... and the only thing of any interest in the Middle East is oil.

I don't have a crystal ball, and I can't roll back time. I have no idea how this world would look today if America did not go on a military empire building spree post WWII. I'm certainly not anti-military. I am a firm believer in "peace through superior fire power". But I also know we reap what we sow, and we have been. Bush didn't fill up barrels to burn on his ranch... but the only thing we care about in that sand box is the oil, and we most certainly have stuck our nose in their business to protect our interests. It's a very costly foreign policy. I have no idea what the alternative would have cost.

But this country is slipping down a slope I am not at all comfortable with. It is unsustainable economically, and there are other costs we are only beginning to realize. It is crazy to think of what the next century will bring us... destruction, or a rebirth... or both.

OK, choose whatever anecdotes suit your narrative. If I were Clarence Thomas and went from a log cabin to a highly paid job where I only had to talk once every 15 years, I'd be psyched too.  My point is, anecdotes are useless in substantiating that "My country is the best". I'm sure you can find similar anecdotes from anywhere in the world. It makes more sense to look at objective factors, like the likelihood someone can rise from adversity to success, compared across countries. If you do that, the U.S. does relatively poorly. And it's not just about escaping poverty, it's also about having an extremely entrenched upper class. Since "Land of Opportunity" type arguments feature in many commentators' assertions that the U.S. is the best, it's worth noting that objectively, it's not.

I doubt social mobility is higher in northern states than elsewhere, and certainly if you compare countries, that doesn't seem to be the case (i.e. Sweden and Norway have good mobility, Russia and Ukraine do not).

I don't really see in the above comments any attempt to substantiate that "My country is the BEST country." I see the above comments as making arguments that the citizens in the US do have plenty of opportunity. Far more opportunity than they might in other countries.