from USA … bad leadership here

Hi Yankee Wifey, welcome to JC. There’s no-one up in UK yet so I will answer…

I presume GB means George Bush and not Great Britain – we just use the surname when we talk about that twonk in the Whitehouse.

I don’t think Bush did it for the benefit of major corporations – I think he did it to secure the future supply of oil assets generally and because he needed to find a soft target after 9/11 (he knew the strengths of the Iraqi military and he knew the land). Think how many more US/UK lives would have been lost had he tried to fight any of the other countries in that region. Not that he did it for the RIGHT reasons, of course, just he thought if he HAD to fight a middle-eastern country after 9/11 then Iraq would be the easiest. I can’t remember but I assume the polls at the time were very much in favour of action against Iraq.

I think Americans generally are gullible and ignorant of world history. Things will be changing because of the availibility of news on the Internet/CNN etc but the fact remains most of its people don’t own a passport, haven’t even left their own state and, quite frankly, have no interest in what goes on outside their shores. Watch your national or regional evening news programmes and, current Iraq/Israeli events aside, how much time is given over to foreign news. Normally zilch.

There will always be exceptions who actually care about America’s image (like you perhaps) and, given the population size, I am sure that millions of Americans have a very deep understanding of world events but the majority don’t. We get quite a bit of the US news over here, albeit mainly business and politics. I dare say not many of us are too interested in general news stories from USA but most of us will have a view on your political issues.

Just as Germans are a nation of sausage-munching, beer-swilling oafs, Frenchies are garlic-breathed, double-crossing b@stards and British are tea-drinking, terribly polite shopowners, Americans will often be viewed as fat, arrogant, greedy, badly-educated bullies. The difficulty you have is that the entire Rest-of-the-World thinks of you in these (or worse) terms. It’s going to take a bit of persuasion to change people’s minds and we aren’t going to live to see it, that’s for sure – it’s embedded in your culture.

Anyway, Happy Days! I am sure your participation in a variety of thread topics will enhance the quality of discussions. Stay away from any BNP discussions and you’ll be fine. :wink:

It must be hard being opposed to the Iraq war in the USA. I remember that mother who protested about it after her son died in the war and the way that the pro-war people demonized her. We do get reports about anti-war people in the US but they seem to be heavily outnumbered by pro-war people. I’ve talked to american anti-war and pro-war people and I can sympathize with the frustration of the anti-war movement. Often it’s like talking to a brick wall.

I totally agree that the war was unnecessary, it had nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with wmd and everything to do with the machiavellian schemes of the hawks in Washington. A lot of companies are profiting from the war and there is a lot of money to be made from the future development of Iraqi oilfields.

I think the main problem with the american public is that the news channels don’t always give them the full story and so those channels are sometimes reduced to vehicles of propaganda for the US government. That’s why so many people were misled over Iraq because the American media wasn’t giving them the full story.

It attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, but I agree that the terrorism argument regarding Iraq was bogus.

Personally, I’ve had enough of Tony Blair. He’s now nothing more than America’s errand-boy. There was a time when UK foreign policy was independent of US foreign policy but now everything Blair says with regard to the Middle-East sounds like American rhetoric. We’ve finally become the 51st state and Blair is nothing more than America’s b1tch.

Britain used to have some credibility in the Middle-East but thanks to Blair Britain is viewed as America’s flunkey.

It has to be noted though that Bush seems completely clueless about the entire mideast. He told the world that by invading iraq he would make the region an oasis of freedom and democracy but instead we see Iraq in flames, the west bank in flames, gaza in flames, lebanon in flames, Israel in flames. The region is approaching critical mass and that moron Bush is leading the world into the abyss. What did the world ever do to deserve George Bush?

Yeah.
Was the invasion of Iraq any less illegal than the invasion of Poland by the Nazi’s during WW2?
A load of propoganda and scaremongering about Weapons of Mass Destruction and Iraq’s involvement with Al Queda. Both turned out to be untrue.