On 9/11/2013 2:13 PM, Dave Smith wrote:
> On 2013-09-11 1:28 PM, casa contenta wrote:
>>
>>> Yet, there was that idea of Manifest Destiny that imagine the US
>>> expanding across North America. It invaded Canada to wrest us away from
>>> Britain. It supported the Texans in their fight for independence from
>>> Mexico, and later started a war a war with Mexico to leverage it into
>>> selling them the south west. It tried for years to acquire Cuba and
>>> supported its fight for independence from Spain and even managed to take
>>> control of the Philippines. It orchestrated a conflict in Colombia to
>>> enable the sever the northern part of that country to be become Panama
>>> so they could build a canal.
>>
>> A canal we later signed back over to the Panamanians once their nation
>> became stable.
>>
>
> You may have signed it back over to the Panamanians, but not to
> Colombia.

So, what's that to you?

Do you see Columbia as some bastion of regional economic or social
stability, or more a source of cocaine cartels?

> As I said, it had been part of Colombia until the US supported
> the independence movement to install a US friendly government that would
> let them build the canal.

Oh for shame!

> The return of the canal zone to Panama was
> after the US invasion that unseated one of their former supporters and
> CIA operatives, Manuel Noriega.

In other words we took care of bad business politically and then gave
them back the canal.

Scandalous I say!

Now then, what's it all to you?

Do Canadians not profit from canal shipping of bulk goods?

I know it's a moot question, as you have not the slightest intention of
replying honestly, or at all for that matter.

>> Do you think international commerce, even with Canada benefited from
>> this engineering marvel, or not?
>>
>> What is this ire you have for anything American anyway?
>
> Ire? Just pointing out some historical realities.

You're harping on one chapter after another for more than mere "pointing
out".

You've made a very clear point of disparaging us.

Why?

>>> True, and that is probably a bigger problem now than ever. I am not
>>> usually prone to buying into conspiracy theories but I have to wonder
>>> when a war in started in the basis of a load of lies and the company
>>> that was once headed by the VP is awarded millions of dollars in
>>> contracts, and where an army of mercenaries is hired to provide
>>> security. I have to wonder why teams of snipers under contract to the
>>> government are sitting in rooftops shooting Iraqis.
>>
>> Do you wonder if they are worse off than under Saddam when women were
>> taken of the streets by his sons and raped and killed, or when their
>> soccer team was hung on meathooks and beaten after a loss?
>
> The whole country is worse off now than they were under Saddam.

That's simply not provably true.

> There are more people being killed now than there were before.

Really?

Is that not a function of the centuries old sectarian shia-sunni feud
perhaps?

It's nice to know you prefer one form of murder over another.

Saddman and his sons had similar feelings.

> Don't forget
> that there was a time when he was on much better terms with the US, like
> when he was getting satellite intelligence to calibrate chemical attacks
> on Iranian positions.

I personally would have left it completely alone, but the nation saw it
otherwise, oh well.

It's a bit like Nancy Pelosi war-mongering now, the shoe is back on the
left foot.

We need to let the Syria arms turnover deal get done, it's not our fight.

>>
>>> > While the US had no such
>>>> obligation. The US entered WW I out of a sense of of noblesse oblige,
>>>> the same
>>>> humanitarian motivation to act in Syria now.
>>>
>>> That is a strange case of noblesse oblige. Most historians refer to the
>>> US outrage of the Zimmerman telegraph, an offer to support Mexico in an
>>> attempt to take back territory it has lost to the US.
>>
>> That's an utter misrepresentation of what happened, how you like to lie!
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
>
> LOL... only an idiot would call me a liar for writing that and then
> posting a link to an article that says what I said it did

The article accurately identifies an axis threat to the US.

Do you think Canada would stand pat if someone promised Alberta and BC
to the French as part of some global deal?

>> telegram instructed Ambassador Eckardt that if the U.S. appeared likely
>> to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican Government with a
>> proposal for military alliance, with funding from Germany. Mexico was
>> promised territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that had been
>> lost to the United States starting in 1836 as parts of the former
>> Republic of Texas, and in 1848 with the Mexican Cession. Eckardt was
>> also instructed to urge Mexico to help broker an alliance between
>> Germany and the Japanese Empire. Mexico, unable to match the U.S.
>> military, ignored the proposal and (after the U.S. entered the war),
>> officially rejected it.
>
> Brilliant.


What you bypassed , and perhaps I should have quoted deeper, certainly is:

"The Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted and decoded by the British
cryptographers of Room 40.[3] The telegram's message was:
FROM 2nd from London # 5747.
"We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine
warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of
America neutral."

You were aware that German U-boats made sorties up into New Jersey and
also off the California coast again in WW2, weren't you?

But to return to 1917, and we must as history repeats, and this was a
forshadowing:

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87...ue_22/ww12.htm

Defending the Atlantic Coast

Meanwhile, back in the United States and in operating areas as far
afield as the Panama Canal Zone and the Philippines, other U.S.
submarines mounted numerous defensive patrols for the duration of the
war. Despite the limited endurance of their earlier U-boats and the
strategic advantage of concentrating their anti-shipping campaign in
“target-rich” European waters, the Germans had demonstrated as early as
mid-1916 that they could operate in the western Atlantic and along the
U.S. coastline. In July, the large, unarmed, German cargo-carrying
submarine Deutschland – having broken through the British blockade –
appeared in Baltimore with a shipment of chemicals and dyestuffs, which
was traded for a quantity of strategic war materials to be carried back
to Germany. Deutschland made another round trip in November, but by
then, the combatant submarine U-53 had also crossed the Atlantic to
visit Newport, Rhode Island – and then sank five Allied freighters just
outside the territorial limits before returning home.

Thus, when the United States entered the war in April of the next year,
there was already significant anxiety about a potential submarine threat
off the East Coast. Further exacerbating this concern was the Navy’s
relative lack of first-line destroyers – approximately 50 in mid-1917 –
and the decision to send most of those to Europe. A massive building
program was already underway – it would lead to the eventual
construction of 273 four-stack, “flush-deck” destroyers by 1921 – but
for the rest of 1917, only five would be launched, and the need to
escort troop convoys to France took top priority. As a stopgap, U.S.
submarines were drawn increasingly into the anti-submarine campaign on
the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, and two divisions were even shifted from
Hawaii and Puget Sound to bolster their ranks.

By the beginning of 1918, small detachments of older U.S. submarines
were patrolling regularly from Provincetown, New London, Cape May, the
Delaware Breakwater (near Cape Henlopen), Philadelphia, Hampton Roads,
Charleston, Key West, Galveston, the Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and Coco
Solo in the Canal Zone. But in fact, a significant submarine threat only
materialized along the U.S. East Coast for a few months in mid-1918,
when Germany deployed a half-dozen long-range mine-layers and large
“U-cruisers” – patterned after Deutschland – across the Atlantic in a
last-ditch attempt to disrupt the American war effort. First to arrive
was U-151, which left Kiel in mid-April, mined the entrances to both the
Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, severed several telegraph cables near New
York, and sank 23 ships totaling 61,000 tons off New Jersey and Cape
Hatteras before breaking off in mid-June.4 During the remainder of the
summer, several more German long-range submarines carried out
anti-shipping missions along the coast, sinking in excess of 50,000
additional tons – including the Diamond Shoals lightship – and planting
minefields that destroyed at least seven more ships, among them the
heavy cruiser USS San Diego (CA-6). Additionally, a submarine-laid mine
heavily damaged the battleship USS Minnesota (BB-22) off Fire Island.


There was lot more at stake than any ineffectual army move Mexico might
have made on interior land in the US.

In fact at the time Pershing was on the Punitive Mission in Mexico to
try and hold Pancho Villa accountable for an incursion and attack on US
soil in Columbus, New Mexico.

He had a young officer named Patton who would later distinguish himself
in another war.

>>>> The Europeans had ****ed up badly and realized it. How could one nut
>>>> with
>>>> a gun precipitate so much death and destruction. Woodrow Wilson had
>>>> ideas,
>>>> solutions. Europe was grateful that our entrance cut the war short
>>>> drastically, and decided to listen to him.
>>>
>>> I can't blame all of Europe for that. They had established a status quo,
>>> but a rapidly and militaristic Germany was determined to expand its
>>> sphere of influence.
>>
>> Of course you can't blame them, you're too wrapped up in blaming America
>> for everything that has happened in the past 200 years!
>
> Bulshit.

Fact.

> I never blamed the US for what happened. I pointed out that
> they tried to sit out two world wars and that after they finally joined
> and tipped the balance they thought they earned the right to claim to be
> the world savior.

Oh there's the not so subtle little dig at the US again, just what is
your major problem with us anyway?

Do you think results might have been different BOTH times if we'd not
entered the fray?

>>> Once again it was a militaristic Germany looking to expand, this time
>>> under the Nazi banner. The British and French were not in a position to
>>> stop them.
>>
>> Balderdash, they lacked the will, or have you forgotten Neville
>> Chamberlain, the Great Appeaser?
>
>
> Can you read? They lost a generation of young men.

So what, so did Germany - that's a push.

> They had been
> fighting the Germans for more than three years before the Americans had
> boots on the ground. It left them broke.

Oh well.

> They were not prepared to
> enforce the Treaty of Versailles if they could not count on the US,
> which did not even ratify the treaty.

Then maybe they ought not to have signed the idiotic treaty!

>>> They had both suffered enormous casualties in WWI, pretty
>>> much losing a generation of young men. They realized that they could not
>>> count on the US for support to enforce the terms of the treaty that they
>>> US had pretty much dictated but which never ratified itself.
>>
>> That's an utter lie, we did NO such thing!
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
>
> Skip the Wiki condensed version.

Skip your useless claims and lies on us writing the darned Treaty.

> Read Paris 1919.
> The US did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the US did not join
> the League of Nations, which had been Wilson's idea.

So which is it then, both?

You vilify us for allegedly dominating the treaty, but then complain we
didn't sign it, ok...

Then you claimed we had the lead role in the League when we did not.

Make up your whirled peas of a mind.

>>>>
>>>> The US still did not have much of a standing army, although FDR,
>>>> eager to
>>>> get into the war, had started a draft way back in 1940.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Nor did Canada. We had only a small navy, but by the end of the war we
>>> had on of the largest.
>>
>> And you feelings on that?
>>
>> Pro?
>>
>> Con?
>
> It is a point of fact.

I see, you have strong feelings about our late entry and general public
misgivings, but not about your own.

Hypocrisy.

> I was responding to the comment that the US
> didn't have much of an army. As pointed out, Canada had a small army and
> a small navy, but they very quickly rectified that situation.

Oh bully for Canada, would you like to trade places with us and become
Team Canada, Global Cop?

Because if so I'd gladly hand you over the global law enforcement badges
and all the costs that come along with having armed forces deployed all
over this idiotically unstable planet.

You're already well down our road now by selling your resources and oil
companies to China anyway, just ask them for a loan and hop in the fray.

Rotsa ruck!