[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Neal

Sky, you have your head in the clouds. Forget "moral authority" and "samurais", practical steps are necessary. Steps taken by the Kennedys, Roosevelts, Trumans, Reagans, and Thatchers in the past kept you from speaking Russian and made it possible for the world to last this long without another world war. The world is not going to burst forth in love and understanding tomorrow, people are still essesntially the same. If you apply some of your analytical skills to the substance of Kennedy's "emotional catch-phrases and pithy slogans...", you would see it was a necessary move to keep the Soviet Union in check. You wouldn't have done very well in the USSR, not with your independant nature.

You keep waiting for the aliens to unite us under a one-world peace but I think more pragmatism would be more helpful.

And what is your pragmatic solution? Hoping for a holy saint, or a better Führer in the WH? The UN sanction do not hit Kim, they hit the already starving people. I do not judge the moralaity of it, I just doubt thta this could be called "pragmatism". Or nuking NKorea, maybe even preemptively? Massmurder (nuclear war simply is that) of a people that are victims, for just some dozen people at the top being bad bullies? Or retaliate nith nukes if they attack first? you have a right of self-defense, agreed, but again, mass murdering even in case of self-defense is not what correlates with the meaning of the word pragmatism, in my subjective understanding.

No-no, Neal, you just make it sound as if all that is needed to improve the world is a Kennedy-guy and a heart-warming speech and a red line drawn for this or that bad guy (many of them we have created ourselves), and that is all that is needed to let the West, or America, appear as the knight of the holy powers of light, and save the planet. Indeed, that is one of my most dominant impression about Americans: a great tendency and vulnerability to blindly believe in authorities especially a president, and easily falling for speeches that are done with rehtorical raffinesse. Maybe a mentality born from the colonizing period and wars with the indians, I don't know.

I just think beyond that immediate action, and reminded you that not all but much of the evil in the world today is created by actions and decision masterminded and carried out by - ourselves in our shining armour. Our position in the fight against tyrannies, progroms, terror and islam by far is not as clean and shining and perfect as America believes. We have plenty of dark spots on our not so white jackets, really. And that you made my comments look as naive love for the good things in life and hoping for aliens from outer space, just illustrates that you do not see that so many of today'S situations are created with help of the West and America, or that you do not want to see it and prefer to think of America as the country of the still morally superior who never troubled any water. From America I only always hear: tough stand here, tough stand there, but I never hear America thinking about it's own contribution to the global mess. You people still seem to think that you have nothing to do with it, that everything would be better if everything just would be like America, and you still seem to think that the many international political decisions you formed and implemented are only selflessly and really for the good of the people whom are affected.

But that things like the ICF for example has led foreign nations into higher dependency and made more people even poorer than helping to improve their life, while it all happened for OUR economical benefit and interest keeping, you refuse to see. Now the rules of the ICF are starting to work against us under the mechanism of so-called globalization (have you noticed the fall in enthusiasm for it in Western economies during the last two years or so, while it starts to become hurting not omnly for th eothers, but for ourtselves as well, while many of the others - are becoming stronger by it?), and I predict you that it is only a question of years now until it will be thought about to replace the ICF by a new design that matches our egoistic interests better - it will be argued to do so for very different reasons than what I said above, of course. but it will not work this time, for china, SE Asia and S America have learned their lesson and are to strong now as if you can push personal agendas through against their will. So that globalisation more and more wreaks havoc amongst Western employees and leads to regular jobs being replaced by low-wage mini-jobs by the many millions, and the class of the so-called working poor is increasing, in some nations even exploding, is in fact kind of a blowback ( i do not refer to chalmers johnson's book title this time, but use the term in the original CIA meaning of it: negative consequnces feeding back on us from causes and actions that are so long ago and so far away that we do not remember them and do not see the link between cause and effect and thus attribute these consequences to different causes that have nothing to do with it). But many of such international structures are masterminded by America, and give America a dominating position in it.

You also often make it look as if you only bring sacrifices and nobody honours you and that you are strong, militarily for example, completely by your own effort. And while you have waged more wars for SELFISH reasons in the last 70 years than anyone else, you present yourself as the misunderstood victim of anti-americanism and international hate that only always brings sacrifices and is payed be people becoming greedy and envy at (of?) america. But as so many commentators have calculated before, without incredibly high financial investements from other countries and especially europe into your national finance saystems, you simply would be to poor to maintain such a giant military apparatus that you now call your own - you depend on us, like it or not, and that is nothing new in history: many empired depended on military contributions from their vasallas and thus enforced the flow of goods and finaces into the empiral centre, no matter the cost. you are living a national lifestyle that you cannot pay for by yourself. You live on tick. All Western nations live on tick, but america by far more than anyone else. And you consider it to be a naturalness. Some days ago somebody here told me proudly that it already has been taken care of by planning not to ever pay back the massive debts, and calculating them on a 1:20 basis only. If financial investments into the US would suddenly dramatically drop, your lights would go dark. During the last five hundred years, the majority of european nations had run into total bancruptcy over reasons of living beyond their potential and maintaining a military during the many wars over here that simply strecthed their finacial systems beyond braking point: they had to start new, at point zero, with all the chaos and personal tragedy of ruined families this meant for the affected nation's population. the US is steaming into a comparable direction - at maximum speed.

And concerning Kennedy, I want to remind you that he, or you, or we all, simply had LUCK during Cuba. Contemporary witnesses of name, Kissinger for example, I think McNamara also, said it very clearly that it was not a crisis that got solved and managed: "Things were out of control. We had completely lost control at some time. We were simply lucky."

Nothing against pragmatism. But that must be considered to be much more than just a popular leader with catching speeches. Sense of realism and being aware of one'S own positive as well as negative influence during the emerging of current situation are necessary preconditions. and here I see America failing as well as Europe is failing, too, but both for different reasons and deficits. America needs Europes financial support, and europe indeed would need a strong and leading america. We are sitting in the same boat, as we say in German. That'S why I consider it to be of such high interst for us europeans as well what kind of leadership the Us is led by, and how trustworthy the motives of it are. If it fails, not only America but Europe feels the consequences as well, sometimes even much more immediately and directly than the US, for example Islamic terrorism. If this mutual dependency would not exist, I wouldn't give a damn about Bush and would have scratched his name from my memory long time ago. Bush not only brought America into trouble, but us as well.

Seen that way, Kennedy would be better than Bush. Anybody would be better than Bush. Maybe you are right after all with your call for pragmatism