I love all you Euro's view of the World. Again, even though Libya is in your back-yard, we get snookered into doing the heavy lifting. Look at the hypocrisy from France when oil is involved (and Germany and Turkey)---at least the USA can't be blamed for this by saying we want the oilfields:rolleyes:

The hypocrisy of Obama is also too much for me to bear. If Bush were doing this he would be all against it---now he gets us into another Middle East war with no stated goals. On top of that it should have been done weeks ago if we were going to do this at all:confused:

Why do you think that these states are able to act like this? Because they do not have a care in the world and also do not care about the world either.
They are homogeneous states, with little outside interaction or ideas. They are the enablers of dictators and repressive regimes also. At least we pick a side and don't just go with the flavor of the month;)

Oh sure you do, everybody does eventually.

Since you allowed the thread to remain open for a fair response, I will be as polite as possible.
1. When you are talking about the Jihadists, you were talking about who is responsible for the revolutions in the middle east. They are NOT backed by Jihadists. In fact these movements are the Jihadists worst nightmare, they want to impose a theocracy and they want the people to support them in that. When women come out into the street to protest is says a number of things about who the people behind the protests are. If you know about conservative muslim culture/beliefs you would know that women protesting is a giant NO NO! The last thing they want is women who are independent and politicaly motivated.
The protesters (especially the early ones) were overwhelmingly middle educated class. The US has pushed economic reform in places such as Egypt and other middle eastern states. This economic growth and economic reform allowed for the creation of a more robust middle class who are aware of their governments totalitarian actions to stiffle dissent. The middle class has the education and means (computers, internet etc) to understand the situation that they are in and compare their own state of affiars to others elsewhere. This "relative deprivation" creates the social unrest. I could say alot more about this but I cant type out 50 pages on development theory. But it is clear to everyone (no one in political science debates who the driving forces are in these revolutions) that it is a middle class push, like nearly every revolution before it - and these middle class protestors are strongly anti extremist, they do not want a government that will repress them again.
Point is the women protesting is indicative of a social and class based movement which is contradictory to your assertions.

Now you quoted me as saying "orchestrated and provided the means for dictators to put down their people is just radical propaganda". I would like you to note that you misquoted me because I never said "is just radical propaganda". Dont know if that was an accident or not, but it was not a correct quote.
Now Egypt is one of the biggest receivers of US military aid in the world, they also are a dictatorship. Same goes for a vast number of regimes, Yemen included. Things are overall better now but the US has a horrible track record of funding extremists. You know the Taliban and Al Qaeda are actually american creations? In the 80s when the soviets invaded Afghanistan we funded the Mujahadeen (sp) who fought the Soviets. Post cold war the Mujahadeen leadership moved to create Al Qaeda, and the Taliban secured the local leadership roles.
The chemicle weapons used by Saddam on the Kurds are also ours more or less. We provided the tech and info along with military supplies to Iraq when they were at war with Iran (Rumsfeld was butt budies with Saddam).
Or the Contras (Reagans freedom fighters who systematically commited genocide) or the coup in Chile which installed Pinochet... The list goes on and on and its well documented, much of this was orchestrated by CIA director Dulles, who is also responsible for the coup in Guatemala because of lobbying pressure from United Fruit Corporation (not kidding).
Its not hard to see why there is resentment towards the US.

Now as far as the UN is concerned, the US is a security council member incase you didnt realise, so we play a big role in UN decisions. Also the US spends more on its military than any other nation (US Navy budget is more than the next 12 nations in the world combined, and 11 of them are allies).
In fact the us has NOT taken the lead, the French have and all I hear is complaints that they jumped the gun to get the glory. Also a big reason the UN has not acted in Sudan is because China is a permanent UN Security council member, with a veto and they are heavily invested in Sudan's oil industry to insure their supply of oil and other rare materials into the future. Due to this the UN security council measures that have passed were non binding, and while were not enacted.

US gives a mediocre amount in foreign aid in proportion to GDP.
"Fact is, America gives more in aid to foreign countries than the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED"
Not true in the slightest, and we give far more military aid then humanitarian aid. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages...n-foreign-aid/
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/3646/
http://mediamatters.org/research/200501040003
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign..._United_States

I happen to know alittle about this area, because I moved from Australia to Singapore because a family member of mine was working in Aceh for post tsunami relief and NGO aid evaluation.

Dont have time to respond more right now, sorry. I would suggest though that you go read a range of commentary on international events in order to avoid the bs the american media (especially fox) likes to spoon feed the public who still believes we won the vietnam war, thinks Iraq had wmds (which they didnt and the arms inspectors were orderd out by the US) or they had ties to terrorists (which they didnt, because Saddam was a member of the Baith (sp) party which was secular because he was Shiite and Al Qaeda was Sunni and they hated each other with a passion).

In any case I appreciate you leaving the thread open for a response.

Lol when I saw this post I immeditely thought about going to get the picture of Rummsfeld huggin sadam. Someone beat me to it (but only the handshake pic). Your charactarization of other countries is completely offbase.

Also Libya has significant oil fields and reserves, which might be a reason why the US would not want to leap into action overeagerly I would say?

Heliocon... You popped in new content, which should have some response

You said:
Dont have time to respond more right now, sorry. I would suggest though that you go read a range of commentary on international events in order to avoid the bs the american media (especially fox) likes to spoon feed the public who still believes we won the vietnam war,

I have never mentioned fox - you are out of line on that

I don't believe America won the Vietnam war - I recall the "Michelin" rubber plantations had deals and couldn't be bombed and the VC were using them as secure positions.

I recall the VC were unloading SAM missiles into Hanoi harbor and American pilots would be court martial, if they struck them.

I recall VN where the American politicians served up over 50,000 American soldiers to the graveyards.

I recall the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia and the murderous communist takeover.

I think that the American failure in VN must have been a horror story for the VN people when America pulled out, when I consider what the communists did to the people of Cambodia.

You said:
thinks Iraq had wmds (which they didnt and the arms inspectors were orderd out by the US) or they had ties to terrorists (which they didnt, because Saddam was a member of the Baith (sp) party which was secular because he was Shiite and Al Qaeda was Sunni and they hated each other with a passion).

Making war with Iraq on a lie was an unspeakable crime.

I become angry when I think of how many people have died in Iraq in a war predicated upon a lie.

I don't think you need to respond, because I pretty well agreed with you in this response.