[Mumitroll]

Whether the US is the most liked or disliked country depends on the period, but it's truly flattering, either way, that the entire world cares enough to boo the Iraqi invasion and cheer Obama's election.

well, the first is a major event indeed. it's not every day that someone performs a large-scale invasion of a sovereign country ignoring the UN and world opinion, especially with such obvious economic motives - oil control - as in Iraq.

the second is a media creation. even in Germany, if you ask people around, the majority is rather indifferent to US elections. the people who are interested were obviously mostly pro-Obama, since McCain is regarded as a continuation of Bush - who is in the world's opinion the worst US president ever. in Russia or China, the large majority doesn't care at all.

partially the "Obama-mania" is also due to his charisma. he's certainly a good speaker and has a good PR team, much better than any recent president or presidential candidate. coincidentally, Hitler also was a good speaker and had a good PR team

Oh, and as for the most hated (as opposed to simply disliked) country in history, I'd think Nazi Germany would take the cake. You just don't get away with committing genocide against white people, no sir.

well - white people arent the majority in the world, you know. US committed mass genocide against the Vietnamese population (both South and North), killing between 2 and 5 million (depending on source). it never paid any reparations or even apologized. in another completely clear case, the World Court ruled the US guilty of aggression and genocide in Nicaragua and ordered it to pay $2 billion in reparations already in 1986. The US flat out ignored that and continues to do so till today. you dont hear much about that in the media, do you? but the people who live there haven't forgotten it at all.

Justification? There is no justificaion for a nuclear strike AT ALL. That doens't mean it could never happen. If Israel has intelligence that Iran is about to launch a nuclear strike, they will launch a premptive strike.

well, just look into history. teh justification for the two nuclear strikes performed historically was to "save our youngsters" (quote Truman). it is regarded as a valid and correct decision up until today officially - the US also never apologized for that. even although it was a horrible, deliberate war crime - the bombs were dropped not on military targets (of which there were plenty), but on large cities, deliberately killing many thousands of women, children, etc. the Hiroshima bomb (I was there last year) was dropped merely a few hundred meters away from the city hospital.

and no Israel will not do a preemptive nuclear strike. it's suicide. what they would do if they had "information" on Iran "planning" a strike would be an air raid with conventional weapons, perhaps also cruise missiles.

As for the Arab states, the problem there is they would have no means to eradicate Israel unless an Iranian strike took out a good chunk of the Israeli military. The surrounding arab states aren't exactly shining examples of military compotence. They failed to beat Israel with a unified attack before, and the balance of power has shifted in Israel's favor since then.

if Israel were to attack Iran preemptively with a nuclear strike, all chance for any reconciliation would be lost forever. no Muslim would be content until Israel were destroyed completely, and earlier or later it would happen - latest simply when other Arab League states would obtain nuclear weapons. from a purely military standpoint, Israel ultimately fights a losing battle - they are merely around 8 million against half a billion Muslims even in the Arab League states (and more outside of it). that is occasionally admitted even by fairly high-ranking Israeli officers. I agree about the Arab states being largely bad at war, but even with that, the 1973 Yom Kippur war went far worse for Israel than the previous 1948 and 1967 wars. yes, they can so far survive by drafting women and receiving immense military support from the US, but if there were another major war in the near future, Israel would probably no longer be able to win conventionally and would have to resort to nuclear weapons.

What would you define as major?

launching the Six-Day War, nuclear attack on Iran, etc. the invasion of Lebanon, while also obviously a war crime etc, was arguably not so "major". but even there - it was not just supported by the US, there is strong evidence that the Bush administration actually exerted pressure on Ehud Olmert to launch it:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200.../060821fa_fact
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects...?itemNo=744043
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/739976.html

Israel has conducted military operations without US approval. Even in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, they used cluster bombs against civilian population centers after the US told them not to.

this is a minor technical detail. akin to the attack dog biting someone in the knee instead of the ankle where its master ordered it to.

Which is why the US has committed so many troops to the defense of Israel over the years. Oh that's right, we haven't.

the US has committed more military and financial assistance to Israel than to any other country in the world, ever.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/...ael050602.html

It did control 1/4 of the landmass of Earth. The Royal navy ruled the seas for hundreds of years. Sorry, but that's more than the US can claim. Sure they didn't have nukes, but they seemed to do fine without them, for the most part.

the extent of control possible then was far from what is possible today. today it is possible to control a place by many means, and having a military presence there is merely one (and if you check http://www.ppu.org.uk/pm/US-military-bases-2001-03.jpg you'll see that it's not much less than the territory of the British Empire). other means of control are things like the IMF or NAFTA, military and economic aid, proxy governments (as in the Ukraine, Georgia, etc).

also, the speed with which a country can be punished for disobedience is much higher today than it was back then, for obvious technical reasons. which is also one of the reasons why the US has made so many military interventions since WWII - a lot more than the British Empire in any similarly long period.

overall it is really a simple case for any historian to prove that US influence today is unprecedented, way higher than that of the British or Roman Empire. just read a bit on that, you'll easily find sources.

Disliking the US is not the same as hating the US. There's a big difference between having an unfavorible attitude towards US policies and chanting death to America. While opinions of the US have been declining in recent years, that's likely directly attributable to Bushy and his policies. Also your numbers are inflated.

the 80% number is from a poll i've seen already a few years ago. 90% for Germany and 95-99% for Muslim places and Russia is something I can estimate from personal experience.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/...08/7708893.stm

there are also some polls with different numbers, more favorable for the US, like http://pewglobal.org/commentary/disp...nalysisID=1019 (coincidentally, with figures by teh US Department of State). i dont think those are realistic though.

That's because nuclear weapons didn't exist yet. That still didn't stop people from killing each other with ruthless efficency, or from burning cities to the ground though.

the scale was different. nobody has ever killed more people on a single day than the US.

Right, theoretically, with large bribes. You do realize how tightly controlled such materials are, correct?

yes. in the US, UK, or Russia. in Pakistan? i wouldnt bet on it.

You don't seem to understand the American psyche. Look at what the US did after 9-11.

well, you see, earlier or later that "American psyche" (I'd rather call it "neocon psyche") will change. the latest would be after all major US cities are destroyed and tens of millions are dead - i.e. a large-scale nuclear war. a local nuclear explosion destroying a single city might or might not be enough. dont know for sure.

Now imagine that, only the US that no longer gives a shit about international law or avoiding civilian causalties.

thats already largely the case today.

Remember, the Bushy adminstration did present a weak case for the invasion of Iraq. We at least played lipservice to international law, so that's not the kind of situation I'm talking about.

the "case" was completely laughable, and everyone not-brainwashed knew it. the one and only reason for this war is geopolitical control of the region with world's 2nd-largest oil resources.

Funny I learned about it in school.

well, what else did you learn in school? probably you also learned that Japan provoked the US into dropping nuclear bombs on its cities, that the US won WWII, that space exploration started when Americans went to the moon, etc?

what you probably didnt learn is that the US killed far more civilians in Vietnam than Japan did in Nanjing - a number overall comparable to all of Japan's war crime victims.

Also once again, your numbers are inflated.

just a rough estimate.

That's of course not mentioning the rest of China, let alone the other areas Japan occupied.

Japan's total war crime victims for WWII are at around 5.5 million according to R. J. Rummel. Statistics of democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 Transaction. US civilian victims in Vietnam are around 4.5 million total (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War) - some sources count differently and have figures of around 3 million. either way, its a comparable figure.

a big difference is that Japan apologized for its crimes and paid reparations. the US never did.

World War II was a total war where the bombing of civilian population centers was par for the course.

and Vietnam wasnt a total war? where the napalm bombing of civilian population was par for the course?

Good that you don't mention Dresden though, since the US wasn't the one who did the main fire bombing. You can thank the Royal Airforce for that one.

i did mention Dresden above.

See the thing is, while they may not like current US policy, that is not the same as hating the US. The people may support a distancing from the US, but they most certainly do not support a severing of ties or anything extreme like that.

yes. nevertheless - its a clear fact that most of the EU governments are (for political/military reasons) running a course that is far more US-friendly (you could also say subservient) that what the majority of the population wants.

You might be more convincing if those weren't all huge business sectors you mentioned, if there wasn't a McDonalds in or near your city, if there weren't any US movies playing in your theaters, if the US auto industry didn't own quite a few european companies, and if you weren't typing that on a computer running software from a US company. http://forums.animesuki.com/images/a...ilies/wink.gif

McDonalds and movies are good cases, I'll give you that. the US auto industry though.. is pretty much on its deathbed at the moment. GM does own Opel, but it just recently asked for a €40 billion rescue package from the German government. i think I dont need to explain how bad the situation is for Chrysler and Ford.

regarding the software question - yes that industry is one of the few remaining US strengths. although to be accurate i'm typing this in a German X terminal on my Linux server box

also.. it's easy to reverse this argument. for example i'll randomly guess that most of your electronics are Japanese, most of the stuff in your house is made in China, if you drive a good car its German, etc.

Except that you're flat out wrong there. The US reduced its military a lot since the cold war.

reduced the people count - slightly. 1.5 mil active personnel + 1.5 mil reserve as opposed to about 1.8 mil active and 2 mil reserve at a local peak during the 1991 Gulf War. the military spending however has increased dramatically. $651 billion total projected for 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militar..._United_States
thats an unprecedented figure and more than the rest of the world combined. its over 100 billion more than at the peak times of the Cold War even if you factor in inflation.

We did in fact reduce our nuclear arsenal in accordance to the START treaty.

There are very major doubts about that. For example, regarding Trident missiles, tests were performed by the US with more than 8 warheads per missile, directly violating START-1. Russia complained about that, but nothing happened.The warhead covers used on Trident-1 and Trident-2 violated the treaty agreements for inspection options by the Russian side. Russian inspectors have been repeatedly denied access to nuclear subs which should have been inspected in accordance to the treaty. British missiles with nuclear carrying capacities were flight-tested at US sites - another treaty violation. US has announced that it did not have plans to use the B1 fleet as carriers for long-range nuclear cruise missiles, and agreed to seal the mounting pylons for heavy cruise missiles on B1s by welding which would require a factory visit to undo - which could be verified by Russian inspectors in accordance to the treaty. However, in reality, not welding was used, but an adhesive seal, which can easily be removed locally at the base where the B1s are stationed - which adds for another uncontrollable 1000+ deployable nuclear warheads - another major violation of the treaty. Yet another one was the scrapping process of the LGM-118 MX Peacekeeper missiles. According to the treaty, all stages of mobile BMs have to be scrapped - the US just scrapped the first stage of the MX missiles, which could in practice be replaced with the Castor-120 stage - which would allow to restore all 50 MX missiles with their 500 warheads within a short time. Yet another point is the deployment of US ABM defense - which also contradicts the treaty.

Thats just the tip of the iceberg, i'm too lazy to type it all off. Go inform yourself, it's all publicly available information. Basically the US circumvents the treaty wherever possible to keep and build up a large nuclear arsenal and a possibly advantageous situation for using it. Obviously you dont read all that in the NY Times though...

Also the Soviet Union didn't simply cut spending on it's military, it no longer exists as a nation.

the Soviet Union never even was a "nation"

Great that's one guy's opinion. If you look you can find many more who disagree. What we're seeing in Russia is most certainly not a return to their cold war stance.

the point is that this guy knows what he's talking about - different to the "many more who disagree". while I agree that Russia itself is not at all interested in resuming the Cold War, they dont really have any choice. they have to do something against the continuing military pressure from the US. and their measures like deploying anti-ABM missiles in Kaliningrad, developing new nuclear subs and BMs, and continually increasing military spending, are just logical consequences of US policy.