Originally posted by ape
well if the euro is being prepped to take the place of the dollar is the EU ready to project it's 'military might' together united as a union who
can't even agree to a constitution to not only protects its interests and investments but it's allies interests such as the US does right now in a
very formidable fashion?
First, the US does not protect its allies' interests. The US protects its own self-interest and then dresses it up in altruistic clothing. And
please don't go down the "you'd be speaking German if it weren't for us" route - Averell Harriman's bank made huge amounts of money (for
Dubya's grandaddy Prescott Bush, notably, among others) from the economic reorganisation of Germany performed by the Nazi party, and IBM profited
from selling technology that would be used in the Holocaust. Part of the way the US dug itself out of the Depression was to invest in Nazi Germany in
the first place. Who was Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1933? Adolf Hitler.
The US, btw, made a profit off the first Gulf War, from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
And the Euro is the
free choice of the countries concerned, unlike the dollar, which was forced down the throats of OPEC by the US after it
left the gold standard (because it had printed
way too much money and was, effectively, bankrupt even then). Military might is not the
solution to everything.
to quell or deter foreign aggression that could possibly disrupt the flow of oil
The sheer denial of reality in that statement is mind-blowing. The US has invaded two countries in the past five years, and is getting set to take
action against another, to control oil supplies. And the net effect, thus far, has been to send oil prices rocketing (whoops! but
such a boon
for the oil companies that back Bush and his criminal cronies) and to reduce the supply of oil coming out of Iraq to a trickle.
The US doesn't deter aggression: it
embodies it.
what about islamic radicalism??
What about it? It's continually overstated as a problem by the US media, which is funny, because it's a problem that's actually been inflamed by
US actions. Iran, for example, was a modernising secular democracy until the US overthrew President Mossadegh in the fifties because
he wanted to
nationalise their oil industry. The US installed the Shah, and trained a secret police so vicious and repressive they made the KGB look like a
bunch of Girl Guides. Result? A rise in militant Islamic fundamentalism and the rule of Khomeini. Did you know that Iranians referred to the US
Embassy as "the nest of spies"? I know that the US embassy hostage taking is routinely portrayed in the US media as just ragheads getting angry
with the much misunderstood US, but they had their reasons to hate your government. They knew who was behind the installation of the shah, and they
knew who equipped SAVAK and provided their training in torture techniques. Oh, torture and the US were bedfellows long before Abu Ghraib: it's part
of the mix of tactics taught in counterinsurgency classes at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and has been since at least the
sixties.
There is so much nonsense about Islamic fundamentalism on these boards. The Islamic population of the UK is tiny, slightly over one percent of the
total. Most of those people are moderates, although some are being radicalised because we've been dragged into that Godawful War of Terror. The few
who are really upset get all the media coverage. Funny that.
the dollar has proven it's stability and basically rebuilt europe and japan to what it is today,
Er... don't know about Japan, but the UK has only just finished paying off the Marshall plan loans.
The rest of the world is waking up to the fact that the dollar is way overvalued, and has been for around forty years (ever heard of Bretton Woods?).
They're looking for a more stable currency, and the Euro is seen as the best bet. Of course there are flaws there, but it's still seen, by people
who think about this stuff for a living, as a better bet than the dollar.