Quote:Look Magoo, I don't know who the hell this Ad Hominem guy is or why his sperm count is low, that's not the point. The point clearly is what does whether or not the U.S. is running shams from Iraq have to do with diet Hitchens point, or Jizz'ses's point? It doesn't, either way. Its mixing fish and apples, man. Its stupid. It doesn't make sense. It is irrelevant to the point.
Let me note first that I am no lover of Patrick Buchanan or David Irving, and I only know N. Baker from his last anti-Bush novel.
However, Hitchens is correct in his evaluation of US-UK politics. It was a stipulation, directly from Roosevelt to Churchill, that the cost of the Lend-Lease bailout would be the dismantling of Britain's colonial empire and the UN support of nationalism. Roosevelt was apparently not the originator of this, as it was carried on after his death under Truman's admin (and FDR never thought Truman worthy of including in any war briefings).
The upshot of the empire's dismantling was US military and surveillance proximity to Soviet satellite nations and the USSR itself, from former British turf. This, along with the long Cold War, *may* have been the endgame of FDR's backers in US-international banking. It may have been the point of FDR's early courting of Stalin, of his insistence that only he understood and could play "Uncle Joe," and of his shutout of Churchill's overtures to Stalin at Yalta. On the same business trip, FDR also shut out Churchill from US negotiations with Ibn Saud for aid in exchange for oil and military rights in Arabia. Consider also Eisenhower's refusal to permit Anthony Eden to use the British military to take back the Suez in the Egyptian nationalization crisis. See Paul Johnson's excellent study of the 20th century, "Modern Times," and ex-CIA officer Robert Baer's recent precis on the Saudi meeting in "Sleeping with the Devil."
In its day (and in the years before 1917), US entry into WW I was widely perceived by the Left in the US as a fight to protect US investments in Europe. I myself am interested in Buchanan's thesis that WW I and WW II are the same conflict redux, as the upshot of both was a repartitioning of Europe (and, at Versailles, 1919, the Middle East and western Central Asia). After WW II, the 1919 repartitioning co-opted from Woodrow Wilson's idealism by David Lloyd George of England and Clemenceau of France was adapted by the US to serve its own petroleum needs, and the requisites of the long Cold War game of bankrupting the Soviets.
As I have made manifest, I tend to agree with Hitchens' suggestion that a Pearl Harbor-style incident was used to create paranoid support for the latest grab of land, resources, and governments. In 1917, suspicion of the motives of the Great War could not be immediately laid to rest in the US citizenry by the sinking of the Lusitania, which only resulted in the persecution and even lynching of German-Americans in podunk towns of the midwest. It took Wilson's 1917 revelation to Congress of the infamous Zimmerman telegram, timed to coincide with the abdication of the Czar and the impending withdrawal of Russia from the war, to get the US to declare war on Germany. "Infamous" as in the infamous "attacks" at Pearl, the Gulf of Tonkin, the WTC/Pentagon.