wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

his,
LOL! I guess W has made conservatives out of all us libruls, longing for the past times when truth was truth.

Northern Ireland is another example of religious conflict dissipating because of Economic security and prosperity. I have often thought that if the Israeli street fighters who became the leaders had had the benefit of military education at Sandhurst, and learned something about 'empire' building, they could have built economic freedom and prosperity in the occupied territories and there would have been peace. Now 40 yrs later, a lot of things could have been forgotten. The one thing Bush did say that I liked was 'contiguous state' because he is saying that the settlements and 'outposts' are the root cause of this problem. That is why Arafat rejected the proposal in the first place, because of the Swiss cheese that has become the West Bank. Leave it to the Neocons to destroy peace! In this case Israeli ones, brandishing guns (many Brooklyn born). Israel is going to have a problem removing them.

eCAH
i guess i'm a new conservative then. never thought that would happen.

The key reason there were no major wars in Europe -- or any further world wars -- since 1945 was the advent of the atomic bomb, whose use by either side would have resulted in a global apocalypse.

Hey his,

You're so out-of-date, living in that pesky reality based world. The U.S. has moved on, into the reality-creation business, where down is up and up is down. Get with the program.

but who is smarter the EU who gets USA to pay for the security so they can have a modern nation or the USA who spends their budget on war making themselves a target and can't stop a bridge from falling or a city from flooding?

sue,
the only religious wars in Europe in the 19th & 20th centuries I can think of would be northern Ireland and maybe the war against the "godless" communists in the 1920's when western powers tried to end the revolution. by 1700 europe ended wars of religion, they sent all their crazies over here

This argument whether the Civil War should've been fought is absolute crap because there was no real decision that we can sieze upon.

For example, the South initiated the immediate crisis by seceding. They did this because Lincoln, an anti-slavery Republican, was elected President. So do we argue here about whether abolitionists should or should not have antagonized the South on the issue of slavery?

Or do we argue about whether the North should've let the South go once it had made the decision to secede? At this point, we're not arguing about ending slavery anymore. We're arguing about whether the US should fight a war to restore lost territory and the legitimacy of a state's right to leave the federal government.

The question then becomes, would an independent Confederacy have gotten rid of slavery? The answer is almost certainly yes, but not completely until about 1900. Slavery was a dying institution, and there were economic and political pressures both within the South and from outside that were forcing the slavers' hand on the subject.

And even then, it was the South who directly started the war with the attack on Fort Sumter.

So it wasn't just one decision. It was many decisions over many years... none of which amounted to a decision to go to war to end slavery. It was a lot of actions and reactions to particular developments.

accountability is anti-authoritarian.

Marshall Plan.
Marshall Plan.
Marshall Plan.
Do the Math.

if you rely on an external source of security resources you can afford to build a very nice social welfare system, even if you resent the help.

Hey Martin Hill. The U.S. is the Global Ruler. We can tell everyone what they think and what they should do. /snark

Please ask the guest how many European wars in the 19th and 20th centuries were wars of religion?

James Sheehan's justification of The Civil War is simple minded. How does one know in advance what the consequences of a war would be? How do you judge the price of a cause no matter how admirable that cause may be.
By the way, the first edition of The People's Alamanac had a section in it that took on various "what if" scenarios, including what would have happened if the South won the civil war. The analysis concludes that slavery would have disappeared way before the end of the 19th century.

"Europe"'s enemies are historically mainly itself; that's the interesting phenomena here. After World War II, they stopped fighting each other. Why?

And to repeat what I said above, it's the same reason they stopped fighting each other last time, 2000 years ago.. there was a greater power uniting them, the Roman Empire.

Another illuminating example from history: the Four warring provinces of East Asia united under the Chi'in to form China.

Or the Ottomans in the Near East. etc. etc.

Is it just distasteful to say that Empire is again the reason?

Yet again you have American experts pontificating on what is happening in Europe, and what Europeans think, and what Europeans do, without having anyone from Europe to comment on or counter what are quite often erroneous claims and statements. Surely it would be possible to have participants from Europe in discussions of this sort?

William James postulated that what mankind needed was the "moral equivalent of war." He believed that, horrible as it was and is, war does bring forth wonderful virtues and actions from its participants: self-sacrifice and courage in all their forms. He believed that the world could not be free of war absent the development of something that would draw forth these great things.

As many look at Europe today, there are those who feel that Europe is in steep decline on many fronts, peace notwithstanding.

fyi
civil war was not about ending slavery. it was about the federal governments right to stop slavery from spreading west.

Joe Stiglitz on exact cost of war

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/12/bush200712

It is a pleasure to have a senior historian deal with a topic that some of us have been studying for 4-5 decades in the Peace History Society. As the author of a book on the 19th century European peace movement, I think there is one point which Sheehan and others ignore .. and that is the fact that the very well developed peace movement which anticipated the horrors of World War I, depended nearly exclusively on legalistic arguments against war. But women activists who joined in the second half of the 19th century pushed the movement farther away from parliamentary and international legal arguments. Not only arguing for a mother's right to preserve her children's lives, most women insisted on the necessity of ALL European states to become socially responsive to ALL citizens, to prevent people from falling for the siren call to arms. An e mail is too limited a space for evidence but it would be nice if professionals paid attention to the whole picture.

Sandi Cooper
author Patriotic Pacifism, Prof. of History at CUNY

The other thing that floored me about Bush's statement was that he said we had to create a CONTIGUOUS Palestine! Has he ever looked at a map of the region? Once maybe?

You cannot create two contiguous states from Palestine and Israel. Palestine has two territories on opposite sides of Israel from each other. If you give them a strip of land, it either has to go THROUGH Israel thereby cutting Israel in two, or it has to go AROUND Israel creating an untenable stretch of land that is absurd to expect any country to accept.

Europe does have enemies. They have the same concerns about terrorism that we do, but they've got more than sufficient security/police forces to combat that problem. They don't have a large, aggressive nation-state on their borders that they have to be concerned about however.

Wars are becoming increasingly pointless. Commerce has rendered it obsolete for many places in the world.

brian's attempts to use Europe as a paradigm for the Middle East seems misguided.

although Israel does emulate the territorial conquest lebensraum policy of Nazi Germany, isn't the paradigm of South Africa a better fit?

and in South Africa it had taken hundreds of years for the indigenous peoples to take back their homeland.

Peace is achievable next year. What utter arrogance. Bush is such a tool.

There will never be peace in the Middle East because it is a conflict of religion. It's a conflict on what God said and who he said it about and who he spoke to and where he put down his finger and drew the lines in the sand. And none of these things are prove-able, none of these things can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction because they are too subjective. It's a conflict of who Daddy likes best and the pain of rejection cannot be borne and isn't an option.

Make no mistake and don't hold your breath. Unless the clouds part and the mighty finger of God points down to make the final call (You, Here! You, Over Here! Now shut up!), there will never be peace in the Middle East.

Hell, I would give anything for a giant voice to ring out over the skies of Jerusalem, telling all us children to cut the shit already. I long for it the same way I watch the skies on Christmas Eve, looking for a reindeer-drawn sleigh.

Europe doesn't depend on the U.S. for its security. It doesn't have any enemies, unlike the U.S. which now goes about creating enemies wherever it goes.

Isn't Pax Americana a simpler and more correct hypothesis? i.e. most of Europe is internal to the American Empire - bases, economic control and increasingly culture - and hence doesn't fight, the same way as the Federal States of America do not.

US deserves credit for marhsall plan- but the EU needs to learn to tell the US where to go?

from whom does Europe need to be protected??

they don't need us!!!

hjs, you're right about that. Germany was actually the only country trying to stop WWI from occurring. The French and Russians were mobilizing to attack them, Germany insisted that they stop or they would declare war. France and Russia continued mobilization and Germany declared war.

Furthermore, in 1916, the Germans approached the British and French for a sort of peace without victory, but the Allies figured the USA was going to enter the war on their side, so they rejected the offer to stop the senseless killing.

Germany did a lot of things wrong in that war, but they were hardly the kind of aggressors they became in the Second World War.

the horrors of ww1 are shared by all the great powers, not just germany. also in ww2 the allies did "bad things" as well.
the victors do write the history.

tami,
u are off topic but your right. "Israeli right-wingers are as threatening looking as Palestinian terrorists. didn't one of them kill a prime minister.

I must protest the image that you have used of the Israeli right-wing supporter protesting. By selecting this image, you make it look as if all Israeli right-wingers are as threatening looking as Palestinian terrorists who frequently wear masks and wave (real) guns. The truth is, this was the only protester dressed like this and he was removed by Israeli police for waving a (toy) gun. Moreover, the Getty Images original caption read: An Israeli right-wing supporter brandishes a toy gun, which resulted in him being taken away by police, while demonstrating against the visit of US President George W Bush to the Middle East on January 10, 2008 in Jerusalem, Israel.

On your website, you removed the part of the sentence which said that he was removed by Israeli police.

It is my opinion, unfortunately, that Europe has reached the final stage of the enlightenment before us.

Well, that might be a big reason why they didn't remilitarize, but they could've easily just gone back to in-fighting and the kind of small scale wars that have plagued its various states for millenia. If anything, it was the ability for the Americans and British to setup friendly governments in virtually all of Western Europe after the Second World War that caused these states that battled each other for so long to rally together and face a stronger threat from the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American domination of the continent in the immediate aftermath of the war and the Cold War tied these countries together. I think it will last at this point eventhough that threat has been removed.

Of course, one could argue that Western Europe would've been relatively war-free for the last 150 years had it not been for Otto von Bismarck. They had been moving increasingly in the direction of a pan-European peace before he decided to forge a Prussian-led Germany at any cost.

A big reason Europe is demilitarized is that they rely on the US to take care of their defense for them.

That's not why Venice has a remarkably low crime rate... it's because a getaway gondola is not terribly practical :)

Some years ago visiting Venice we were struck by the city's claims of a remarkably low crime rate. We asked a local policeman why this was. The patrolman smiled and said, "We got it out of our system a long time ago."