Well, you've got to exercise it just like any other muscle.

He's full of it there, anyway. Hitler was everybody's enemy but Hitler's, and that last part is debatable.

The United States was providing material support (that's military supplies, not fizzy sugar water) to Great Britain in March of 1941, China in April, and the Soviet Union in June. That's a bit before Pearl Harbor.

And not exactly neutral, especially considering that this was back in the days before the "Unitary Executive" theory, when a President actually had to go to Congress in order to commit troops against a sovereign nation.

Indeed.

I had read that the Neutrality Act in 1939 started the U.S. sending "arms and other aid" to Britain and France.
But yeah, I wanted to retort with some things about giving Germany Coke ads and syrup while we gave Britain weapons and millions but decided Fanta and Volkswagens were totally worth it and I'd just go easy on him.

I am not seeing your point here.

The "Coalition of the Willing" perpetrated the Iraq war, not the insurgents. Remove the coalition, and you remove the reason for insurgency.

That's oversimplistic. If and when the Coalition withdraws, if it leaves a power vacuum with hostile sectarian contenders, the conflict will continue.

I think that supports my point.

The USA could always leave behind some CIA and Special OPs people, just like there were before April 2003.

Treating Iraq as if its a homogeneous nationstate is the same mistake the neocons made in the invasion, and the same mistake the British made cobbling the damn country together in the first place.

So, to answer your question, sure, I'll dispute that that statement could be taken as applying to all Iraq.

Funnily enough, neither do I.

Yes, I know many muslims (mera nam Eddie hey). I've also travelled to muslim countries, and debated political theory and theology with imams and lay muslims alike. I didn't start out believing Islam was incompatible with Western democracy - few fresh faced political students do. I came to that conclusion after years of study and reflection.

I also did not say that Islam was incompatible with human rights - I said it was incompatible with a Universal Declaration on said, as evidenced by the Cairo declaration I referred to above (aka the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights), as well as Western democracy. Such democracies hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct - you might have missed the whole Satanic Verses thing, or the more recent furore regarding cartoons of the Prophet published in a Danish newspaper (the Jyllands-Posten), but we certainly didn't. Sharia law doles out punishments that even the most ardent pro-death sentence American would baulk at. Which you might know if you'd ever read the Holy Qur'an. Which, incidentally, I have. Have you ??

Did you declare war on him in 1941 ?? No. Can he therefore be called in any reasonable definition of the word your 'enemy' at that point ?? No. Care to retort ??

As ever, you tend to miss the point. No-one on this side of the Atlantic is unaware of the sacrifice in blood paid by US service men and women to liberate Europe from the clutches of Nazism and Fascism. It's taught to us in our schools, in TV documentaries such as The World At War and by our forebears - we don't need fictional Hollywood blockbusters to tell us (yes, I'm implying you do). We are also aware, however, that despite the strenuous efforts of European leaders such as Churchill and De Gaulle the US remained physically out of the war until dragged into it by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Untrue ??

I don't remember the Canadians having much to do with the 'cobbling together' of Iraq. Oh, you've seen your error. Pity I spotted it before you had a chance to correct it, eh ??

And I believe photoline's argument is that the insurgency would end when the occupation did. No mention of a cessation of hostilities, just of the insurgency. It may indeed be replaced by a civil war, but that does not negate the validity of his argument. Perhaps in future you could stick to arguing about what we actually write, rather than what you think we did.

Yeah. I'm so mortified.

That's just semantic quibbling, and you know it. Going by your interpretation, what he said would actually have been entirely meaningless.

Then you're sorely mistaken. American students are taught about the Second World War in our schools. We also have television programs and museums as you do which teach us about the conflict. We also have grandparents who served in the military during the time, as well as survivors of the Holocaust who relay to their descendants the horrors and the triumphs of that conflict.

I'll concede that the Second World War didn't affect the American civilian populace as deeply as it did the British, as we were not subjected to physical attack as the UK was (though that fear was omni-present in the American psyche at the time). However to say the American populace is ignorant of the sacrifices made in World War II, of both our troops as well as the other Allies, is a fallacy, and I'll kindly thank you to get down from your high horse.

Really ?? Hmm. I was merely going by the word of my friends Emily (a US teacher with whom I shared a flat in Prague) and Gita - neither of them put much store in the history lessons taught in the schools they attended, and it was their assertion that most Americans learn such things from the movies. I guess you must have enjoyed a better education than them, eh ??

You think you should get credit because you had to study to become bigoted?

That's not in any way a meaningful distinction. What distinguishes "human rights" is universality.

The UN declaration therefore claims to represent humanity as a whole. Whether or not the Cairo declaration represents anybody is a matter of you define as speaking for "Islam." There are plenty of Muslims who hold your view that their religion is incompatible with the UN declaration. There are plenty of Christians and Communists and Fascists and adherents of countless other ideologies who believe the same. But Islam is not an ideology, it's a religion.

Yes. I've also read the Bible. It's no prettier. If you take it as a model for a political constitution, it's barbaric. But that's not what defines a believer in a religion.

Retort to what? All you've proven is your ability to confine the "reasonable definition of the word 'enemy'" so as not to include someone who intends to destroy you.

And we did declare war on Germany in 1941, actually.

Wow, you must know me pretty well. Quite an achievement for somebody I've never heard of before tonight. You must be some kind of genius.

Yeah, thanks. Being a stupid American I might have otherwise missed all your other jibes at stupid Americans.

What's your point? Wait, nevermind, actually. I failed at caring.