The UN and NATO don't make a military move without the US spearheading it. Korea? US spearheading. Kuwait? US spearheading.
The United States sent the largest contingent of troops to Korea because they had large numbers of active troops based in Japan, and because they were by far the participating country least ravaged by World War Two, both economically and in terms of manpower.
As for Kuwait, same deal. They already had troops in the gulf, and have the largest standing army in NATO. Is your argument that might makes right? In both cases, the decision to go to war was approved by the UN security council and the declaration of war was by the UN or NATO. America does not, in fact, lead either organisation, no matter how much they may like to think they do or how much it seems like it.
World War I was not a territorail conflict, it was a simple conflict between two countires that blew up thanks to alliances.
Nope. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assasinated by a pan-slavic nationalist allied with a non-government Serbian terrorist organisation, which Austria-Hungary decided to use as a pretext for annexing Serbia, which is something they'd been itching to do for ages anyway. This caused Russia to declare war on Austria-Hungary. Russia mobilised to bolster Serbia. The Germans realised this was the chance they'd been waiting for to finally finish the pesky business of the Franco-Prussian war, and attacked France through Belgium (The Schlieffen Plan). The British only became involved because of the violation of Belgium neutrality. World War One was the endgame of a series of conflicts involving the divvying up of Europe (and to an extent the Middle East and Africa) between the six great powers (France, Germany/Prussia, Britain, Russia, The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) that had been going on since Napoleon.
Have you ever heard of a country called French IndoChina?
Yes. I think the most salient points about it are probably contained in its name: that it was a French colony in Indochina. As opposed to, say, anything to do with America.
It was the US Congress who caused it to become the fuck-up it is now seen as, because they did not allow the military to fight a REAL war.
The United States deployed half a million troops using the most advanced weaponry in the world at the time, and accomplished nothing of value whatsoever,despite dropping over 7 million tonnes of bombs (3 times as many as used by the US in World War Two), which is equal to a 1,000 lb bomb for every single man, woman and child in Vietnam*, in a conflict which killed nearly 3 MILLION people. I would really, really love to know what you think a REAL war would have involved.
These people didn't even have proper weapons. How did they win? The US went in, trained them and armed them.
They won because the Soviet Union withdrew their forces on account of their country falling apart. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union was supporting the government of the (at the time) Democratic republic of Afghanistan, the PDPA (Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan) against Islamic fundamentalist rebels (the Muhajideen, which, incidentally, translates roughly as 'people involved in a jihad'). The weapons and cash which the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UK illegally funnelled into the Muhajideen through the military dictatorship in Pakistan were the same weapons used by the leaders of the rebellion to found and enforce the Taleban, and are the same weapons killing US and UK troops in the country today. Good one!
For Bosnia, I want you to tell that to my History professor, who was the commander of a Spec. Ops. group that was in that country from '93 to '96, and they . He stayed with families, barely scrapping by, all over the country.
Sorry, I was talking about
legal US military involvement. UN Peacekeepers were there of course since '92, in a humanitarian capacity, so I'm sure the Deltas and whatnot had a bit of fun. Pity that, whilst engaging in basically, illegal black ops, the US troops didn't actually manage to stop any of the mass killings or anything. Actually, one kind of wonders what they
were doing.
*and that doesn't even count chemical weapons or naval bombardments.
