> Brian wrote: > if YOU have a problem with them, you deal > with it yourself.
Great analysis and it follows Occom's Razor. I would just add one thing to it which is France saying, "if you would like us to support you, ok, but what's in it for us?" That's where I think Mr. Powell couldn't thrown in a piece of the reconstruction or something and got support from all of Europe. I really do think this goes all the way back to the Suez Crisis in the early 50s where the US wouldn't help Britain and France invade Egypt. They did anyway and it turned out to be a mess. (see analysis below) ---------- The echoes and ironies of the Suez crisis are hard to avoid. Then it was Britain and France that launched a military action aimed at toppling a Middle Eastern dictator, Nasser of Egypt—and it was the United States which worried about legality and the international impact of intervention without a wider mandate. In the run-up to war, John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, argued that the use of force against Nasser "would make bitter enemies of the entire population of the Middle East". The British and the French, however, were cast in the role of today's impatient Americans. They were, as a historian, Peter Clarke, puts it, "bent on intervention and increasingly impatient of the time-wasting pantomime at the United Nations, ostensibly aimed at a diplomatic settlement." Eventually they abandoned the UN process and went to war. The Franco-British intervention in Suez failed because, faced with a run on the pound, the British were unable to resist American economic pressure to pull back. Once Britain had got over its shock and anger at American "betrayal", it drew a simple conclusion: in future, British foreign policy should always be carefully aligned with America's global objectives. France drew the opposite lesson. When Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, called Guy Mollet, his French counterpart, to tell him that Britain had agreed to an immediate ceasefire in Egypt, Mollet was in the middle of a meeting with Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor. As the historian William Hitchcock records: "When Mollet, totally deflated by Eden's call, returned to the room, the German chancellor bucked him up by denouncing the Americans and British as unreliable. Instead, he declared, 'Now is the time to build Europe.'" Ever since, France and Britain have lived by the different lessons they drew from Suez. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Special thanks to the CF Community Suite Gold Sponsor - CFHosting.net http://www.cfhosting.net Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:5:137013 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:5 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
