Comment by dejb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dejb | Hacker News Reader

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OK Firstly I'm from Australia not the EU.

> Yes, in some ways we do look down on you.

That was my point. Most Americans know so little about the world but they are so convinced they are the best. In my experience most first world countries are better to live in than the states.

> It's because you're Monday morning quarterbacks. You want respect - get on the field.

So we have to start a war or something to get respect? Is that what the invasion of Iraq was all about?

> We don't argue that it's right, but let's look at the alternatives. China? Russia? The EU? No one? Yeah right.

Why does any one nation have to be nominate itself as the sheriff? I haven't seen much clamour for the US to exercise military power recently, more the opposite.

In truth I don't think the US has anywhere near as much power as it thinks. Most times it has tried to exert that power it has backfired. When you have about 20-25% of world GPD and you try to continually exercise more than 50% of the control something has to give.

So we have to start a war or something to get respect? Is that what the invasion of Iraq was all about?

There is absolutely no reason, other than bickering and incompetence, that the European powers couldn't be operating an airlift capability equivalent to or better than the US C17 Globemaster fleet. If we were we could have saved countless lives in the wake of the Asian tsunami. The only people in the world able to undertake a massive logistical undertaking at short notice is the USAF.

Militaries do an LOT other than blowing stuff up.

I'm not sure of the relative efforts applied to the Asian Tsunami. I didn't think that the US devoted a great deal of their military capacity to the problem. Of course the US. unlike Europe, actually shares an Ocean with Asia so it would make sense for them to offer more help.

You seem to have a very indepth knowledge of the logistics of these situations. Perhaps you could explain what happened to the rescue effort in New Orleans when Huricane Katrina hit?

> I didn't think that the US devoted a great deal of their military capacity to the problem.

We devoted a carrier group. We have more than one, so it wasn't a huge deal for us. And, since we have several, there is always at least one fairly close to almost anywhere there's an blue-water ocean.

However, a carrier group has a lot of capacity. It's at least one fairly significant medical facility, an airstrip and transport, a lot of housing and trained personnel, a huge amount of desalinization, and so on.

It would be a huge deal for the EU to provide the same capacity.

A single USN carrier group probably has more capability than the current Royal and French navies combined. The EU nations spend in total about half of what the US does on defence, but have about a tenth of the capability to show for it. That's what I mean about bickering and incompetence.

The British govt is finally realizing that, hence the RN will in a few years have 2 near-US-equivalent carrier groups (the US has 14 IIRC). The rest is a joke. The EU "rapid reaction corps" would take 2-3 months to deploy anywhere...

What happened there was a failure to learn from history. It's like the Irish Potato Famine. Conspiracy nuts like to think it was deliberate but the truth is that it was hugely embarassing for the British Empire to have a disaster like that in their own back yard. What sort of imperials think they can rule the world when they can't even deal with a local crisis? The far-flung reaches of empires are glamorous and exciting, but what matters really is the bread-and-butter stuff at home.

That is an interesting historical perspective, one that I had not considered before. Still, if anything, it supports the notion that the US is faltering as the world power.

BTW I'd be interested to see a comparison with deaths in rural Soviet Union under Stalin with the Irish situation. Seems to me like a similar situation and yet the deaths are pretty much attributed as murder under Stalin.

Ummm, that's because it was murder. See the (well written) works of the historian Robert Conquest. By the way, when the Soviet archives were opened up during the Yeltsin era, his estimations of the number of Soviet murders turned out to be almost exactly right (actually, a little on the low side).

I think of this sometimes when I think of my wife. She survived, with years of hunger, Mao's "Great Leap Forward", when 77,000,000 human beings -- men, women, children dying as their mothers held them and watched -- were systematically starved to death.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin, an expert on the subject

I was, of course, refering to the agricultural deaths. To some extent those seem similar to the situation in Ireland and possibly China under Mao. To what extent can attribute a failed policy as murder? Is the US responsable for the 1 million or so deaths in Iraq? Probably not.

Ireland was never a british colony (apart from northern ireland)

> So we have to start a war or something to get respect?

Not at all.

There are no shortage of problems in the world. Rwanda is basically over, but there's the Sudan and the other hell-holes of sub-saharan Africa. Surely you've got more to contribute than "the Americans dropped the ball again."

Then there's Bosnia. Right in the EU's backyard. Why should the US be there at all?

The world is full of problems. Pick some and solve them. We don't care how you do it, but we do notice that you're not even trying.

Is it really unreasonable to expect the EU to handle fairly big problems?

Apparently so - you can't even manage to provide reasonable capacity in Afghanistan. (Man for man, fantastic, but there aren't many men.)

> you can't even manage to provide reasonable capacity in Afghanistan.

Am I misunderstanding you or are you really arguing that one should expect the EU to clean up after the US?

Apart from that the EU is actually doing things in Afghanistan as far as I know -- but more like the friendly-negotiative style, not the world's cop style.

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