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| Jump to Survey | british | | Jump to Survey | No, it disregards opinions of allies that are needed if the US wishes to win the war on terrorism. It will cause suffering and death to thousands of innocent people and cause destruction to one of the oldest civilisations of the world. I think it would be politically motivated as the US has a desire to control the worlds resources - iraq has the second largest supply of oil in the world, and bush is very close to the oil industry. The U.S has broken numerous treaties, possibly more than iraq, attacking would be a demonstration of double standards. Also lets not forget that the middle east is unstabe and a war will not help this, it would make it far worse and that the attacking of an islamic nation will encourage more people to fight for terrorist organisations and increase the gap between the west and the islamic world. These is also no real evidence that saddam is any more dangerous now than anytime in the past 10 years. And anyway, diplomatic avenues have not been fully explored and i don't think the UK and US want to explore them. | | Jump to Survey | The US produces 25% of pollution not because it has a high percentage of GDP but because it makes no effort to be environmentally friendly and americans frankly don't care about the environment if it means a
loss of profits or even inconvenience. The richest 1% of the world consumes as much
resources as the poorest 44%. Not that i'm that much of an environmentally friendly person myself (i worked out on bbc.co.uk/news that if everyone lived like me we would need 2.5 planets).And Germany HAS signed the Kyoto treaty and is the first nation to formally ratify it. The parliament voted unanimously to make the treaty part of German law. it may not be a perfect treaty, but it is a start and it should be ratified not only because it could genuinely help global warming efforts but to give a sign to the world that the US at least cares abut the environment and to aid ailing relations with the rest of the world, particularly mainland europe which is very environmentally aware.
Its true that european powers caused huge amounts of damage in ex-colonies many years ago,
damage that is still being felt today, people are dyeing but the fact that poor nations exist
is not a european fault. poor nations aren't a direct result on colonisation,
nations are getting poorer, poverty is getting worse, this can't just be blamed on being colonised hundreds of years ago but modern policy towards the third world in the forms of debt, agriculture,
trade tariffs and quotas, subsidies, protectionism, exploitation of labour and that is the fault of the entire developing world, as well as europe. Not every poor nation was once a colony either - e.g Thailand. There are also important factors such as war and disease which the developing world doesn't seem too interested in solving.
France may have been in Vietnam, but it gave up before thousands of people we killed and it stopped short of dropping tonnes of chemicals on civilians that are still causing death, misery and malformed babies and cancer till this day, which does show restraint.
I managed to find a time when france helped the US- November 2001 when it sent an aircraft carrier to support the US-led war in Afghanistan.
And while i'm on Vietnam, in 1979 Vietnam overthrew Pol Pots regime in Cambodia, who had comited countless genocides and war crimes. The US response to this was to back a Chinese invasion while the US gave diplomatic and military support to the Pol Pot regime. I read that quite recently.
Something i noticed is that there seems to be a false idea of aid, there aren't hundreds of
billions of dollars of aid being pumped into the third world that is holding these nations together and rebuilding them from the ground up, if there was 2 thirds of the world wouldn't live on less than 2 dollars a day.
It has been estimated that if everyone in the UK put 1 penny from each 10 pounds of income into aid 8 million lives a year could be saved! Thats maybe a good indication of how little aid is getting down to the third world people. |
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