At 13:51 02/09/03 -0400, you wrote:
Keith said,
I think he's dead wrong about America being an Imperial Power. In the Middle East, America is just trying to look after itself and its future oil supplies.
arthur
And what was Britain doing all those years as an Imperial Power. Looking after others???
In many ways it was. After the first phase of out-and-out exploitation by the East India Company in India, the British Empire gradually became what the new liberal classes of the 1870s onwards (the ones that started the civil service and then the beginnings of the welfare state) thought was a service to the world. Because of their patronising ways, these types made a mess of it (as indeed they have done of the welfare state in England) because they took responsibility away from those they were helping but often out of what they thought were the best of motives. It was not so specific and so directly commercial as the Americans have been in their invasion of Iraq. The UK left many institutions behind them when they left -- universities, schools, hospitals, museums, and so forth. The Americans don't seem in the slightest bit interested in helping the Iraqis in the same way. At any one moment there are hundreds of children dying of typhoid and other enteric diseases in Baghdad and other cities caused by lack of clean water. America could easily supply the hospitals with essential drugs but are seemingly making no attempt to do so -- at least according to the TV reports we're getting. I don't think the Americans will be leaving anything behind them when they go -- except perhaps a lot of burned out tanks and equipment.
Keith Hudson
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