The scheduled partial U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe were long overdue; some of us had become shrill and hoarse in calling for them over the past few years. It was not just that there was no longer any conventional enemy on Old Europe's borders, or that the new hot points are further to the east, or even that in terms of a cost-benefit analysis it made no sense stationing traditional army divisions roughly where Patton and Hodges ended up 60 years ago.
The real significance, inasmuch as many airbases and depots will stay, is symbolic and psycho-sociological. Unwittingly, we had created an unhealthy passive-aggressiveness in Europe that clinicians might identify as a classic symptom of dependency. Europe — now larger and more populous than the United States — has reduced defense investment to subsidize a variety of social expenditures found nowhere in the world. So insular had its utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over.
But let's look at it from their point of view: Is the continued existence of Canada in the interest of the United States?
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Once you start thinking about it in American national-security terms, maintaining the territorial integrity of Canada seems easily the worst option, and all the permutations of coast-to-coast crack-up infinitely preferable.
1) AN INDEPENDENT QUEBEC
On September 11th, at Montreal's now famous Conqaedia University, Muslim students bayed and whooped as the twin towers came down and spent the rest of the day celebrating or brawling with those boorish enough to be offended by their good cheer.
#1
How long can the jury rigged situation last. The western provinces will continue to be raped and pillaged by Quebec and Ontario. If the Quebecers were to get their wish and have total independence they could probably make a go of it economically as an energy supplier to the US in the form of Quebec Hydro. But how long would it be before they decided to raise the cost of a kilowatt hour just gouge the Yanks. The same could happen in Alberta. The oil in the tar sands requires a reasonable price to make it profitable to extract. But if Canada ws to break up what about the Maritimes and the rest of the West? I really doubt the Maritimes could make it on their own ecnomically. Although then Newfoundland would be in control of it's own destiny economically in terms of it oil production. The farming provinces of the west would still be real players in terms of wheat sales and could be viable concerns and BC most definetly could make IMO between its fisheries and lumber. The one province that would in the end take in the shorts IMO is Ontario. Too much of its economy is tied up with Ford, GM and DC. if they decided to start playing games with their industrial base I think the auto companies and the related suppliers would be looking south of the border. Just don't know which one.
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Lol! Chuck sure skewers the status quo crowd, heh.
The closer is priceless:
The New York Times editorial page offered this reason for maintaining the status quo: Otherwise, "the military will also lose the advantage that comes with giving large numbers of its men and women the experience of living in other cultures." Seventy-thousand GIs parked in Stuttgart, practicing their German and listening to Wagner. Finally, a military deployment the New York Times can support.
Lol! The standard bearer of the US press, lol, wotta buncha doofuses! Fug'em.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
