Aragorn1: Well that would depend on how you define "invasion". Under the definition "an attempt to land forces on hostile soil for military purposes" the Dieppe raid was an invasion. I am not certain if more troop landings were planned as many aspects of this is shrouded in mystery. I am confident that the objective was not a liberation of France, rather to establish a breachhead, capture some ground and hold it for sufficient time to make the Germans pull troops out of the Russian campaign. I believe this to be closest to the truth as it makes the most sense.

Link: I am honestly SO sorry for forcing you into the offensive like that. It was not my intention to make you defend yourself. On the contrary the whole thing has been me defending myself. As you can see I made a very brief comment regarding the original subject that drew some quite condensed parallels between the world wars and the contemporary conditions that may be similar. I was then accused of not knowing something I consider fundamental knowledge so I felt I had to elaborate. Then I get accused of being to superficial again by you and I simply had to retrace a bit. I also felt that any flaw in argumentation within a strictly historical discussion due to lack of professional training needed to be pointed out. Sort of a "bear with me, I am only an amateur scholar" statement.

I am 100% native Danish. My command of the English language comes more or less exclusively from school. We do start out English classes quite early here. Our own language - Danish - is considered among the most difficult to learn in the world and is very difficult to master (though it is similar to Dutch so you'll pick it up easily). Half of my family originates from Southern Jutland which had been seceded to Prussia after the Second Danish-Borussian war of 1864. As such Danes living in this area were forced into German military sevice during WWI. I had two great-granduncles fighting on the eastern front. Both made it through the hostilities, however one died on the march back. I guess I snapped when someone suggested I did not know about the assasination in Sarajevo.

Thanks for the link, looks like it was one big free for all! Apparently the RAF bombed a couple of their cities by mistake whilst they shot down an American plane and forced many more planes from various countries to land for violating their airspace.

[ 05-30-2005, 01:58 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

Don't sweat it, mad=dog, I may have overreacted a bit. I just felt like I was being told "Dude, you suck at your historical knowledge". You can understand that being a history student makes such a statement even worse ;) Especially since I had an exam about the period 1870 - now just last thursday.

Somehow I feel we both loathe the simplicity with which some people tend to think. That's a good thing, I know, but a decent portion of self-reflection every once in a while is good as well. Not everyone knows the things you and I know, you know ;) I think there's A LOT of biological facts that I might have known once, but now they seem to have been forced from my mind. I can't decide if that's a good thing... :D

Now let's hug and be good friends. I'll build a campfire and you can play the guitar while all of us here will sing "Kumbajah" ;) :D

Ten-four. I'll bring the marshmellows. And I find it hilarious that both of us reacted due to academical pride. With that kind of professional enthusiasm the world can go all bad.
Actually I am writing up a set of papers and a compedium for a thesis summarizing our groups findings over two years atm. A lot of work and the most difficult and annoying part is condensing it down to the core facts. You'd like to become all philosophical, but scientific papers have absolutely zero tolerance towards redundancy. So you can see how these feelings get exagerated on my part.
If you come by Copenhagen make sure to drop by for a cup of mud.

TL, you can always join my camp and hope for a small Meteor to strike. Y2K let me down, Nobody has the guts to fire a WoMD. :D

You got's to be on the right track when a rabid warmongering Noe-con like me is the only one that agrees with'ya. ;)

[ 05-30-2005, 09:56 PM: Message edited by: John D Harris ]

Will there be a WWII? You bet your sweet bippy there will be, ever since we got kicked out of the Garden, or crawled out of the slime (Depending on which camp you are in.) we humans have killed each other and will continue to do so.

But as is was pointed out in an earlier post, at the current time there is nobody that can stand up to the USA. WHEN, not if, a rival nation arises that can threaten the USA in military and economic power, there will be lots of folks killed. The USSR for all it's Military power couldn't stand up to the USA in economic power. Despite what many re-visionists want to say the USA ran the USSR economy into the ground. The USA spent 7-9% of GNP on defense, the USSR spent nearly 30% of GNP on defense. Both countries spent about the same amount of actual money, the USSR spent nearly 1/3 of it's capitability to keep up(some accounts slightly ahead). If the USA needed to spend we could have increased our spending to 1/3, then inorder to keep up the USSR would have had to increase to spending 100%.

Nukes are great weapons to DEFEND in a conflict or to End a conflict. But Nukes are a complete assine weapon to use if one wishes to gain territory or resources. Radioactive fallout kinda puts a damper the use of any territory where nukes have been used, and it kinda defeats the purpose of gaining resources *cough* Oil *cough* If one has to wait a couple of thousand years before radiation levels have droped enough to go drilling. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Hmmm, i think things are more difficult than that.

There has only been two world wars, so in fact they have not been a regular occurance to suggest they will occur again. There have been large scale wars yes, but they tended to be between the Great Powers, which now no longer exist. So, the chances of such a war are remote, especially with the lack of rival superpowers and ideological confrontation. There is also, given the systems of alliances little chance of a war between the lesser world powers that doesn;t involve the US. As John says, a new superpower would ne needed for such an event to occur, and in my view this superpower would have to have an ideology that would be seen to threaten the US. THe most likely candidate is China, but she is only communist in name, however we lack the crystal ball. And the US sees S.E. Asia as an important, an would not be happy to see a country extend a sphere of influence there. But even were this to happen, the nuclear detterant would mean that, like the USSR and the USA, war would be avoided due to MAD.

The point about the USSR, is in view flawed. However it is too early to draw conclusions, from my point of view, given what is known, I beleive that the econmic strain on the Soviet economy, although a strong contributing factor, wasnot the ulitmate cause of the collapse of the USSR, but the change in the ideological nature of the USSR, which removed the ideological basis of the conflict and split the soviet bloc, causing it to split due to not having its binding factor and the uncontrolable unleashing of populist forces that resulted.

On the nukes issue, tactical nukes offer new possibilities on this front. If the leader of a small country developed capabilities and was just power-crazed enough to use them, he could, possibly detroy the leadership of a country, while retaining her resources and allowing the country to be lived in. However, the country would need the military to exploit this so, it is very, very unlikely, even ignoring the problems of a delivery system.

My tip for future conflict is this:

With the fall of the USSR the USA tranfers it ideological confrontation to Islamic fundamentalists, who are seen as a threat to the democracy and the US way of life. THis in turn means there is no clear war, as they are stateless. States may support them openly or in secret, but they cannot truely be defeated. The USA involves herself in wars in small countries all over the Muslim world trying to prevent aid to terrorists. It is largely ineffective as although in the short term the issus in that area is resolved, instability in the region and the world is created and actions alienate others, who join the war against the US.

Well that's my silly theory to add to the pot [img]smile.gif[/img] . Can't forsee what the ending will be to this scenario, as unlike the Cold War, there is no state to fall, and the Fundamentalists shall not abandon there ideology as the USSR did. THe collapse of the USA would seem to be bring a possible end to this ideological conflict...

While it is certainly a side/separate topic, since it was mentioned, the world will grow by approximately 20+ million people this year. That's the population increase I'm referring to, and that's about the size of it, for anyone who is interested. I don't know what the number of deaths due to AIDS in Africa is, but I bet it's quite small compared to this. The number of deaths in Iraq in 3 years and from the Tsunami over the next 2-3 years is peanuts by comparrison.

Just FYI.

A bit of a side note, but it's starting to become apparent that the AIDS problem in the ME is nearly as bad (if not as bad or worse) as it is in Africa for precisely the reasons it got so bad in Africa (Taboos against talking about it, failure to realise it's a threat, etc etc)

<font color = lightgreen>That's why we should just become an empire, moving in and taking over. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

No, the tide of terrorism will never completely abate, but enough people in the Middle East will get tired of being blamed for every nut-case terrorist who does anything anywhere in the world and they will try to put an end to it themsleves.
If you think that Islamic terrorists will topple the US, then by logical extension you probably think that Basque separatists will topple Spain and Quebecois separatists will topple Canada. Right....

Actually, the "war on terrorism" can be won. I have a two-fold strategy devised that would bring about a resaonably successful resolution, but no one in Washington would have the cajones to implement it. Yes, it is extremely drastic, but it would work. No, the details are not being made public at this time.</font>

[ 05-31-2005, 03:34 PM: Message edited by: Azred ]