To: Bilow who wrote (119896 ) 11/18/2003 12:52:29 PM From: Sam Respond to Re: "There's a damn good reason we have so many American servicemen buried in foreign cemeteries Bilow. It's because we've had a long-standing policy of preferring to defend our allies against totalitarianism instead of waiting for it to directly threaten us." were directly attacked. Well, yes, we helped GB with supplies, but certainly not in terms of men. There wasn't public support for it. And it would probably be more accurate to say that the "long standing policy" of the US has been to support totalitarian govts whenever the leadership of that govt agreed to support US business opportunities. Just look at the history of Central and South America from Panama (as it was detached from Columbia) in the 19th C right up through the wars of the 1980s. We supported and defended plenty of brutal totalitarian govts, and it certainly wasn't always due to the Cold War, it predated the Cold War, and included countries which were entirely irrelevant to it. "The business of America is business," said Silent Cal, and that is a fair summary of what has guided US policy over the years from our founding on. The only reason some people don't see just how true that has been, and how expansionist the US has been is that the "rightness" of Manifest Destiny so pervades our collective consciousness that we don't even see the takeover the Western part of this continent as expansion, no matter how many wars, lies and broken treaties with Native American tribes and Mexico it required. And of course it was just six years or so after Turner published his famous paper declaring the Western Frontier "settled" and closed that we turned our sights southward and westward, invading Cuba to get rid of the last vestige of Spanish influence in our neighborhood, and picking up the Philippines as a "bonus." What a "splendid" war that one was (or, I should say, those two, counting the Philippine War).
