Hammermill wrote:

One thing people like Derek will never understand is that Americans
have a history of fighting FOR freedom and liberty.

Don't be silly and anyway you're out of context here.

Although his choice of words was poor Derek is right in principle. The US
isn't in Iraq through any sense of freedom or liberty. It is there through
a combination of blindly lashing out because of 9/11 and trying to impose
a US-friendly guardian over Iraq's oil supply. Nothing else. There are
plenty of other dictatorships around with worse records of civilian rights
which the US steadfastly ignores.

In doing this it has directly caused the deaths of somewhere between
30,000 and 100,000 Iraqi civilians depending on whose figures you believe
(the US military? - right on!) with no end in sight. The US (and British)
soldiers who have died there have done what they were told, no more, and
after WW2 we hanged German soldiers for having done that.

I don't think that anyone here is significantly anti-US and certainly has
no opposition to honouring those who did die in defence of freedom - we do
the same in Britain. Just don't confuse the two, there is no justification
for the carnage and destruction in Iraq, and attempts to do so serve only
to bring the US further down in the eyes of the world.

Can we try to see past this sort of jingoistic drum-beating and get back
to gliding?