In article , TMOliver
writes
(Kenneth Williams) iterated.....


So nice of Mr. Rumsfeld to think that one up. Someone should
wake that old buzzard up to the fact that we British have
been doing it far longer than America has and with far less
troops and equipment to supply.


Well, throughout the latter half of the 40s, and the decades
afteruntil the wall crumbled, we maintained a substantial force
shielding the UK from the perils of its own (necessary)
parsimony. I kind of always contemplated that along with their
hostage role, USForces Europe, were substantial Peacekeepers of
a peace that the Europeans couldn't (or wouldn't) manage to keep
for themselves. Onlt the US presence during those years allowed
the UK to dispatch the occasional battalion to some restive
backwater conflict.

As for the far longer, I've a photo of my grandpa during his
days asa "Peacekeeper", 1918 in Germany. Atr least he avoided
representing British commercial and political interests propping
up the "Whites" in a variety of scummy Russian harborsides.


Now poor America is being stretched all over the globe and
suddenly needs help from everyone else.

Welcome to the club.

Hell, lad, we are the club, and the rules changed back in 1945
(and the winds of change were blowing far earlier, ruffling the
already tattered, much moth-bitten coat of the mangy old Lion of
the Scuppered H'aisles.

By Golly, come to think of it, had we not offered them ample
employment in public service jobs, limitless undiseased 'taties,
a chance at lace curtains, enlistment in Sherman's band of
Bummers burning and bankrupting all those puir Southren
families, a large brick parish on every urban corner, vast
opportunities to reap political graft, and even a chance at
Aristocracy, as with the Big K family (or how the Erse co-opted
Camelot), all those extra Erse would have seized the reins and
government and commerce throughout the UK and everybody would be
speaking Irish Gaelic within the sounds of both Bow Bells and
Big Ben.


Kenneth Williams

....ahhh, the paranoid insecurity of advancing national
insignificance, or the inevitable "Leuxemburging" of the UK
within the EU, bilingual education in Frawg required of all
kiddies.

TMO

You two deserve each other. What a load of tosh.
--
Peter

Ying tong iddle-i po!