do americans regret not listening to churchill about Stalin's iron curtin?
551273
no, because it's part of our history now - we learned from it - and it makes us 'US' , it makes us stronger!
628847
Love the question, love love love it.  \nIt completely changed foreign policy.  The US used to use the fear of the USSR against the rest of the world to bully them around.  Once the "Iron Curtain" fell we needed to spread cash around. \nAs far as domestic policy, it did the same thing.  The government needed to find a new enemy of the US people to keep us in fear of something.
1153246
Most definitely ! Reminds me of an old FDR quote during WW2.\n\nIt is a shame some Americans don't understand or support that quote. However, I think most Americans would agree.
340494
The US learned that their actions could cause wrong interpretations by the Soviets, example: \n\nUS destroyers were dropping signaling depth charges on a Soviet submarine near the quarantine line, intending to force it to surface. Unbeknownst to the US Navy, it was carrying a nuclear-tipped torpedo. The captain lost his temper.  The oxygen supply dropped in the sub and as temperatures rose to 120 degrees, some sailors fainted.\nVadim Pavlovich Orlov, an intelligence officer said the bombardment was like "sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.... But we were still holding on, trying to escape. We were suffering like this for about four hours."\n\nThe sub's commander, Valentin Savitsky, who could not communicate with the Soviet general staff, thought a nuclear war may have started up above. He ordered an officer to assemble the nuclear-tipped torpedo and prepare it to be fired.\n\nBut Second Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov told Savitsky that the conditions for firing the torpedo, a rupture of the hull, had not occurred. Savitsky reversed his order and the submarine surfaced.  Nuclear war was averted thanks to the actions of a subordinate officer.\n\nThe outcome of this event, after it became known on the American military on how close they came to nuclear war was to change its policies regarding military confrontations, ie from now on they would take into account the possibility that the Soviets might interpret their actions as a cause for a nuclear response.
286347
The denial of the Holocaust was actually invented by an American for a cause that is now dead, and the solution it was supposed to aid has been hijacked by people even more evil than those it was supposed to fight. It was invented, knowing that it was a lie, because an American veteran of the Second World War came out believing that the crimes of Stalin were far worse than the crimes of Hitler, and that the only political force that could stop Communism in the long run was National Socialism. He felt it had been a mistake to stand with Stalin against Hitler (no matter how evil Hitler was) because Democracy was too weak, decadent and self-destructive.\n\nHowever, he knew that the Holocaust was too horrible a crime for the American public ever to forgive, even if the majority of Americans still harbored ill feelings towards Jews in an impersonal way. The only way America would ever come around to National Socialism would be if it could eventually be convinced that the Holocaust never happened. This was going to be the work of generations, because there simply was too much evidence, and there were too many survivors.\n\nSince then, of course, the Iron Curtain has fallen and Communism is dead (even if corporate America is propping it up for slave labor in China). The purpose for the deceipt no longer exists. Even worse, the plan has been taken over by White Supremacists whose intentions are far more sinister to all concerned. \n\nWhat concerns me most, however, is the bad trend in study we are seeing in a completely unrelated field, that of Intelligent Design. One of the tenets of ID is that, because there is no competing document written at the time of the beginning of the universe than the Bible, there can be no other reliable witness than Adam. Soon, the last of the Holocaust survivors will be gone, and there will be no living voice to give direct testimony that this crime really did happen. We should be very careful what we wish for, because we may get it in a completely unintended manner.
459986
No.  No sporting event was going to turn back Hitler.  No World Cup Tourney was going to stop Japan from trying to take over the World.  Sometime you gotta put aside diplomacy and kick some ass.
442658
Churchill and Stalin divided Europe before the end of the war, according to rumours they signed out the new spheres of influence on a yellow envelope, during some conference.\n\nThe issue of Poland as it appeared on the yellow envelope was 50-50. So not a real resolution at that time. I think in Yalta they came to a conclusion that it would be part of the soviet sphere of interest. \n\nSorry I cannot be more accurate, this is what i remember from my classes at university. Find the yellow envelope story.
113124
i couldn't remember either.  i admit i didn't pay much attention to anything political when i was growing up...who am i kidding, i didn't pay attention to much outside of my 10 mile radius :P  but i see that it is jimmy carter :D
711566
I wanted to be a postal Inspector, but i was treated so shabby in the interview, I bailed out.\n\nI have no regrets and I do not dwell on the "shoulda woulda coulda"
627229
No\n pearl was a set up\n we would have been better off with Hitler than Stalin\n there would not be a middle east problem today.\n Any questions?
1175594
i'm really scared by intolerance and how it is masked as self defence.  It scares me how the USA can get away with awful things just coz they are the USA and I strongly believe that in the future, historians will look back at the Bush administration in a similar light to other fascist dictators.  It's weird how people who are in the thick of it at the time can never see it.  I think that the Bush administration (in a similar way to the Nazis) have used moral panic very effectively.
838576
we veered off path when we stopped listening to the generals... and didn't have a plan to rebuild the nation...\n\nthat's a start...
816877
No.  Unless you think that our deadly enemies of the time (USSR, Peoples Rep. of China and all their satellite nations) who would have loved to embarrass the US were all some how paid off to not mention their radar and radio telescopic readings.  Common sense...our enemies were tracking it the same as we were...if there had been any funny business...they would have screamed bloody murder...instead, they re-doubled their own space and missile programs.
468404
Of course we would have. President Roosevelt had started the Nation's first peacetime draft in history, starting in 1939, before the war began. Before the draft, the US had around 100,000 active duty soldiers. A year after the draft, we had over a million. By the end of the war we had over twelve million soldiers. \n   Roosevelt's massive pre-war military expansion was a precautionary measure; he could smell a storm coming, and we needed to be ready\n   Consider how world war one played out. We stayed on the sidelines and watched the Europeans kick the snot out of each other for three years. But we were not neutral. From the beginning of the war, we wanted Great Britain to win, because we knew our seas would not protect us from the world's turmoil much longer, and we needed good friends on the other side of the ocean. So even though we didn't fight until 1917, we kept sending food and war material to the Allies, which kept them in the game against Germany.  Germany realised that as long as we kept supplying their enemy, they could not win. So the Germans, out of necessity, started sinking our ships, and then, finally, we went to war, after the Germans were exhausted from endless trench warfare.  This strategy was preffered by the US, as it made winning much eaisier and less painful.\n   Back to WWII....\n   By the autumn of 1941, history was repeating itself, as we had hoped. The Germans were locked into an ugly, brutal stalemate (in USSR), that was taking a heavy toll on their military (and the USSR). We would have been content to let that play out another year or two, but inevitably, when Germany was on the ropes, we would have mobilized our Armed Forces to deliver the coup de gras.\n   When Japan launched a major strike on US soil, that did not change our ultimate decision, it just brought us into the war earlier than we had planned on. Winston Churchill cheered when we got hit, because he knew we'd have to start helping then.
865655
Rumsfeld, along with Ashcroft and Cheney, were among the architects of the cold war scares decades ago. They use the same rhetoric, just changing the "enemies." I, for one, will be glad to see him go. During the cold war we talked about a thing called the military industrial complex. It has resurrected at the hands of these men and others of their ilk. Try to go to a screening of the movie Iraq for Sale.
586134
The ANNOUNCEMENT was related to end of WWII.  The ENFORCEMENT was related to Korea.  Truman misspoke his doctrine - or was ambiguous - and the Russians and Chinese misjudged his wording, leading to conflagration on the Korean peninsula.  I just don't remember what his misstatement was, precisely.
1158508
I spend as much time in the US as I do abroad. In Europe, Asia and Arabia. The disprespect that is now heaped upon anything American is just unbelievable. In these forums I read notes from people who have never left their environs, harping on and trying to justify the unjustifiable. It leaves me very sad, because natural friends of America are now openly disrespecting a once great Nation. Why? Because of the Fundamentalist we have in the White House. In Britain, the politicians and populous have acted and asked Blair to go, because he has brought shame to the country in his support for Bush. It is unbelieveable how much he is now ignored by his own European partners who once glorified him.