Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good ignorant rant!!

You wrote:

“Even as late as 1906 England was all about the genocide in the Congo. read Conrad for what a nightmare England represents.”

The Congo was a Belgian colony! Conrad, writing for an English speaking audience, was pointing out the horror of Belgian colonialism, which most experts think was the worst in the world at that time.

Conrad, who was in fact Polish, became a British citizen when he was in his late 20s and liked Britain a lot.

Thanks for the source of those surveys, this organisation has as its specific aim, a policy to say how great the USA is compared to the rest of the world so I would suggest that they have designed the survey to give answers which reflect this aim.

I can’t say that I’ve ever met a Brit who has thought polygamy was legal in the USA so I can’t explain that one I’m afraid.

As for the question about carbon emissions, the wording is deliberately misleading. Yes, the RATE of increase has fallen in the US faster than the EU but the actual AMOUNT of increase is lower in the EU and the total AMOUNT of emissions per head is lower in the EU.

Polling is now a highly developed art, polling companies know how to design questions to give the outcome their clients want to achieve, thus I take all of these claims with a pinch of salt.

ALso it would be nice to see a source for those claims you’re making in comment 97.

Ah, what an ever changing cast of characters we have here. Zinger…Anthony…Westlake…Mary…and now – surprise, surprise! – “anonymous”.

Although…maybe you’re jonesy55?

Enjoy: http://americaintheworld.typepad.com/home/files/TrueOrFalseStatements.pdf

I would suggest thst you look at comments 2, 9, 12, 25, 32, 35, 64, 70 & 74 for starters.

Of course you would!

So let’s ignore the posts that aren’t mine…why don’t you point out my “ignorance” in detail, anonymous?

Whatever the reasons behind US support for Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, and I’m not saying it was neccesarily a wrong policy, my point was that this support is not fictional and it is this support that people were no doubt thinking of when they answered the pollsters question. Thus it is a mistaken response but one that is not as grossly ignorant and as far removed from reality as the pollsters are attempting to portray it.

The Iraqi military was massively equipped with Russian hardware, when the attack on Iran failed and turned into a war of attrition that Iraq could only lose the USA realised that the threat of an Iranian takeover of the Gulf was something that could not be allowed so they gave intelligence assistance to prevent that, so lets say that Iran had defeated Iraq and taken over the oil fields of Iraq and then Kuwait, where would we be now?

For example with the question about Saddam’s weapons, i’m sure most people in Britain don’t know the exact percntage of weapons sold to Iraq by various countries during the 1980s. They do however have a general impression though that Saddam’s regime was supported militarily by the west, including the USA, which is reflected in their response to the poll question. The survey analysis is basically trying to say that this impression is wrong and that the USA did not support Saddam militarily.

However although it’s true that the USA didn’t sell many F-16s, machine guns or Apache helicopters to Saddam, it did provide vital intelligence support in the Iran-Iraq war and made dual-use technology available which it tacitly knew would be used to build up military capability in the hope of counteracting Iranian influence.

So the general impression that people have of the USA supporting Saddam is not wrong, they may have the details a little mixed up but that is hardly surprising. Of course it wasn’t just the USA, other western countries also supported Saddam in similar ways but as the ‘leader of the free world’ the USA is always going to attract more scrutiny than say Belgium or New Zealand, that just goes with the territory.