[PornoDoggy]

Dravyk,

I think Jeremy is wrong. You don't need to look that far back to figure out why U.S. is regarded the way it is in the Middle East. It's not Wilson - it's Guy Mollet, Anthony Eden and David Ben-Gurion.

It's not at all ironic that America is the target. France and Britian were completely discredited when, acting in concert with Israel, they attempted to take the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had nationalized it. There's something a little ironic there, because not working through the United Nations was one of the problems General Ike had with the whole operation.

Even before that time, the U.S. had begun to act every bit as imperialistic as the limeys and the frogs had ever been - with a lot less skill. There was that whole thing with the guy that the Islamist's replaced in Iraq; the games over the damned Aswan dam John Foster Dulles played with Nasser; and, of course, Isreal.

But Jeremy - Please. Wilson was a man of his times and his culture. His rhetoric may have inspired some in what is now called the third world to aspire to independence, but there were plenty of other inspirations going on at the same time. Sun Yat Sen got the attention of the Asians, a variety of Arab leaders had been agitating for independence from the Turks before World War I, Ghandi was part of some peaceful hell-raising in South Africa before he returned to Indai, and then there were the followers of that German fellow - Karl somebody. Besides, everyone knew that Wilson's concept of 'nationalism / nationhood' didn't really extend much to non-whites.

Not that it would have mattered a tinker's damn if it did. The Republicans controlled Congress and, as they they are prone to do, stuck their heads either up their asses or in the sand, and pretended the world was going to go back to where it was before.

The League, unencumbered by the pesky Americans and their terribly annoying anti-colonialism, turned over most of the Middle East and North Africa to the U.K. and France as "Protectorates" (wink, wink).