WWI, Why America?

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Colon™
Oh oh oh, you're going to lecture me on the war's development in Belgium or what?

Yes, I believe he will.

Elsewhere he is insisting that British recruiting posters of '15 had the intent of getting America to act like the 'son' of Britain and help the 'old gal.'

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Ned
What is your position on the Iraq war, pray tell.

Are the Sunnis or the Shiites the 'evil' in Iraq?

Let them fight a civil war (which they are already) and fight Al Queda a bit smarter than an occupation force . Smaller interdiction forces responding to intelligence would work better, I'd think. It'd probably also create less of the evil forces as an occupation force would/has .

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Ned


Then how do you deal with the assertion in the OP's link that Belgium had secret alliances with Britain and France?

Laugh at them?

Rather than take the deal offered by the Germans for the passage of their troops that Luxembourgh had taken, Belgium chose to fight. As a result, Belgium was virtually destroyed.

Yep. Someone else was unable to resist, so Belgium was morally wrong even though they were not only capable, but obligated.

Good argument.

Insane!!!!!!!!!

You're past the point of me caring about your self pity.

[Barnabas]

Ned, France and Germany have a long fronteer, there was no need for germans to go thru Belgium

[SlowwHand]

U.S. Entered World War I
April 6, 1917
Disagreements in Europe over territory and boundaries, among other issues, came to a head with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian zealot on June 28, 1914. Exactly one month later, war broke out. In 1915, the British passenger liner the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, killing 128 Americans and futher heightening tensions. By the end of 1915, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire were battling the Allied Powers of Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro and Japan. In 1917, the U.S. entered the war.

Kind of like present day terrorists.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/jazz/wwi_2

[SlowwHand]

There are two main reasons why the USA entered WWI. The first was Germany's decision to renew unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic Ocean. The United States was quite upset with Germany's use of submarines to sink merchant traffic headed to England and France. The U-boats sank or damaged a number of high-profile civilian targets (the Lusitania, for one) on which dozens or even hundreds of US citizens were killed. The Germans had stopped unrestricted submarine warfare for most of 1916, I believe, just so that the US would not enter the war. By early 1917, though, Russia was beginning its collapse and Germany was getting strangled by Britain's effective blockade of German ports. So, Germany elected to restart its submarine campaign.

(As an aside, Britain also had a policy of stopping and seizing merchant ships headed for Germany. The difference was that Britain didn't sink the ships it caught. It brought the ships and cargoes home and then reimbursed the owners for the loss. Germany's lack of a viable long-distance surface force and port access precluded it from taking these steps. For Germany, it was U-boats or nothing.)

The second, and arguably more important element was known as the "Zimmermann Affair." In late 1916 or early 1917, the US State Department intercepted a cable from Germany to Mexico wherein Germany promised to return all the land Mexico lost to the US in the Mexican War (and other transactions, such as Texas Independence and the Gadsden Purchase) to Mexico in exchange for an alliance with Germany against the US. Once this information was publicized, US public turned sharply away from isolationism and towards war against the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313150312AA4V0wY

[SlowwHand]

http://www.world-wars.org/worldwar1/

[SlowwHand]

In other words, it wasn't the British suckering the Americans.

[Barnabas]

Something about ww1, is that Austria-Hungary (which was the old austrian empire) existed back then, but after losing, Hungary got screwed much worse than Austria.

[Kontiki]

Or so the British would have you believe....

[SlowwHand]

Those aren't BBS references, Eyes.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yahoo Answers seems to ignore that the Brits had the Zimmerman Note for quite a while before they actually released it to the Americans... at the opportune moment, of course. Not that the US wasn't coming in on the Allied side anyway.

[SlowwHand]

How many references would you like to see? You mention only the one.

[DinoDoc]

IIRC, they were trying to find away to release it that wouldn't expose the fact they had been spying on US diplomatic communications. Had Zimmerman been smarter he probably could have spinned it as a British fraud as the public innitially believed it was instead of confirming its validity.

[Imran Siddiqui]

How cute, Sloww probably believes there is one 'official history' and the textbooks have it .

Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmerman_Note

About the Zimmerman Note and how the Brits wanted to make sure the Americans knew about it, to bring them into the war, and at the same time try to hide that they had broken the German code.

To highlight a passage:

The British government guessed that the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. would send the message on to the embassy in Mexico via the commercial telegraph system, and therefore a copy would exist in the public telegraph office in Mexico City. If they could get a copy, they could pass it on to the United States government stating that they had discovered it through espionage in Mexico. Therefore, they contacted a British agent in Mexico, known only as Mr. H., who bribed an employee of the commercial telegraph company to obtain a copy of the message. In his autobiography, Sir Thomas Hohler, the British Ambassador in Mexico at that time, claims to have been Mr. H. To the delight of the British code breakers, the message had been sent from the German embassy in Washington to Mexico using the older cypher in the Wassmuss codebook and could therefore be completely decrypted.