James, as far as the Middle East and India are concerned - it is the Brits who screwed things up really big time, and then convenienctly withdrew leaving things up for others to deal with. MOst of the conflicts in those regions have firms roots in the British colonial policies. The US is a mere schoolboy in comparison. Our policy in that region is fairly benevolent and favourable to the local interests - especially in comparision to what we did in Latin America or South East Asia, or to what the British (remember the Suzez canal "crisis"?) interests there have been.
Remember, you hear that from a Europhile, and I am wondering what assorted Europhobes have to say on that subject. There must be a reason why assorted Middle Easterns and Indian nationalists were sympathetic toward Hitler during WWII.
>Is it such a revelation that people on the left should take a different
>view from the majority of working class people? If we didn't, we would
>share their basically pro-capitalist point of view. All viewpoints begin
>as majority viewpoints. In the midst of Britain's war against Irish
>republicans, support for Ireland's self-determination was a lonely
>position. Nowadays, a majority in Britain favour Irish independence, and
>most understand that Britain's war was full of atrocities. If I had
>taken my cue from the given level of consciousness of British people
>during the war I would have been supporting the 'shoot-to-kill' policy.
The trick is to make am empirically sound judgment and avoid being blinded by either popular opinion or ideology (whether popular or unpopular). It seems that you prefer a preconceived notion of what capitalism is and how capitalist states operate and choose to remain oblivious to the empirical possibility that there might be quite substantial variations in characteristics, motives, and modus operandi.
wojtek