"That the US (and British) forces liberated Western and Southern Europe is a historical fact, not a debateable opinion, and your relativism ("We've read our history books, and they've read theirs, so it's hard to say who is right.") is embarrassing."

Touching that point, yes, we certainly sped things up and made a difference, but we give ourselves far too much credit when people make comments like, "we totally saved their asses from Nazi rule."

Two years ago, Le Monde ran the headline "we are all americans". Chirac and the rest of the world cried, prayed, and sided with us.

This administration has absolutely squandered that. In two short years, we have managed to piss every body off.

Compare also the roughly 3,000 civilian deaths of the September 11th attacks, none of which should have happened. But is the death of 5-8,000 Iraqi civilians any better, especially when many of the points sold for the war appear not to have existed? What about the Afghani civilians? There are probably 10,000 CIVILIANS dead from our bombs over the last two years.

It's no surprise that the world sees us doing preemptive war against a very weak army for reasons that have turned out to be largely untrue as neo-terrorist. The United States has actually used nuclear weapons in battle - not once, but twice. The United States has effectively set up many of the regimes it is now trying to knock down - if not directly, than indirectly by meddling (ie - paving the way for fundamentalist uprising in Iran, doing a regime change in Iraq in the 1960's that paved the way for Saddam Hussein to usurp power within a few years of us knocking off the LAST guy we didn't like).

The rest of the world looks at track records such as that and says "do they really have OUR best interests at stake?"

I think this Onion article about "U.S. versus Them" is not far removed from reality:

http://www.theonion.com/3935/top_story.html

Didn't the conversation end when people starting talking about Nazis?

Okay, people, let's get the facts straight. France resisted for 6 days. 6 days. Their contribution to the war was IN FAVOR of Germany. While aligned with Germany for the remainder of the war, their resources were invaluable to the Nazi effort. At least when the Soviets retreated, they destroyed their industrial capabilities and their armaments.

Could they have won the war with out us? If "they" means the USSR, then likely. If it means the UK, then there is a chance.

Assuming: 1, Hitler did not strike a deal with the non-Russian Soviet states (as he was close to), 2, did not come to control all formerly British Middle East oil (as he was close to), 3, did not control the trade routes from Asia to Europe (as he was close to), 4, did not develop nukes (as he was close to), 5, did not develop longer-range ballistic missles like those against London or plant them further East (as he was close to), and 6, Japan had not attacked Eastern Russia in earnest (as they would have were we not there), the Soviets would have a chance only because of their population. Many millions more Soviet lives would have been lost in a long and drawn-out war of attriction. (I think saying only 6 million is a major underestimation). Not only would they be fighting the eastern front of the European war alone (and possibly the entire European war after the imminent fall of the UK), they would have been alone against Japan.

It is unlikely that they would have forced their way all through Europe and through Asia. Chances are, they would have struck a deal when reasserting their own sovereignty. After losing tens of millions of people, they would have stopped and had a cold war against fascism. The map would be quite different.

If they did go all the way, then all of Europe truly would be dominated by Soviet communism, which was hardly better (for the sake of this argument, we will ignore Asia). Further, I think that fascism would have retained more than just some central European states, perhaps keeping much of Africa and South America. Hence, this cold war.

Remember, the Soviets had previously struck a deal with Germany, and they could have easily done it again. While their massive population and industrial complex was good for defense (when you are willing to sacrifice tens of millions of lives), it is horrible for offense. The Nazis were close to many of the aforementioned developments, not to mention negotiations with India about promising independence and prosperity if they turned against the UK.

So, even if you think the US contribution was minimal (and that is insulting), the "slight" difference was quite significant.

The UK knows it would have been gone without us. The Soviets, who would have survived, thanked us for ours. The French play their "resistance" card which by all historical accounts amounted to squat.

Now, as for the 9/11 cartoons, they are just in bad taste. You are welcome to oppose the US liberation of Chile (just like Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan or even Iraq), but to call us terrorists is to not understand the meaning of the word. Should we try harder to expedite our departure from Iraq? Yes. Do we specifically target civilians with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible, trying to break the spirit or our enemies for having different religious doctrines than us? No. I can't think of once in our history we did that. Even the horrible atrocies against the Native Americans, as bad as they were, were not "terrorism".