From 1914 onwards America has been an influential country. The problem is that they never deal in fact.

At least 50% of the problems globally can be traced back to american intervention. From a British point of view one of the best things to happen in recent years was 9/11. That is what it took to stop Americans funding the IRA murderers. Now we have the prospect of Peace in Ireland at last. Why we pretend to have a "special relationship" with America beats me. The terms imposed for help in WW2 were not those of friend. They were all about destroying the British Commonwealth as a trading entity because it was too powerful as competition.

America has destroyed any democracy that didn't do as it was told, often in the case of South American countries putting in dictators who murdered thousands. Their latest escapade with Guantanamo Bay has proved that America cares nothing about human rights, and is happy to torture people.

Who gave america the right to kidnap people in other countries, fly them to secret camps, and then torture them. .

Excellent and well presented point. .

Face it Bush has been a disaster to all concerned- Americans, Iraqis, Republicans, and The World. He squandered the support we had after 911, and now he just makes us look foolish on the world stage. It will take decades to repair the damage he has done.

I've lived abroad, namely Central America, and even among those I lived with and taught who didn't even have electricity, much less any means of keeping current with American politics, they still had a fairly big grasp on what Bush was doing in the US and abroad. We are making an awfully big impact throughout the world, and need to mind that. It makes it a bit more difficult for us levelheaded folk to travel!

We need to make better friends of our neighbors or they become enemies. Quickly. And this has nothing to do with that chimpanzee in the oval office. He's merely the product of our backwards thinking. .

America does now, and has for the past 30 or 40 years, looked like an ogre of foreign policy. I'd be surprised to hear of a country where the US HASN'T fiddled with in some way, shape or form. You've installed juntas in Asia, dictators in South America, despots in Latin America and Tyrants in the Middle East. You've invaded out of principal and spite rather than the intended principals of the Munroe Doctrine. You've repeatedly ignored your own Constitution and international law to further the ends of the ruling upper-class. You wonder why foreign countries attack you? Yes, they do want your freedom. They want the freedom that you, and the Western world, took from them years ago. The situation in the Middle East stemmed from a peace treaty signed after WWI in Paris, circa 1919. It effectively carved up the Middle East and the Balkans, later causing strife because of opposing sects of Islam trying to govern under a single law, ultimately causing governments like Saddam Hussein to hold the country together in a stranglehold (supported by the US.) What's more, the US has blind and unwavering support of Israel, a terrorist state that upsets the balance of the Middle East by being over-armed with high-tech weapons.

The US has NO respect for international order and will do whatever they please to further their own goals. They support Georgia because of their aid in the Iraq war, and a promise of oil. Even though Russia only moved into South Ossetia because Georgia sent in troops to quell uprisings in the (effectively) Russian-run state. Rather than let a region independently decide its future, the US supports violent oppression.

Is it any wonder that they have endlessly intervened in some of these beacons of democracy; Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, Chile (Pincohet-era), Honduras, Syria, Cambodia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Grenada, Nicaragua, and a plethora of others.

The America Military/Intelligence complex is not a joke, it is a dangerous beast. It supports dictators so that it may hold a grip on wherever it pleases. Unfortunately, today, Kissinger's dream is unfurling and the world is slipping in chaos because all of America's installed allies are falling, being overthrown through revolution, or turning on their old master. It's a sad state of affairs and it's making me worry about the sort of world I will have to live in for the next 50 years.