[mod]Personal remarks on all sides will cease from this point onwards. Thank you.[/mod]
So do the people in other countries hear a lot about the decisions that the U.S. government makes?
I barely hear anything about the governments of other countries. Also I agree that the U.S. government makes pretty stupid decisions at times but in reality that is not our fault. Truly honest people do not exist in the U.S. government anymore. Most of them are there to help themselves. Fact is it takes too much money to become an American politician. So most of the time we pick between a Terd and a shinier terd.
Because the United States is the only super power much of what goes on there is reported widely. I've lived in Spain, Italy, and, of course, the UK, and the media in all three countries pays a lot of attention to domestic and foreign policy as far as the United States is concerned, because so much of what the US does impacts on the rest of the world, not just in terms of foreign policy, but also in terms of economics.
And i think Bosnia was something EU could have handled.... Germany should have stepped in or France and Britain
The EU had next to no combined military force at that time, so there was precious little that it could do in terms of intervention. The failure of EU foreign policy in both Bosnia and Kosovo was the collective spur to try to do something about European defence, but it still doesn't have the capability to act independently even today in terms of intervention. In terms of peace keeping, and other monitoring roles, it does have some capability. If you want to learn more about that, you can check out the
European Commission's External Relations web page.
Let me just say that the U.S. was offered oil at 10$ a barrel when Iraq brutally took over tiny Kuwait. We intervened where the U.N. saw no need. You can not negotiate with Mad men hell bent on the domination of the worlds oil reserves. What the U.S. did in Iraq was justified.
There was a UN resolution to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, and push them back into Iraq, so the UN very much saw a need to take action. A range of UN resolutions were then imposed in the wake of this resolution. It wasn't the 1991 conflict which was overly controversial, but the 2003 invasion, which had no UN mandate, and the justifications for intervening kept changing.
The idea that you can't negotiate is one of the dividing lines between the US and many EU states. EU states tend, as a general rule, to prefer to negotiate, and then act with UN backing if negotiations fail. The US was not interesting in achieving UN backing, and really only went through the motions. At the very best, it could be argued that the US felt that it was desirable to have a UN resolution, but it certainly didn't feel that it was necessary, let alone essential.
Also the U.N. takes too long to make decisions while people are suffering. Bosnia, Darfur, Syria. Libya, Rwanda. The U.N.was content to let the people of these countries die. Also when U.N. troops liberate a country they do not fire a shot so no force is administered.
Ask yourself why the UN Security Council takes too long to make decisions? Which countries sit on it? Which countries wield a veto? Think about that, and then you'll be able to answer your own question here.
As for the point liberation, I'm afraid that's incorrect. Afghanistan and Iraq saw plenty of shots being fired (by more countries than the US, so it's not just the responsibility of the US, although they are the lead actor), to borrow your phrase, and it's possible to argue that they're actually less free, especially in the case of Iraq, than they were before foreign forces intervened.
Also if you've ever see Hotel Rwanda you'd know that that was a failed U.N. attempt at peace. I did alot of resaerch on that specific case, the U.N. troops werent aloud to fire shots...They just went in to save all the white people.
This isn't exactly what happened. A useful summary of what happened can be found
here, with one of the UN's own reports into the disaster
here.
France did not intervene just to save 'white people' incidentally. It intervened to establish a humanitarian zone, and ended up evacuating its own allies in the country as well as French nationals. Many of these allies were allegedly involved in ethnic cleansing.