Wendt and Risse-Kappen argue (very reduced version ) that democracies don't fight each other because they see how the governments act towards their own citizens. These good relations between a government and the citizens in a state makes this state apear inherently peacefull and, as result, trustworthy.
Now, from an exterior view, the relation between the US government and the US citizens seems not so good. AFAIK, there is a lot of personal freedom taken in the name of security. This seems to most Europeans very strange, especially because we still have the pictures of the land of unlimited opportunity and the land of the free.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The *reason* you think this is true, as we've already talked about, is specifically because of the *American* media and opposition have the freedom to tell you that.
If you're basing your opinion of what you heard children on the internet complain about on the internet, then you're going about this wrong. My (the royal my, that of Americans) opinion of France isn't based on seeing that there's a riot there on the news, my opinion of Germany isn't based on reading about how video games are edited for content.
Our pal charlieg makes the same mistake - you're putting yourself in the middle of an internal debate that isn't important at all. Why do you read about Bush being an evil tyrant and Iraq is a horrible mess? Are the American people ready to rise up? Do people actually believe these things in the US? Of course not -- the whole point of any of that is that someone who isn't Bush would like to be president next time around, and part of doing that means showing that their party disagrees with everything the Republicans do.
You must have the same concept in Germany - the party that isn't in power is obligated to force criticism of the one that is wherever possible. The difference is that in other countries you don't have Americans seeing the scale of the thing and assuming there's actually some grand battle between good and evil going on. You're seeing words like 'tyrant' and 'oppresive' because they're negative buzzwords -- not because anyone believes that a legitimately elected president serving his Constitutionally mandated term is a terrible dictator, or that the government is actually going to start censoring everything because it's a theoretical possibility that such a law could be passed when one party controls the legislature and the executive branch. (Well, okay, American teenagers probably believe this - but only because they read it in the same place you have and also have no concept of what oppression or a tyrant is.)
To go back to WC... Why is WC often understood as WWII in space? I don't get the link...
Wing Commander is the *Pacific* theater of World War II in space.
The war begins when the Kilrathi - the Japanese in space, complete with their own Bushido honor code - launch a sneak attack on the Terran Confederation. The entire makeup of the games is built as an analogue for the 'island hopping' campaigns -- you fight for one system after another until you get close to the enemy homeland.
(... and then, of course, the war ends when you drop the secretly developed "t-bomb" on the enemy home planet, forcing him to surrender.)
Not to forget... Tolwins Nazi-Gang (New in WC4 too) and Tolwin, turning evil.
I mean, is there a strucural reason aginst the AWACS plot or is it just that is wasn't implemented by Origin?
The complaint people (and don't confuse people with me) have with the "AWACS" plot is that it's incredibly contrived, not that it's some kind of continuity error.
I'm not hung up on Iraq. I was merely citing a topical example of why there is such problems with the way America is perceived.
Well, what you were asked to do was cite a grievance you had with the United States - and you're stll spouting this generic teenage crap about Iraq (which, since you're apparently from
England is all the more idiotic).
We're all heard this story. It's not original thought on your part and it's not an unbiased opinion crafted by other countries -- you're just parroting the American political opposition.
The evidence was circumstancial at best. ("This is a mobile biological weapons factory" - Powell points at picture of a couple of lorries on a road.) It was amazing how quickly the motivation for war was rephrased to "Regime Change" and even more amazing how the US people gobbled it all up. It's clear the Bush administration was looking for an excuse to wage war in Iraq (when senior Whitehouse insiders like Dick Clarke are saying this, well, there isn't smoke without fire) and 9/11 provided the climate to enable the war. The rest of the world looks at the situation and sees America seizing large oil fields and Halliburton awarded multi-billion dollar contracts to pipe oil out of Iraq and all in all it just doesn't look good.
Neat. What's it to you?
It's such an inane debate, because it's one of those things where everyone takes their own standpoint that's so far diverged from reality and pretends that it's true.
The administration is stupid to continue claiming that it's looking for 'weapons of mass destruction', because it's a claim that's going to go nowhere.
But *EVERYONE ELSE* is stupid, in a non-rhetorical sense, to continue claiming that they were honestly mislead by any of this. Anyone with half a brain knew exactly what the administration was going to do regarding Iraq when they elected Mr. Bush. Sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending you were tricked isn't an intelligent defense at all.
That is to say, the proper response to all of this is: duh. Of course the reasons for going to war were 'manufactured' -- just like the reasons for pretty much every war in history. If you've figured out that the "evidence" for war with Iraq wasn't an open and shut case demanding action, then congratulations, you've figured out... exactly how the world works.
From FDR conducting a media campaign to prepare Americans for a war with German (to stimulate the economy!), to Johnson claiming the US needed to go to war in Vietnam because someone shot at a destroyer to Polk being ever so worried about how Mexico reacted to the soldiers he sent into their territory in the first place, it is simply how every single war in history has begun from a public relations standpoint.
Figuring that out makes you a master of the obvious, not some kind of righteous crusader on the side of truth and justice.
(Do you have any idea how idiotic George Bush appears outside of his home nation?)
Which I've always thought of as good evidence for why the entire system is a hilarious sham both internally and externally -- everyone is reacting to a conceit created by the American media. Of course President Bush isn't an idiot - it's a realistic impossibility. The entire concept is half conscious put on and half sour grapes here at home... and abroad, again, people somehow believe that a blatant political debate is somehow *true*.
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) that democracies don't fight each other because they see how the governments act towards their own citizens. These good relations between a government and the citizens in a state makes this state apear inherently peacefull and, as result, trustworthy. 
