no way we would buy the bullets, although it would not break our bank.

Germany paid one time for not going to war, that was at the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Please lookup the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Cost

That was later felt as embarrassing and the public consensus was that next time Germany would either take some military part or no part at all.

As for the Persian Gulf War cost, there is an important side-note to it. Regrettably I have no link on it. True or false, I remember reading it in a left-winged news magazine and it was “public knowledge” in Germany, especially at the begin of the Iraq war in 2003: The congressional office inflated the US costs of the Persian Gulf War on purpose, they were moreover in the 40-50 billion $ region and they would not want to admit that they made profit out of the war.

Sigh ….

A key issue I’ve been talking about for some time. Every time someone says “The U.S. should intervene in Darfur” or something such, I comment somewhere along the lines of “We’re busy – how about if the Germans and French and Italians and Spainiards send in their army?”

Being informed that they haven’t the resources to do so, I lead the discussion to the end that the lack of resources stem from a lack of will. And the lack of will stems is expressed in a particular choice of priorities – if you want to spend money on social services, then of course you will not have that money to spend on the military, etc. But then, if you don’t want to spend money on that, why should we? Who are you to tell us how to spend our money and place our priorities on something where you are not willing to do the same?

Others here are very likely much better informed on this next than I, but IIRC there’s also an issue that other countries (Britian and Canada being notable exceptions) won’t permit their armed forces to actually be put in harms’ way. Haven’t various other forces in NATO assignments been forbidden from being placed in combat situations?

There are a lot of people that declare that there is no way that one “wrong” president can do that kind of damage in the US. These morons need to come up with some example to prove their case. In a democracy, elections matter. I cannot think of any democracy or republic that successfully survived voting into office a marxist or socialist government without some sort of civil war; barring FDR who lucked into a major world war and died in office. Let’s see: Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, all the SSRs that really had no choice, Nicaragua, Argentina,…….hmmm, except for the thoroughly emasculated Nordic countries it seems to be a clean sweep. On the other hand, I expect “pirate” submarines off the coast of Denmark and Sweden any day now…..