Nah, We'll pass. We like your theme parks too much.

"...Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S...."

Okay, so thats not nice. ;)

Well that's the CIA for you. Kidnapping innocent people and threatening entire countries over problems they've caused is all in a day's work.

Well, it's his fault. How dare he call himself Muhammad ibn-Ali Schwarzkopf.

You want I should meet and greet this individual? ;)

Heh, Mafia 2, great game.

As for the topic here, you do have to wonder whether the American government realizes that this was more or less inevitable. You've got a couple of wars that were very unpopular and because of them we weren't able to commit troopers to things that were much more important. As in dealing with the Mugabe situation in Zimbabwe and the issue of Darfur. If anybody would have greeted us as liberators it would've been the Sudanese people or at least the subset dealing with genocide.

You're heartless, really....

You don't need a bomb. Just a bullet. Sadly I don't think there's any other way Berlusconi is going down. He's survived just about every scandal known to man.

Thus far, it's really nothing much more than the traditional Final Diplomat Dispatch (where an outgoing diplomat uses his last dispatch to rip the country he's in a new one) was, except for America instead of the UK.

And a cathedral to the head. He rolled and failed the dexterity check, but won the Constitution one.

Not really. After all, you guys COULD vote him off. You didn't, therefor you deserve him.
... and yes, I'm swiss, I lost with every vote last weekend and also deserve my administration. As much as I'd like to smash them against the next wall - repeatedly.

I hate to be Debbie Downer here, but you'd have to be incredibly naive to think that the "truth" should always come out. Sometimes fictions, lies, and deception serve a very real purpose, and actually save lives.

Do you think that the Cold War would have ended well if both sides knew exactly what the other was doing and the variable extent of their nuclear stockpiles? Do you really think that we should know the names of international intelligence assets?

And in this case, do you really think that making public diplomatic cables serves any real practical purpose? Does Iran really need to know that the king of Saudi Arabia wanted the United States to engage them? Does the world really need to know what some diplomat thought about some PM's personal character in an off-the-cuff classified diplomatic cable?

Realpolitik, you know that little principle that allows us to operate in our secular world, requires some level of secrecy to function. To think otherwise is at best youthful idealism.

Anyhow, you're welcome to your opinion obviously. That's just mine.

I'm pretty sure they did. Even regarding how much involvement they both had in conflicts such as Vietnam, Afghanistan (1979 - 89) and Korea. But neither wanted a full scale nuclear war and it was that which kept it under wraps.

We all agree that any goverment can be an enemy of freedom, but these debate really shows how weak our democracy is. In Iran, the regime could expell hundreds of students from universities for supporting oposition, executing defenseless women for adultery, hang people for the crime of sodomy, suporting guerrilla on neighbouring countries and here we got a huge crisis for some naive comments made by some embasies staff. It´s depressing to see how vulnerable we are.

Well, believe or not, they actually did not. Everything from spy plane photographs to human intelligence was scrambled by both sides to obscure the true sizes of their individual stockpiles. Both the KGB (now, the FSB) and the CIA operated under false assumptions throughout the Cold War due to rather elaborate counter intelligence operations by both sides. Sometimes it was as simple as as placing wooden mockups of NBC delivery systems in a highly visible location.

In the age of the internet and google earth, I know that this is pretty hard to believe.

As for the South East Asia conflicts, you're absolutely right on those counts. But neither side ever attempted to make their involvement a secret.

Now, please understand. I really believe some things should come out. There have been multiple times that the United States has overstepped ethical and legal boundaries, and the individuals responsible should be held accountable.

This is not one of those cases.