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Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment :

I'd say Pilger's got it about right. And he doesn't even mention the
four Canadians killed by some part-time idiot who wanted to drop a bomb
on someone, anyone.

Did you really read Pilger's article? Gallipoli and Dieppe are prime
examples of what he's saying about the old British Empire: our uncles
and fathers were those colonial troops.

The reason the U.S. doesn't sustain casualties is because it doesn't
commit ground troops unless it can put them there in overwhelming force.
This is the Powell doctrine, and it works wonderfully when you have an
enemy like Iraq in the Gulf War that is stupid enough to think it can
stand and fight.

Britain has always tried to play the U.S. off against Europe to avoid
domination by either. It's a tight-rope act that, when it works, makes
Britain a go-between that both sides can utilize. A ham-fisted and
essentially stupid administration in Washington now, however, is driving
Britain closer to Europe all the time. What Tony Blair really wants,
don't forget, is to take Britain into the Euro.

A little bit of history: America lost exponentially fewer men in World
War I than any other nation that was fighting. It lost (I'm guessing
here) about 50,000, roughly the same as in Vietnam. Britain and Italy
lost hundreds of thousands, and the French, Russians, Germans and
Austro-Hungarians millions. By staying out of the war until it was
almost over, by concentrating on business while its European rivals were
tearing each other apart, and by filling the vacuums they left after the
war, it gained far more from the Versailles Treaty than any of the other
major combatants.

They tried to pull the same stunt in World War II, but the Japanese
interfered and when the U.S. declared war on Japan, Hitler declared war
on the U.S.

American losses in World War II, while a lot larger than in World War I,
still don't come anywhere near the other combatants.

But...the U.S. between 1945 and the rise of McCarthy wrote one of the
greatest chapters in its history. It sponsored the establishment of the
U.N. (which the present administration is trying to pretend never
happened), and the Marshall Plan saw it devote as much as three per cent
of its GDP (GNP in those days) to a version of what we now call foreign
aid...now it spends about 0.1 per cent. It also sponsored the Bretton
Woods talks, an attempt to set up a world-wide financial system to avoid
the problems of the 1930s that brought on world-wide depression...a
system which only failed when it was revised into a provider of seed
money for big business seeking to move into third-world markets.
Essentially the idea was that we would all cooperate and we would all
get rich (which is the basic tenet of Socialism, by the way). Now it has
become 'we all cooperate and America gets rich.'

I agree that the Charge of the Light Brigade isn't a particularly good
example of military strategy; nor is Custer's Last Stand, for that
matter. Jutland was inconclusive, but the German navy never came out to
contest control of the seas again. It would have been nice if the
Bismarck had been sunk without the loss of the Hood, but the Bismarck
was sunk. The U.S. lost half its carrier force winning the Battle of
Midway. In the Falklands the British used what we now call the Powell
doctrine; they went in with overwhelming force and took their islands
back. And in doing so ended the military dictatorship that had seen
30,000 Argentinians 'disappeared'.

'Idiot pinko' is name-calling, which is what idiot nazis start doing
when they have no argument. I would avoid it. It's like an Arsenal
scarf; it tells other Arsenal fans that you are one of them. It says
nothing about whether Arsenal is really a better team than West Ham.