"It is very difficult to separate "America" or any other country into its components, however two components -- the national America, represented by government, and the cultural America, represented by films, magazines, television and other media etc. both display violence, in one form or another. Therefore, to be fair, people have a problem in distinguishing individual Americans from the national and cultural identities."

Bingo, pdc. This is the point I was trying to make back at the start. Choosing archetypes of American life and attempting label them as accurate representations of America as a whole bases an assumption of society on a stereotype, without questioning if that stereotype is correct.

While statistics may be used to reinforce an arguement, they simply can't hold it up on their own.

You have to question who collected the statistics -- was it from police reports, or from the court system? The former might call something a murder, while the court might call it self-defense. Are the result sets being compared being gleaned from the same data set?

Are law enforcement authorities equally effectively at finding and classifying crimes?

Are the legislative definitions of the crimes being tallied the same in the various locations?

Are crimes being reported in multiple places? For example, could a domestic violence crime that results in murder appears in both sets of data in one location, but not in another?

How efficient is the gathering of information -- is it at an equal level for all countries being cited?

What happens when the data is tallied by religion, ethinicity, gender, economic status, etc.? Does the data still show a meaningful correlation at the national level?

Are crimes being accurately reported by victims? Just as rape is notoriously underreported in the US because of latent shame and the habit of blaming the victim, reported levels are still dramatically higher than in many other places like India and the Middle East.

And so forth.

HuwG -- Thanks for the synposis. I think that that theory falls apart over one cruicial aspect: the US has never been shy about BUYING what they want or need, and cost is never an issue since it's passed on to the consumers. Even if Canada were the last place on Earth with petroleum reserves, the US would be perfectly happy if those resources could be bought on the open market. If any pressure were applied, it would be muscle non-US interests out of the set of potential buyers.

Wars are almost always fought over access to resources. Even the quintessential freedom fighters want the freedom to use their resources in they way that they see fit, whether it be primary resources like food or secondary products like money. Historically, this means physical control of the land. Today, in most of the industrialized world (Israel being the most notable exception), physical control of land isn't the issue anymore. When multinational corporations that change their citizenship at whim, and transportation is widely available and cheap, which COUNTRY the resources are actually IN is irrelevant. Instead, wars are fought over economic access to resources. For example, the US doesn't want Iraq at the 51st state -- the US wants economic access to Iraq's resources, namely oil.

If Canada declared tomorrow that they would no longer sell petroleum products to the US at any price, it would be viewed as a hostile act. In that case, I suspect Canada would have a lot to fear. As long as Canada's desire to make money by selling resources to the US coincides neatly with the US's desire to buy resources and resell them at a profit... I don't see an issue. It's far smarter to make Canada pay to protect our northern border by simply being there than to attempt to patrol the whole long thing with US military forces.