Could Syria see our marines as an act of war?
?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm going off memory from my time stationed in Berlin here, so no links:
The Allies (the US, UK, France and the Soviet Union) won the War in Europe in 1945. We wanted to make sure such a thing would never happen again, so we took strong steps to defang that country. The most prominent was telling the Germans they couldn't establish their national capital in Berlin. We originally split the city into three Sectors - the British Sector, the American Sector and the Soviet Sector. The French then came in: "Hey! What about us?" Because we're nice people, we even offered to let the French pick out the land they wanted in their sector. They picked out a smallish area in the center of town...and then we found out WHY they wanted this particular property:
The Berlin Victory Column commemorates the Prussians kicking the shit out of the French in 1871, and the French Army was going to blow it up because this monument REALLY pisses them off. They ended up with the districts of Reinickendorf and Wedding, neither of which had anything the French hated.
Once that was settled came the question of military occupation. Each nation was allowed one "brigade" of troops. This one was whipped in there by the US and French; the British don't field brigades and the Soviets had very few. The composition of these brigades was tightly controlled: no more than a company of tanks, no more than three battalions of infantry, and no "commandos or marines."
