Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Haese
Stuart I prefer to call it selective peace keeping. What about Indonesia's civil rights records or North Korea, Iran or name any country in mid to north of Africa where dictators rule supreme and murder countless people or rig elections and have new ones when they don't like the result.
As for harbouring terrorists well there are two ways of looking at this. First, terrorism would not exist if the west kept its nose and intelligence agencies out of other countries affairs. Aggressive foreign policies get fundemental idiots off side and they start taking steps to have their say. how many people have died in Iraq since the first gulf war. Last count was 500,000 or more. No wonder the extremists wnet mad and starting doing more bombing etc. Look at Ireland for the last 100 or so years and what the British have done there. Secondly, it is interesting fact that lots of money comes out of Saudi Arabia to sponsor terrorist organisations. Nothing gets said about that. Nor will anything get done about that. While the oil flows selective foreign policy rules supreme.
Actually GPS was around when I was in the Army and doing ops o/s to establish economic zones of other pourer countries. We were using GPS in 1983 and it took several days to get a 100mm fix. It was not borne out of conflict but certainly in anticipation of conflict. Mind you all the wars since Vietnam have sponsored Stealth aircraft and increased missile technology, nothing really positive there I don't think.
As ex military Stuart I am not denigrating the people in the field. The policy of warfare is composed and conducted by politicians and senior government officials. The troups are just the instruments for such policies and nothing more than that. They are ordered into the field and they follow orders.
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Sorry, but again I have to disagree. Terrorism will rear its ugly head wherever people are disadvantaged, but one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. To be clear we are talking about terrorism against civilians in the developed world by the likes of Bin-Laden etc. These people are fighting a Holy war, which has more to do with religious zealotism than politics. I think that they would have emerged anyway.
North Korea has had very little influence from the west other than being stopped from invading South Korea.
I did mention that there were many other areas that they should be fixing, but if they can halt the spread of the influence of the Bin-Ladens of the world then they may be able to use diplomacy on the majority of the rest.
How many of the 500,000 people killed were Saddam's doing and how many were from the US? Saddam was engaged in genocide, and now the same extremists still bomb innocent civilians, they hardly target the Americans anymore. This has been going on for thousands of years, and it's not going to stop anytime soon.
Ireland's woes too came not from the influence of the British, but from a holy war from centuries ago, admittedly from the English royalty at the time. Have you noticed that since 2001 the IRA have been actively involved in the peace process. They realised that the first thing to be clamped down on would be resident terrorists, 9/11 was just the excuse the Brits needed to wipe them out completely with little objection from anyone.
Hmm... It's a fact that "lots of money comes out of Saudi Arabia to support terrorism" is it? Please quote sources for this information. It is not a fact, it is unsubstantiated rumourmongering supported by the same people that denigrate the war effort. Look through that "fact" and you'll see the conspiracy theorists at work.
As ex-military you should know that this sort of questioning of the motives for war has to denigrate the troops that are actually over there doing it. I am surprised that you do it.
Cheers
Stuart