Walsingham

I'm enjoying the debate. But there's been a bit of a family crisis here. May have to drop out for a while. Apologies for not responding to any points extant...

Right. Have been taking notes this time, so I hope I won't miss anything. I'll mainly respond to Steve Thaibin, since he did us the courtesy of typesetting all his stuff. I don't agree with him :D but at least I can see clearly what I'm disagreeing with. So I've highlighted some points, and my responses below (which is your cue to go to sleep) US DOMINANCE IS ABUSED AND SCARES FOREIGNERS? Yes, plenty of people are scared by the US. But if you think that's because they are well informed and independently decided that, you are over-simplifying. It may surprise some folks that foreigners have their own societies and media-streams. By far and away the people who are most annoyed with the US are the power-brokers and journos in the countries where unrest is high. Leaving aside how great a democracy America is, the US/UK tend to insist that people move towards democracy. This understandably puts the willies up the local chiefs/warlords/mullahs/wisemen/editors. Because it threatens their stranglehold over the luckless peasants. So, yeah maybe we make it worse, and give them more excuses for feling this way by being all butch. But make no mistake they would not want us to get involved however nice we were being. As for abusing dominance. I find it extraordinary that people in the west are even trying to get the US to ramp back in the way they are. When China really gets up steam we are going to be laying out the red carpet just like we were when the Soviets were looming on the border. So, yeah, maybe they are enjoying dominance a bit much, but what's the alternative? The United Nations? Speak to someone who works there, and they'll quickly disabuse you of any romantic notions. TERRORISM :ph34r: IS JUST AN ACT OF WAR BY OTHER MEANS? People very frenquently confuse guerrilla warfare with terrorism. Guerrilla war is the use of irregular forces, exploiting the benefits of local logistic support, and small unit size and commitment to hit the weak spots in what on paper is a superior military force. Fighting a guerrilla army is no kind of fun, and it isn't pretty, but it is a world away from modern terrorism. Modern terrorism is aimed at nothing more nor less than the creation of abject chaos. They attack targets of opportunity to destroy the infrastructure of the state, both physical and psychological. If you want to get all intellectual you can read about this in Mao's work. If you want to keep your feet on the ground, it is the old principle of making yourself bigger by making others small. The theoretcial ending for these b****rs is that the state they are attacking will become so weak and fractured that they can waltz in and make demands. However, in the meantime, the poor bastards who live in the state concerned have to put up with constant fear and ever worsening conditions. The more complex and sophisticated our systems of state, society, and culture become the easier it is for some malcontent half-wit to jam a spanner in the works and bring it all tumbling down. We HAVE to stop trying to be all touchy huggy about terrorism, before one of these little groups finally pulls off a proper mass-casualty attack that makes 9/11 look like a tea-party. There are some parallels between this and 'shock and awe'. However, there is a difference between acts of war committed by a duly elected body, and a bunch of self-appointed nuts. In the same way that a state is allowed to incarcerate an individual, but a lynch mob aren't. THE AL-SHIFA PHARMA FACTORY WAS NOT PRODUCING CHEMICAL WEAPONS. You are quite right, according to an old acquaintance of mine who has been working in Sudan for years. However, there was substantial rumour at the time that there really had been a much smaller lab in operation in the city. The suggestion was that the plant was targetted due to poor communications between the Forces and CIA. However, it could also have been a total balls up. On the other hand any pharmaceuticals factory is capable in principle of running out chemical and some biological agents. You have to know what you are looking for. It doesn't make the place suddenly look like a James Bond villain lair. Yes, if the attack on the factory had been 'successful' and it had been the correct target chem agents would have gone all over the place. Is that the US being crappy, or the SOBs who built a chemical weapons factory in a residential area? Note that subsequent to the attack the US have developed new bombs specifically designed to deal with chem weapons facilities more safely. They're still not safe, but they're working on it. SUDAN IS NOT AN ENEMY OF THE US? I have no idea where you got that statement from. Not only has the Sudanese government consistently attacked the US by diplomatic means, it has also for many years hosted terrorist training camps, including those run by Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden helped run the country by building roads and other facilities, in exchange for their cooperation. Moreover, if a country which engages in deliberate ethnic cleansing isn't our enemy I want it added to the list right now. THE US HAS KILLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS IN IRAQ, AND MILLIONS ELSEWHERE? <_< I'd like to see your sources for that. According to my best understanding, the studies which showed the casualties in Iraq were upwards of 100,000 sufferred from being from unverifiable sources, double-counting, and people listing dead soldiers as civilian casualties. I refer to the site www.iraqbodycount.com ; which has several different studies linked to it. ~~~~~ The war isn't over, in my opinion. In fact it is now far more serious. If we lose at this stage and Iraq collapses it will be the most monumental shot in the arm for the Global Jihadists. The country will dissolve into civil war. Turkey will intercede in the North, throwing that country into unrest. Iran will intercede in the South, bringing Shia Islam into confrontation with extremist Wahabbi Sunni Islam in the form of the insurgents. Lord knows what will happen to Saudi Arabia. But expect the scale and ferocity of attacks to increase in the West, in every country. I do not believe we can afford at this stage to lose. I believe whatever our political stripes we must get behind the continued assistance and pacification of Iraq. Once that is done, and we have discharged our duty there, we can get back to the business of calling each other names.

It would certainly save time. However, if you look even around your local community you can surely find someone willing and able to create some bespoke music. I am sure your ideas are not precisely the same as those in the titles you mention. Why make the music the same?

There's been a lot of posting since I last wrote. i'm beginning to think I am going to have to take notes. For the time being, apologies for missing anyone's points to me. HUGE POST OF DOOM 1. I think that anyone who argues the Iraqis should have done the job themselves is ignorant of both the Iraqi state apparatus, and probably any similar regime. I have lived and worked in several and can say confidently that Iraq had about the worst possible chance of internal revolution of any state in the world. After his fashion Saddam Hussein was an absolute genius of terror, on a par with Stalin, but with the advantage of being able to pick up where Stalin left off in refining the techniques. I mean Stalin wasn't able to line up TWO heirs with comparable savagery. 2. Democracy is not a state of nature. We are a brutal species, and will always revert to tyranny without the coercion. Coercion that is necessarily the use of physical pain and death. 3. I don't want you to think I believe the good old British Empire was the way Kipling painted it. It was mercantile, and there are some signal instances of us being worse savages than the people we were civilising. I just think it serves no purpose besides Mel Gibson's to say we were always like that. I also think we owe a certain debt to the men of principle in the Empire who did stand up for decency to record that stand. Just as we rightly remember the bastards who did not. 4. I'm a wee bit old fashioned when it comes to freedom. I agree with JFK when he implied in several speeches the notion that so long as one man is subject to the law of Tyranny none of us are free. I look first to my own country, of course. But after that I do not rest easy with the notion that other men are in chains, and that I am separated from them by only a few miles, or a dash of skin colour. 5a. I recognised already that we are not addressing many tyrannical states around the world. We are even aiding and abetting some. My only response to that is to plead the limited capacity of any nation - even the US - to intervene in world affairs. We cannot afford to tackle everything at once. Sometimes we must content oursleves with 'engagement' which is the application of peaceful pressure and cultural conforntation, to affect a slow change of principle. The germs of this approach can be seen in the younger citizens of many Gulf States, even while their governments persist in squashing democracy. While such an approach is moving forward I say let it do so. 5b. However, if we made a point of moving against only one tyrannical regime in each generation we would not have forever to wait before we had risen to a point our ancestors could be proud of. 6. We already covered the issue of what we were told earlier in the thread. Some of us feel it was a mistake to lie, but the cause was obvious. Some of us feel the cause was obvious but it was wrong to lie. My analogy would be being told that the house down the road was full of explosives and we had to put out the fire there or we'd get hit in the explosion. Then it turns out later that you were lied to because they needed your help to stop their house burning down. I guess we are allowed to complain about the fact that there have been kickbacks. But for feth's sake we should have done it anyway. (Apologies to those like Lucius who don't see it that way, but I think new people are dropping in at this late stage and needed a reminder)

You'll have a tough time studying war history in teh UK. back when I was looking for an MSc in the area I found more Masters degrees on mediaeval arts and crafts than on war studies. A lot more. Which is when I realised our civilisation was (+1) doomed. However, I take issue with the idea that everyone who does history becomes an accountant. Some become unemployed/journalists.

The comic 2000AD runs them occasionally as well. But basically the computer game was bound to supercede them for most kids. It's just easier, and being the shoeless monkeys that we are we also take the easy option. Now I'm off to eat a ready meal and have a can of coke.

George Galloway has the vouchers under his bed. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Like a modern day Smaug. Cigar fumes wafting up the secret tunnel wherein lurk a bevvy of US senators. (Apologies for double posting. But not sure how else to respond to different people). I was going to wind up doing even more posting but I'll stick to it here. 1) Yes, the military do wind up working in the economic interests of corporations. This is a simple matter of economics. However, we also occasionally find that those interests coincide with humanitarian concerns. It's a fact of life that unless you want to quickly bankrupt yourself you have to do both together. If you go bankrupt you can't help anyone. And Aponez is quite correct. Many military 'morons' risk life and limb, and spend years of their lives helping people all over the world in small relatively inexpensive projects. 2) In my opinion the British Empire gets a lot of stick for the way it lumped different ethnic groups together. Having grown up around some of the men who participated in this sort of thing I can say that in the main they were guilty of nothing worse than naive anti-racism. They happend to believe that despite their differences the people of wherever were not uncivilised barbarians but were potentially civilised people, and that if we just left them to get on with things they would sort it out for themselves. I mean, Britain herself is a massive hodgepodge of different tribes. the lines were drawn to make the countries concerned economically capable, not pander to sectarianism. The alternative would be to stand up at the time and say "These damn foreigners are too dumb to bury their differences and cooperate." Which would have got you quietly assigned to peanut planting projects in Tuvalu at the time. You have to also remember that the colonial office was up against an imperative to cede control asap. So even if they had accepted the principle of ethinc segregation, they would not have had the time to do the research. Even assuming every town and village could have been classed as 'kurdish' or 'shia'. Given that this was a practical impossibility it was even more obvious that they had to just build a working economic entity and let the people sort things out for themselves.

Absolutely bang on. France was owed money, and intended to become the high end systems supplier at the end of sanctions (which they thought would be tied up eventually), along with civil and oil engineering projects. France of course matured its angel into a potential case for weakening US hegemony and strengthening a European bloc. Something that underpins their whole foreign policy drive for the last ten years at least. Russia and China wanted their slice of the Iraqi cake for hard currency exports. Russia also rather enjoyed Iraq being out of the oil game because it was buoying up their own oil exports (the only other significant foreign earner for them at the time.

I've only been interested in China seriously for about a year, since I started reading Stratfor.com (really excellent material, if anyone is interested, if completely amoral); so I'll take a bit of a back seat here. I was under the impression that China wanted Taiwan partly because they have a more dogmatic political culture and Taiwan is 'Chinese' Goshtarnit. I suppose it can't hurt that Taiwan is also in possession of much of our small missile technology and even at a similar level in many aspects of component design. Which would be a boon to their burgeoning electronics industry and also their airforce. But That's just my personal view. I haven't seen it anywhere else. I have a copy of 1421 on my bookshelf waiting to get read. But i have to say it sounds rather peculiar. I can cope with the notion of the Chinese circumnavigating the globe; more things in heaven and earth and all that. but I can't cope with the engineering issues I have with ships of that size and construction being able to do it. Nor do I understand why they would use single slabs of carved stone as ballast as has been suggested, rather than gravel. It just makes no bloody sense. At least to me.

One of the neat things about being in a diff time zone is coming back and seeing so much written overnight. Okay. Quick and simple point first. We (meaning the US and UK) didn't sell Saddam Hussein his arms. Fact. The sales were (in order of magnitude) Soviet, French, and Chinese; with China eating up increasing percentages as time went on. My source is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports for the period around 1989 and 1991. Some US and Uk firms collaborated, certainly, but we were NOT big retailers. And the UK provided some officer training at the low level following the age old (and possibly bollocks) principle that doing so moderated the views of the officers we trained. Second point is that I think it was a terrible error to lie about the terrorism angle. Nobody even vaguely concerned with terrorism found it plausible. I think it says a lot about the poor regard the Bush administration has for the people of America that they even tried it. But that's just my opinion, not a fact. I'd agree with Eldar that Iraq is not a Vietnam. But that is the game plan of the opposition, and if we haver on the issue it WILL get worse. Speaking of which I think it's great that no-one here is arguing for bugging out. Because that would precipitate a civil war. One that would go on as long as they usually go on, with very very high civilian casualties. China is a whole huge kettle o fish noodles. they are presently stacking everything they can up so they can precipitate a crisis that will fall out in their favour. Hence their bulking up their airforce, and buying US dollars. They have also been ostentatiously training for amphibious operations. Expect something to happen there. And for the time being we can't do squat to stop them. But it might hurt their economy and jeopardise the Olympics. So I think they will be aiming to bully Taiwan into voluntarily rejoining China for fear of a war.

Are these forums usually so educational?

You have no life. Yet you bring wonders.... Killl it! Undead!!!!!!!

I'd live in Alaska. Alaskans are the coolest people I have ever met while travelling. Oh, plus, with the snow and everything I'd have a perfect excuse for those days when I just wanted to stay in and roleplay!

I'm very interested in the possibility of dynamically modelling the effects of stress, fatigue, fear and so on in roleplaying. We all know the sort of flashing red screen device for implying pain, and also the wavy visual occlusion that happened in Deus Ex when you got drugged. But what about more complex representation? Adrenaline effects. The consequences of unfamiliar threats, smells, environments. Attentional focussiing under stress. Anyone else interested in this?

See, that was my problem. I can remember what that was. I even think I have a copy somewhere. It's 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On' But i can't recall the first one.

You mean it's OK to go along with a rotten politician if he is arguing for the stuff you want? Like GW Bush? *grins, then ducks hurled antelope*

:D You got me there. It was pretty cool, for all that! ~ I don't think he will be invited back. He got chucked out for encouraging mutiny among the troops during war. Which I think is officially high treason and one of our few capital crimes. The only reason I think they didn't do it is that he would get round it and be still more strong as a 'heroic martyr'. In any case I do think it's only a matter of time before he gets caught out on something.

I can't remember what the song is during the opening sequence in Fallout 1. And it's driving me nuts.

Sure they did, but they would never have been allowed to launch an invasion based on "we're going in there to liberate them poor Iraqis" alone, they just needed an excuse, a really good one, the ultimate lie... hmm; "Threat to the international community in the forms of deadly biological and chemical warheads plus a possible nuclear program?" You got it! :D <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I take your point. However, that is an extremely simplistic approach to the question of the intel. yes it was a lie to say we knew he had the weapons. But we DID know for a fact that no-one could account for thousands of tonnes of chemical agents we knew he had in 1991, and had subsequently 'gone astray'. That was the Un's own report. The Iraqi authorities were also fighting extremely hard to stop the inspectors doing their jobs. i think it was reasonable to assume the weapons were there. But more importantly, if our government had to lie in order to get us off our fat backsides and do something about the regime, then I think it is we who should be ashamed, not the government. ~ As for the situation in Iraq. A comparison with Japan or Germany postwar is risible. 1) In both cases we were supplanting ourselves into the role of government in countries with strong national identities and sense of society. Iraq was a hodgepodge of tiny communities bound not by any social contract but by pure fear. Since we are not ruling by fear there is substantial upheaval. 2) In both cases, thanks to the fanatical doctrines espoused, former members of the fascist regimes did us the favour of getting killed in the war. They were thus not around to cause trouble later. Moreover I should point out that Iraq is NOT in the grip of a popular rebellion. The numbers of insurgents, and the tactics they are employing both betray their origins as former members of the regime (the special Republican Guard units had terrorist training as standard to operate against opponnets outside the country), and jihadi tourists from Afghanistan and elsewhere. ~ The use of military force against Korea could not be applied with the same degree of confidence as we had with Iraq. The campaign would be long and brutal.

Galloway did indeed do an excellent job of whupping the senators. But all that tells you is how much better training the house of Commons is for debate than the Senate. George Galloway is not a concerned respectful defender of human rights or anything. You should check your heroes before you sing their praises. Some of us with longer memories recall that Galloway visited Saddam Hussein when he was in power and said he admired him. The same man who fought the war also fought sanctions - effectively meaning a 'do nothing to Saddam' stance. If you look at his history you will see a relentless opportunist with a natural talent for politics and an enjoyment of verbal bullying.

Utter Nonsense. <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> If you wish to delude yourself thusly Women would always win because men are easy to distract. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Mmmmm... pies

Knowing Brits (RAF and Army) who have come back, i can say that is how they see it. And the questionable legality can be best dealt with by a gander at the Attorney General's advice. Make sure you read the full version though. In it, it is clearly stated that war is legal where there are compelling reasons to believe that doing so would avert an humanitarian catastrophe. This is an established fact with Rwanda and the Balkans. With saddam hussein's bodycount at an average of 101 civilians dead per day I'd say there was a crisis... But if you really want to hear whether it was a good move, don't take my word for it. Ask an Iraqi.