Middle East Blood Bath 2014

downthetrack wrote:

Through out the last century 10s of millions of people of religion and race have been murdered and persecuted by the filth of socialism and communism.We know who the real racists are HJ.

Yup, and capitalism is doing its level best to catch up.

It is difficult to pin global war and pestilence on any one political bent as they all seem so good at it, even Tony Bliar, a catholic socialist in love with money, managed it.

downthetrack wrote:

Elias wrote:

libya is on the brink also.

ukraine seems to be esculating into a proxy war much blood to be shed yet i fear

Yes its next,absulute crying shame.Could have a fantastic tourisum industry.wonderful beaches

Yep. Utterly. If only war torn Somalia could stop this pirate shit, a fat bloke from Coventry could pedal a swan shaped pedallo around the coast. They'd be happy with that. Typical Western wank post. Our way or the highway.
Your post is 50% of the problem.

I think many a trader in Morocco,Tunisia and Egypt would disagree with that post.
Like to many a leftie prefer given money rather than work for it

Imagine if Engerland were a tourst cuntry wiv fings for sale!

Awful attitude. These are proud human beings with a heritage that dates way beyond ours. When they were inventing the wheel and mathematics, we were inventing fire.

Yep very proud,that's why 1000s are crossing the Med everyday.
Whats so wrong with tourism ?

downthetrack wrote:

I think many a trader in Morocco,Tunisia and Egypt would disagree with that post.
Like to many a leftie prefer given money rather than work for it

Just dealing with the first line of your post, You are right with the sentiment there, all the Moroccans that I have spoken to think that Egypt  and Tunisia are off their heads getting involved with the Arab spring. fecked in the head is what they said. Morocco had a few  demonstrations but generally they are proud of the revolution of the women, they are relaxed about whether people are devout, burkered or not and they don't want any of that gunfire or shit because they are a nation of traders. It's wrong to lump every Muslim country together as "the Arabs" they are very diverse with really disparate views as tribes or nations. As always though it's always the people of countries who are against warfare, the politicians are usually keener but they don't do the fighting.

  Boris Johnson   

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Iggy wrote:

  Boris Johnson   

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Amen for Boris !!

Indeed

The mess that is called Iraq was created by then leaders Bush and Blair. Now Blair wants military action again in Iraq. The Coalition seem not too keen on that, well, not British involvement anyway.

Clegg has said he would support American military action. Apparently there are 400 British people fighting in Syria and Iraq right now. These are said to pose a serious risk to the UK if and when they return.

It seems to me that Ukraine is a high priority for the West at the moment, as war in Europe is a no-no and must be avoided at all costs. The USA and the UK have given aid and military assistance to and around Ukraine. Planes and warships are in the area, troops are in NATO member states close to Russia.

It also seems that the West does not give a damn about what is going on in Syria (the West showed its weakness sometime ago).

Now that Iraq is kicking off big time, the hand ringing has begun with certain UK Politicians slagging each other off, while the USA decides whether to attack ISIS at some stage ?.

If the West did care, then they would be in there righting the many wrongs that have been going on. I was never in favour of the Iraq conflict, it would have been better to have left SH as he was (dropping bombs when needed to keep him on his toes). I was in favour of the conflict in Afghanistan though.

War is war and the West (mainly the USA and UK) will have to go and fight wars in the future for the beliefs they hold so dear. Whether that is against Russia/China/Islamic terrorists etc-etc, then so be it.

The human species is a war mongering species and to find ourselves where we are now is astonishing - by that I mean we have not had a WWIII as yet.

I am not against war if it is stated and proven beyond all doubt that there is a serious threat to the UK.

world war 3 (cold war) was over decades ago,
world war 4 (v axis evil) over possibly with bin ladens execution.
we are in world war 5 now more or less amounts to many civil wars in neighbouring regions.

You are right really Elias, war is a huge business and the politicians won't ever let it stop the theatre of operations change that's all. Since the second world war we have had Burma, (wasn't Sudan a bit of a goer at one time or was that diplomatic?) Northern Ireland, Falklands (which Argentina are kicking off about again) Iraq and Afganistan which are all off the top of my head and I'm sure that I've missed a few out.
I would love to know the cost in lives of those conflicts, ON BOTH SIDES! not just the "insurgents, jihadists, rebel fighters or terrorists" whatever the term is that we are using to describe the young sons of the poor bastards we are killing at that time. The language of war is something that annoys me no end, one mans insurgent is another mans freedom fighter protecting his home and family. Bullshit of the highest order.

ISIS aren't 'freedom fighters' - they're executing any one who opposes them. 'Al Queda' threw them out for being too extreme. There's a theory that the West want an extremist Arab state where all these insurgents live - the reason being, at the moment, they have no country, no geographical centre and they're essentially fighting a geurilla war that the West can't win. If they have a state, the West can bomb it into oblivion, if they have an army, tanks, an air force, the West can fight against that. I hope that's not the case as there's millions of people stuck in the middle.
An extreme Arab state right next door to Iran isn't going to be a very nice place to be.

hairy, how do you think the english, portuguese, belgian, dutch, french & german empires were won with tea & biscuits ! ???

hairy j wrote:

ISIS aren't 'freedom fighters' - they're executing any one who opposes them. 'Al Queda' threw them out for being too extreme. There's a theory that the West want an extremist Arab state where all these insurgents live - the reason being, at the moment, they have no country, no geographical centre and they're essentially fighting a geurilla war that the West can't win. If they have a state, the West can bomb it into oblivion, if they have an army, tanks, an air force, the West can fight against that. I hope that's not the case as there's millions of people stuck in the middle.
An extreme Arab state right next door to Iran isn't going to be a very nice place to be.

I caught a Tweet from Andrew Neill the other day in which he said it had been claimed that ISIS had managed to capture one of Iraq's most important banks when they captured Mosul. In that bank was $2.5 bn in cash and a substantial amount of gold bullion.

If true that alone makes ISIS considerably richer than most of the nations on Earth. They aren't going away.

Village Green mentioned Iraq and Ukraine in his post. It struck me that Ukraine and Iraq are rather unfortunately located in terms of strategic geography.

Iraq, arbitrarily created by use of a map, ruler and pencil during a stitch-up between us and the French, fits in most of the land mass that connects Europe, Africa and Asia. It couldn't be a more importantly placed "country" for trading, hence its magnificent history as the trading centre of the Arab world (just think of Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba's Arabian Knights if its all a bit too complicated for you), which in turn led to advances in science, mathematics and God (Allah?) knows what else. Somone once said to me "the history of Iraq is the history of modern warfare - everybody has invaded it at some time or another (and sometimes more than once!)".

Ukraine, likewise is the land bridge between Germany and Russia with a sweet little Black Sea route to Turkey and, hence, much of the Middle East including Iraq (see previous paragraph), thrown in.

As a result both Ukraine and Iraq have been fought over for centuries simply for what and where they are. To be born in either is not the winning ticket in life's greatest lottery of all.

Sprinkle on top the modern demand for oil (Iraq) and gas (the main pipeline from Russia to Europe runs through Ukraine) and a few centuries-old ethnic, religious and political rivalries (all coming about because of their respective geo-political importance as trade routes) and Tony Blair becomes a completely irrelevant factor.

Even if he is an asshole.

Backed Iraq in the Iran war .Now going to jump in bed with Iran .
Got rid of Saddam then tried to back the same bunch against Assad.
This one, that one, no that one. no this one .The Clueless West

An extreme Arab state right next door to Iran isn't going to be a very nice place to be.[/quote]

There already is a money loving ,weapon loving, blood loving ,women hating place called Sandy Arabia

What's this Sunni v Shia thing all about then?

The trouble with the Middle East is that just doesn't seem to be any Good Guys; it's Baddies v Worsies with it never being entirely clear which is which.

Sir Francis Drake wrote:

What's this Sunni v Shia thing all about then?

The trouble with the Middle East is that just doesn't seem to be any Good Guys; it's Baddies v Worsies with it never being entirely clear which is which.

The split started on the the death of the prophet Muhammad (632AD).

His death led to a dispute on who succeeded him as the leader of the Islam world.

Roughly a ratio of 9-1 in favour of Sunni to Shia population..... mainly spread over the middle east and asia.

So nearly 14 hundred years of split .....means that they have developed many different customs of belief that make it impossible to have long periods of peace between them.

Which ever belief is the majority in a country will inevitably dominate the other.....there version of Protestantism versus Catholic over the centuries.

Obviously that is just a simple approach to the Sunni/Shia problem......you would have to write a a very large book to explain it all....and of course the otherside would dispute it anyway.

The 9/11 attacks were a shock to the American psyche that is often underestimated by non-Americans. During the whole of the second world war, not one inch of the mainland US was attacked. No acts of terrorism occurred on US territory during the subsequent Korean or Vietnam wars. The prospect of the "front line" suddenly moving to Greenwich Village was unthinkable. Apart from the immediate direct retaliatory measures that, for obvious political reasons, had to be taken, the US had to come up with a way of keeping terrorism off their continent in the long term. What better way of doing that than to foment internal divisions (relying on the centuries-old Sunni/Shia frictions) aiming to remove any powerful head of state who, traditionally, kept the warring/religious factions in their country under sufficient repression. An arc around the southern and eastern Mediterranean from Tunisia all the way around to Syria/Iraq is now virtually a war zone, or at least serious internal disturbances, which are drawing in extremists from all corners. "If they're fighting for control in some tin-pot desert, then at least they're not fighting us" might be the unspoken thought of many an American citizen.

The US now has no need of Middle East oil as it is set to become virtually self-sufficient from its own reserves thanks to oil sands and fracking, so it has no interest in whether they can get access to a country's oil once the fighting has died down (as in the first and second Iraq wars). A secondary "benefit" of the disruption is to deny (temporarily but significantly) access to that oil by others (China, Russia, India etc.).

Who can argue that, up till now at least, their plan hasn't worked?

It may be a conspiracy theory but it's at least plausible.

So the USA is going to ally with Sunni Iran to fight the Shia ISIS who are backed by the Shia Saudis who are allied to the USA?

If I've got that right US troops could end up in direct conflict with other US troops.

What a, literally, bloody mess.

Centuries Of fighting the Irish was resolved by sitting around a table talking, warfare doesn't often sort anything long term but the main point of it is to generate profits for BA and it's allies. Going back to Morrocco the king is Arab and the queen is Berber, it's kept the country united for quite a while now. Iraq from Bagdad down is Shia and Sunni so nothing is a simple as it seems.

bjorn_yesterday wrote:

The 9/11 attacks were a shock to the American psyche that is often underestimated by non-Americans. During the whole of the second world war, not one inch of the mainland US was attacked. No acts of terrorism occurred on US territory during the subsequent Korean or Vietnam wars. The prospect of the "front line" suddenly moving to Greenwich Village was unthinkable. Apart from the immediate direct retaliatory measures that, for obvious political reasons, had to be taken, the US had to come up with a way of keeping terrorism off their continent in the long term. What better way of doing that than to foment internal divisions (relying on the centuries-old Sunni/Shia frictions) aiming to remove any powerful head of state who, traditionally, kept the warring/religious factions in their country under sufficient repression. An arc around the southern and eastern Mediterranean from Tunisia all the way around to Syria/Iraq is now virtually a war zone, or at least serious internal disturbances, which are drawing in extremists from all corners. "If they're fighting for control in some tin-pot desert, then at least they're not fighting us" might be the unspoken thought of many an American citizen.

The US now has no need of Middle East oil as it is set to become virtually self-sufficient from its own reserves thanks to oil sands and fracking, so it has no interest in whether they can get access to a country's oil once the fighting has died down (as in the first and second Iraq wars). A secondary "benefit" of the disruption is to deny (temporarily but significantly) access to that oil by others (China, Russia, India etc.).

Who can argue that, up till now at least, their plan hasn't worked?

It's possibly even more simplistic than that. One word - Geography.

Even in both of the two World Wars it would have taken a fairly huculean effort to get across the Pacific/Atlantic in anywhere near the required numbers to give the Yanks a bloody nose.

9/11 upset that particular apple cart spectacularly as far as a terrorist strike goes, but of course now long-range missiles with the obligatory nuclear warhead means nowhere on the planet is out of reach anymore for your typically ambitious crackpot dictator.