The "war on terror" is a "mistake",

[SHERMAN]

I think that we are definetely on topic. Let's take Israel as an exemple. Who is the big enemy of Israel? The Palestinians are a people who are suffering of a mix between religion and nationalism. It's my definition of Islamism. It's the religion at the service of the nation.

Islam originally(Like Jewdisem, to a point) had no diffrence betwwen religion and state.

And I'm sure that all these people who are ready to fight against all odds are champions in national pride.

I would say the turning point is when you hate other nations more than you love your own.

I can find a French zionnist today and tell him what is the nation he loves most. And if he says Israel...

No, call him a hipocryt. You cant say "Yey Israel" and than live in France.

In the french parlement, there is a guy who wants to force the athletes to sing the Marsaillaise

I think someone who refuses to sing the national anthem shouldent represent the country. I dont see how you can play under the flag when you dont sing the anthem. My exeption to this is Israel, because our enthem is impossible for an Arab to sing seriously, so I dont expect the Arab athletes who represent Israel to sing it.

 

[wolfen]

But there's still no connection between the two that justifies National pride, turning into hatred.

If you are worried about those with a grudge against your country, it would probably be better if you started looking in your own back yard at people who think like The Unabomber and Timmy McVeigh, they have the opportunity to far more damage than some squeaky voiced nutjob hiding in Afghanistan, and there are probably damn near as many of them just reading some of the Ultra nationalist BS published on the net.

Theres no comparisian between those two and a islamic terrorist, to me the homegrown ones are 1000 times worse, I have way more respect for a man who wants to kill me because he believes his god told him to than a little boy who wants to kill me cause its fun, thos eare the scary ones.
I have no fear of ANY person in the arab world or anywhere else in the world, but not knowing if my 84 year old next door neighbor is rigged to blow half the neighbor hood away scares me

 

[Partisan]

No, call him a hipocryt. You cant say "Yey Israel" and than live in France.

What about me, I'm an Englishman, I say "Yey England" and I live in America? So by your standards I'm either confused, indecisive and / or a hypocrite? Or could I be part of the modern labour marketwhich moves around, or could I be someone that enjoys visiting and experiencing different cultures, or am I the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies?

 

[SHERMAN]

What about me, I'm an Englishman, I say "Yey England" and I live in America? So by your standards I'm either confused, indecisive and / or a hypocrite? Or could I be part of the modern labour marketwhich moves around, or could I be someone that enjoys visiting and experiencing different cultures, or am I the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies?

I you are planning to spend the rest of your life in the USA than yes, its wierd.

 

[AB_Shorts_Momma]

I can find a French zionnist today and tell him what is the nation he loves most. And if he says Israel...

No, call him a hipocryt. You cant say "Yey Israel" and than live in France.

What about me, I'm an Englishman, I say "Yey England" and I live in America? So by your standards I'm either confused, indecisive and / or a hypocrite? Or could I be part of the modern labour marketwhich moves around, or could I be someone that enjoys visiting and experiencing different cultures, or am I the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies?

I believe, when taken in context, the question would be do you say that you love America more than England?

 

[wolfen]

What about me, I'm an Englishman, I say "Yey England" and I live in America? So by your standards I'm either confused, indecisive and / or a hypocrite? Or could I be part of the modern labour marketwhich moves around, or could I be someone that enjoys visiting and experiencing different cultures, or am I the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies?

I think that your the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies But remember one thing, you invade us again and we'll send all the starbucks over to England

 

[Partisan]

I think that your the advance party for the British relamation of our lost colonies But remember one thing, you invade us again and we'll send all the starbucks over to England

That's reason enough to stay away, no wait, you've already exported them, try something else.

 

[wolfen]

hmmmmm.................Star bucks didn't work, .........................AH HAH I know we send the Mexican illegal aliens to do all the grounds keeping

 

[Partisan]

hmmmmm.................Star bucks didn't work, .........................AH HAH I know we send the Mexican illegal aliens to do all the grounds keeping

Before we get comletely off the thread & get slapped let me just say that you'll have to do better than that, here are the things that won't stop us reclaiming our former "colonies" & why:

Starbucks - got
Illegals - got
Gardeners - got, sometimes we even pay them.
Sir Allen Stanford - got butt loads of our own (please note the Antiguan knighthood)
McDonalds etc - got & so on.

The one thing that could us back would be the threat of making us drink Budweiser or Miller, with no other choice - that could send the whole nation into decline.

Any other great threats PM me, this is fun, or we could start a whole new thread! Over to you

 

[wolfen]

Bud or Miller? Man not even I am that cruel

 

[Partisan]

Glad to hear it, just think of the benefits of a Brit invasion, Stella, Strongbow and a morally casual attitude towards sex - can't be all bad!!

To link back to the thread. Have you seen the article about arming / creating militias to contain the Taleban in Pakistan?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7902093.stm

Since it worked so well in Iraq, it looks like it'll be tried again - is this going to help, or is it just going to create more instability?

 

[senojekips]

As soon as they have defeated their "enemy of the day", they will start thinking it's their turn to run the country and will turn on the next person up the ladder, and we will have another enemy to fight,... that we trained and armed.

 

[Partisan]

As soon as they have defeated their "enemy of the day", they will start thinking it's their turn to run the country and will turn on the next person up the ladder, and we will have another enemy to fight,... that we trained and armed.

So what do we do? So far almost every insurgent group armed, trained & or supported by the West has bitten us in the bum - painfully!

As I've said before, if the Pk govt has a plan to follow up on this, then there might be a chance, otherwise lets start looking for hell, our transport is a handbasket.

 

[senojekips]

So what do we do? So far almost every insurgent group armed, trained & or supported by the West has bitten us in the bum - painfully!

As I've said before, if the Pk govt has a plan to follow up on this, then there might be a chance, otherwise lets start looking for hell, our transport is a handbasket.

Well for a start, we must learn that the way forward in the long term is to not get involved by arming and training local militias hoping that they will stay with us. We already know that they won't, but we fall for it every time, we are as dumb as dogsh!t in this way. It appears that we never learn from our mistakes.

To me it seems that we have never woken up to the fact that we should be using our huge technological advantage to win our wars instead of going in on their terms and trying to duke it out, in the dirt, in their home territory. This is all very romantic, and it gets lots of political and military following because it gets all manner of people advancement and recognition, but it's the Neanderthal approach and worse still, doomed to failure before we even begin.

We could have achieved more and lost virtually no one by sitting back in a nearby country and prosecuting the battle on our terms at a tiny fraction of the cost. A war of this type could be fought within the budget of the public service free beverages allowance, when compared with the way we approach it now.

We've got to start thinking of war as a nasty necessity that must be won with as little expenditure of lives and money as possible, the trouble being that there is little glory and no promotion in this approach and so it will never get support.

We have arrived at the time and place where the "back room" boys must be allowed to run our wars rather than letting them be run by politicians and medal encrusted generals. They are fast becoming as outmoded as their counterparts who physically led their troops into battle, they have since been relegated to HQ in the rear, and now it looks like it's time for them to drop even further out of the picture.

 

[A Can of Man]

What do these terrorists rely on for power? An open armed struggle against the USA where an individual can actually go and physically fight against Americans.
This is what we need to deny the enemy. What they want is not necessarily victory, but the fight itself.

 

[Partisan]

Senojekips, I agree with you. We are attacking the enemy where he is strongest, not using simple tactics, or even Sun Tzu!! Head to head ain't going to work, because the terror organisations know that they can't win, so why bother! They will attack the "system" by crating fear, suspicion and use violence to coerce people to help them.

To fight terror, we need to accept the following as a minimum:

1. It is a long haul, no short term press victories and sound bites.
2. There will be casualties - on both sides
3. It is a war that is a war on many fronts, we need to have a simple plan for each of them - civil affairs, media, human rights, education, infrastructure etc - it cannot be a purely military solution. The military can help to set the conditions for victory, but ultimately peace comes through political means.
4. We cannot tear up the rulebook to fight the terrorists, this is their strength, to make us become like them.
5. Everything must be done within the rule of law, no matter how frustrating it is, once we make exceptions we prove the terrorist case.

13th Red neck, also agree, but don't forget that the USA is not the only country that has suffered from terrorist attacks & I would speculate that there are plenty of other countries which have lost citizens to terrorism - 9/11 wasn't the first terrorist attack in the world.

 

[perseus]

I'm not sure exactly what is being suggested here. Are you all suggesting the terrorist training camps and the Taliban army could have been taken out from bases outside the country? Isn't this what we tried to do to Saddam during the 90s and he remain defiantly in power. Don't these people simply need to survive to win?

I am amazed to see the newsreels of the ground skirmishes, it looks like a battle from a previous age. It seems that the aeronautical technology we do have was designed for a high tech enemy, not defeating scattered bands of skirmishers.

I am surprised each platoon is not provided with a small model aircraft which can be controlled from a laptop. This could then rake enemy positions from close quarters, or provide an exact position for GPS guided artillery rounds. Automated small ground vehicles could be similarly controlled, waiting for columns of troops at key locations, even entering villages.

 

[senojekips]

My idea was, that rather than swamping the country in men and machinery with all of it's logistical problems, attendant costs and risks, was that we should use our vastly superior intelligence gathering skills, to gather facts about their leadership within their country then use our high tech weaponry to just keep taking them out as their plans are about to materialise. Of course we would also use it on selected targets such as training facilities, as was the case in Afghanistan and "other places".

Had we have taken a little time and got well set up before jumping into this feet first, I'm sure that we would have got rid of OBL many years ago, as it appears his minders were not aware we were tracking many of his comunications and therefore able to keep track of his general area until our sources stated publicly that he had been previously located from his cell phone or sat phone transmissions. We were both too eager, and we committed that gravest of errors in that we severely underestimated our opponent. Therby sacrificing our biggest single advantage,... technology.

I'm not saying that we don't have other cards up our sleeve, but we tipped off our opponent too early through our own stupid over confidence, and as a result they have developed very simple and effective ways to thwart us. They are in no hurry, it is us who want to get it over with and get out, they will simply out wait us, whilst needling us all the time with guerrilla tactics. They will kill our young men knowing the effect it will have on those at home, because they have no such worries.

They have taken the time to work out how they can best hurt us, while we just stormed in thinking we could overpower them with brute force,... and so we would, except that we can't find them. We are trying to fight a guerrilla war with conventional battle tactics. These tactics failed us in Vietnam, they failed the Russkies in Afghanistan and they will fail us here.

 

[Partisan]

Senojekips you're right. However I was talking with a friend about this today & he came up with a novel approach. The purpose is to keep the area destabilised, with the terror groups having to fight an insugency against regular forces. If they're doing that then they're too busy to try other attacks elsewhere.

Now it has many flaws, not least of which is the fact that most terror organisations are franchises and licensing is pretty simple, but as a basic strategy for Western powers it does make some sort of weird sense.

I agree that technology hasn't been fully exploited, but I also think that we've failed to learn many of the lessons from wars before.

1. Manouevre warfare is great, but we actually need to take & hold key ground, which will enable us to dominate the battlespace - technology won't do this on its own, but is a force multiplier.

2. The population is key, going all the way back to Genghis Khan, nations have tried to invade Afghanistan/Baluchistan and failed. They are a series of independent tribes, not a nation, there is no sense of true national identity, shared culture or even beliefs. So we need to think of a pragmatic approach, which will only benefit the Afghans but also encourage their sense of national identity - tough trick, luckily there are some highly paid people working on it?

 

[senojekips]

1. Manouevre warfare is great, but we actually need to take & hold key ground, which will enable us to dominate the battlespace - technology won't do this on its own, but is a force multiplier.

At the moment, the only ground we "hold" is that piece upon which we are standing at any given moment. Everything else is up for grabs by whoever wants to have it. It is the very nature of Guerrilla war that you don't hold ground and that is our mistake.

They run into the fight, and kick us in the nuts, we kick back but the target is no longer there as they do not "hold ground"

As I've said all along. You can't fight a guerrilla war with a conventional army. It favours the local force, they know the land and they know the people. Often they ARE the people.

We have to become the ones standing on the outside picking our targets and choosing the times to hit them from a distance. We've got to out guerrilla the guerrillas, play them at our game instead of theirs.