To want to leave this website for making me think about that one.

[filee777]

It's really really upset me, I've had some great support on this forum but I think I have to be off.

Such a shame.

Still here filee?
Are you trying to break the MN record for how many times you can write fuck, fucking and cunt on one thread?

Thank you for your posts LtEve - they're very informative and articulate.

Yes because it is going so well in Iraq now isn't it? How many people have been killed there in the last three months alone in this country 'liberated' from a sadistic regime? How many in comparison to Saddam's death toll?

BTW My DD's best friend throughout school was a Kurdish girl. So Yes I know what Saddam put his country through. But to claim that long lasting good came of our intervention (which was founded upon a lie by two world powers which was then blindly enforced by our forces) is naive.

Ham sandwiches probably not the best choice of meats in the context of Afghanistan, Feeling

not even if its naice? no guess not.

The human rights of the vast majority of Iraqis has significantly dropped since our intervention

And saddam was guilty of many things but he was very pro women being schooled and in fact schooling in general, he built a lot of them, along with roads, dug electricity lines and many other that were for the good of the people.

Much of that infrastructure we destroyed.

Before saddam demanded a higher price for oil and wanted a free market agreement with Iran and Afghanistan, we thought he was great, despite his less than comfortable ethnic cleansing.

We damaged far more than we sorted in Iraqi

It takes at least 30 years for a political and economic system to recover after the removal of a regime. It will take time.

Yes because it is going so well in Iraq now isn't it

Well the school I helped to build is still there and still educating children who wouldn't have been otherwise. It has also formed a close association with a Welsh School and teachers have visited, hoping to forge reciprocal visits for children (although I would suggest that is a long way off yet). Children in Wales and Iraq are learning each others languages so they are able to write, and will soon be able to talk via video link. I think that is pretty amazing.

Volunteers are arriving every month and helping out in areas they wouldn't have been welcome in previously. MSF have explored more areas than ever before and have been able to distribute aid and training to those in need.

The bridge is still there too, and the lands either side of it have been able to be farmed. I assume the drainage/sewage works have held up, as the farm land need it.

There are still areas in which Anthrax is a concern, but the British government allowed the British Military to innoculate those most at risk; slowly that risk is diminishing and the swamps are returning.

The people I have remained in touch with are happy and moving forward.

For me that is a success, and I am happy with my (minor) involvement.

The Iraqui's were scholarly and building great architecture when we were still living in huts. They had one of the great civilisations. We have destroyed much more than Saddam ever did by bombing them back to the stone Age. Not that Iam Pro Saddam but trying to make out that we somehow improved that nation is bloody offensive and very ignorant after the fact.

We armed Iraq. Russia armed Iran. Proxy war.

I think it's quite possible to distinguish between pride in the behaviour of our troops and the overall war. I don't, as it happens, support Iraq, but I am proud of the people i know who went over there as soldiers and did their best to do what they could for the civilians. It's not the army's fault that the crazy extremist religious mobs moved in and started blowing one another and innocent bystanders up post-Saddam. That was a failure of intelligence and the two governments of the time in the US and UK--not the British Army.

Well that'll help their economy being able to talk in Welsh . Sorry but the small successes you mention are very much a drop in the ocean of widespread corruption, suicide bombing interfaith violence threat and terrorism, fear by the people of going anywhere out of their immediate vicinity unless they know and are known in the area. We have created hatred of the west in a country that would have been far more amenable to us once. They were once our allies FGS...

Compared to what was and what was destroyed, all that has been done is small attempts to repair the immense damage caused by the coalition meddling years after it could have assisted without the bloodshed vengeance mentality.

You are so right mignonette

We have to be the most arrogant nation on the planet to think we have done so much to 'help' these 'poor little natives' and to believe that bombing the shit out of something will improve the human rights of the people living around it.

Lets face it, despite how many individual schools have been built, things are most certainly not better in Iraq post-saddam, it became a free-for-all as it does in most countries where we remove the system of leadership

and if it takes 30 years to recover from a war, why not let them sort it out themselves? which they may well have done in thirty years if they were not busy sorting out their now destroyed infastructure that we blew up whilst 'saving' them.

Like i said, trash the house, set fire to it if you will... but as long as you feed the cat on the way out you leave feeling all happy and glorious with yourself.

Its absolute bullshit.

I was there mate, you weren't. I saw how the 'non-favoured' people were treated and how they lived. 'Scholarly' and 'great architecture' only applied to the chosen, and they held the riches and the power that kept the 'lower classes' underfoot.

It's very ignorant to believe that everyone in Iraq lived like that, when actually it was very few statistically.

It is also the failure of the army. Blindly doing that which they feel is wrong eg Afghanistan is moral cowardice. Saying 'I do what I am told/It is my job' is moral cowardice.

I am fed up of people excusing their actions on 'just doing what I am told to do' . You represent your organisation. You are accountable.

Kudos to the conscientious objectors. There must be some.

Well pretty much nobody will live like that if you bomb them back to the stone age 'mate'.

And as for trying to impose Post colonial democracy upon an essentially tribal nation with quasi religious administrative structures....How bloody arrogant and ethnocentric. And we keep doing it! We never ever learn.

Lt how is that any different to Britain 100 years ago? Do you really think we would have reacted well to someone coming in with bombs and 'fixing' it for us? Would it have made any difference in the long run?

We are seriously not that far away from a caste system, why we feel we have the right to go and destroy other peoples countries is beyond me.

What we did was take away that countries right to become a developed, second world nation and eventually become a first world nation with all the trimmings.

We kept them well and truly in the third world and that was, completely the point. Oil's cheaper from third world countries it is essential in capitalism for there to be a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid.

Come off it, it doesn't matter what I say, does it? You aren't going to agree, you aren't going to listen to anything I have to say. You only want to be right - no matter that I have experience of the country, the people, the military, our actions and so on.

But that's fine. I don't actually care what someone so narrow minded thinks about a situation they have no experience of. I am very happy with my part in Iraq. I didn't do or see that much in comparison. My experiences in Bosnia coloured me and my beliefs; they were more harrowing and life changing. I'm a good person and Bosnia made me a better person. It made me appreciate what I have and what I have done. FRY has bounced back, as have the people (although the atrocities will colour their views for generations). Iraq will be the same, and so will Afghanistan. I'm glad to be a soldier, and glad that I actually did something. It makes me happy.

We do not need to go to war to make us grateful. I am thankful for that. And the witnessing of great suffering is not the special preserve of the forces. Nor is the relief of it. Loads of ways to do good without being past of an occupying force that tolerates xenophobic, antisocial and at times murderous behaviour and then claims to not have any moral responsibility as 'we're not all like that'.

LtEveDallas, you have stated your thoughts clearly and calmly. There has been no drama, no hyperbole. Please know I support you and all persons in the forces who have done their job with dignity and integrity.

You ignored my question Lt

We were the same as the situation you described in the later part of the 1800's, do you think someone bombing us would have improved our lives now? Would Britain be a better place without the buildings and art from that period and those before it?

Would you be grateful for a force that took all that away from us? Would it have made our human rights now better?

I think you are looking for a simple answer to a very complicated question if you ask 'Is life better for Iraqi people now than under Saddam'.

There is no black and white answer to this, and comparing the Saddam dictatorship with life in UK in 1800s is quite frankly ridiculous.

There is more to being a 'civilised nation' than architecture, literature and good infrastructure. The Nazis were 'good for the nation' too, if you look at it that way. (and, yes I am aware of Godwins Law, but we are talking about brutal dictatorships).

Yes, it is great when a revolution brings peace and prosperity to a region, but sometimes we have to be happy with the little revolutions. With the bridges built, the children educated, the girls saved from abuse, the babies vaccinated against measles.

LtEve has answered your questions with quiet honesty and a complete lack of aggression, and is to be applauded for that, and for her work in a troubled region. Even if we don't agree with the mission. Your attempt to belittle the achievements of LtEve and her colleagues reflects badly on you.

I know someone on Facebook who seems to know a lot of army/army affiliated people and I have been able to look at their public profiles through various likes/comments etc. I have been shocked at some of the racist and mysoginistic stuff on their pages. Some of the stuff on there after woolwich would have made the EDL blush. Now obviously I am not dumb enough to deduce from this that everyone in the army has those sorts of views, but between what I have seen on Facebook and what I have seen on arrse it does make me wonder whether it is just a tiny minority who think like that.

You just don't get it with other professions. You wouldn't log onto the TES and expect to see that sort of stuff. For a start it would immediately be deleted by the mods. But that doesn't seem to happen on arrse, it seems to be more 'o it's just a joke, blokes will be blokes, ignore it if you don't like it'.

Yes I know that arrse is not an official army website but I still think that more could be done to condone to shit that is spouted on there. And if some of the mods are in fact ex army, then why would they let all stuff stand, when it gives the very organisation that they used to represent such a bad name?