Norman Kember-honourable and brave or a bit of a pompous arse??

[moondog]

I'm plumping for the latter.....

Arrogance filters down from the top...

NN - re. Vietnam - I remember one thing that really stuck in my mind when I was studying at university - not a single high-ranking American posted in Vietnam in 30 years spoke Vietnamese. Some spoke French, but French was the language of the elite in the South (the dictatorship the US supported to fight the Commis). Not many Viet Cong spoke French or English.

I wonder how many in the US army speak the languages of the countries they have recently occupied ? It might help them to get to know the countries they are in a little better.

yes, that is hard to understand. Maybe its because we are used to governments run in traditions of aristocracy and empire building, whereas they are a government run by businessmen and asset-strippers. Not that I support either!

KK,that is a very good point.
The Americans (and other imperialists) have been staggeringly ignorant and arrogant in their refusal to learn the language and customs of the people.
The Americans have caused enormous offence in the ME by not observing mores such as removing shoes in people's homes,physically handling women and allowing dogs to sniff Korans.
Really adds fuel to the flames.

I have spent a lot of time in the States and have some good friends there,but the average American is frighteningly ignorant of anything outside their country,if nor state.

It has also been acknowledged by British intelligence services (generally better at this sort of thing) that there is a dearth of Arabic speakers in their ranks.

(Interesting aside (to me especially as a Welsh speaker): Welsh was used quite frequently in the 2WW to convey messages (in Morse code I believe) as it was bound to flummox the enemy.

Caligula,
Whilst many Quakers refused to fight in the armed services, this does not mean that they did not oppose Nazism. They just weren't prepared to kill to do so!
The Friends Ambulance Unit being a case in point.
\link{http://www.cotteridge.quaker.eu.org/joining_the_fau.htm\FAU site}
Others DID decide to fight. It was a very personal decision in a very difficult situation.

moondog - yes Welsh would be an excellent basis for any secret military code - it looks and sounds wonderfully difficult

Caligula - I had a Quaker friend years ago at uni. - his grandfather had actually fought in the Spanish Civil War - on the anti-fascist side of course.

sorry - my last post was addressed to donk !

my mum's older brother was a concientious objector in the 2nd World War. He was a musician, but he went down the mines and worked as a coal worker for the duration of the war. My mother bore the full brunt of the nuns' scorn upon her brother at her convent school. I always had mixed feelings about his decision - but again he was vehemently opposed to the Nazis - but not able to take a life. I also have doubts about Britain's decision to declare War on Germany - I would love to think it was to save the Jewish people but I think it was more the fear of invasion that provoked Britain nto action.

Eh? Of course Quakers were anti-nazi. I don't think I implied any different.

sorry to bang on about relatives but my grandfather [mum's dad] was so old he was a chaplain/officer in the first world war. The chaplains were non combatants but he used to go out onto no man's land to rescue the wounded and bring back the dead for burial and he got the Military Cross for bravery under fire. I'm sure most people have family members who acted equally bravely in war, its just interesting from a christian perspective in considering what is the right thing to do in war.

I think Augustine, Thomas Aquinas etc drew up rules for war because of the world in which they/we live where war seems inevitable. I think Christ was teaching about what was ultimately right and wrong in this context, some might say he was being too idealistic, but I do think he was right - violence always does bring more violence.

ruty - I have conchies in my family too. but I think the decision to declare war on Germany was utterly, totally,the right thing to do. there was no alternative. sometimes to make peace you have to make war, is what history shows us. negotiating with, or appeasing men like Hitler or Saddam Hussein will never be a complete answer. we owe those who fought in that war and the leaders who guided us through it an unpayable debt of gratitude imo.

i agree that we do owe them huge gratitude HC - whenever i see war memorials in different villages and churches and see a list of men who died , often more than one from the same family, i remember that gratitude. I also lost relatives that fought in both the first and second world war, like many. But lets not forget men's lives were squandered in the 1st World War because of stupid and lazy and blinkered decisions. Lets not forget that the 2nd World War may have been prevented if Germany had not been in such a disastrous state after the 1st World War. there is one line of thinking that we are all supposed to fall in line with. I'm just pointing out that there are other factors to think about too. I am not a total pacificist. If someone threatened my family's lives I would kill them if i had to. So I do not have a simplistic approach to war. But still with all these factors I believe the Iraq war to be totally wrong and immoral.

and i never said it was wrong to declare war on germany - i said the reasons why we did were a bit more pragmatic and less heroic than perhaps we like to remember. that is not to take away from the heroism of those that did fight.

I agree ruty, war is a complicated thing
I also think it was immoral and a dereliction of duty to have left the people of Iraq and Afghanisatn to years and years of oppression, religious persecution, death, torture, starvation.... I think we should have stepped in sooner.
That goes into the balance for me.

The fact is no one gave a damn for 20 years that Saddam was gasing and butchering his own people and invading and murdering his neighbours.

Not even GWB's father gave a damn in the 1st Gulf War to actually help the Kurds and Shiites topple Saddam, although they literally begged him for money and support. Once the war was over, Saddam went in and murdered 1000's of Kurds/Shiites as punishment because he knew they had tried to topple him.

So what happened in 2003 ? What was it that made a butcher of 2 decades like Saddam deserving of US/UK attention ?

I think you need to look into the neo-Cons. in the US, Blairs fashion stylists and their inability to find Bin Laden sitting in a cave somewhere to get a full answer that question.

That is why the comparison with Hitler and the Nazi's is so inaccurate.

i agree KK - from what i gathered Bush senior's govt had promised the Kurds and Shiites help and support and then pulled out and just left them to be massacred. Also, because of sanctions on Iraq for so many years, Iraq's date farms, for example, collapsed leaving many people unemployed and in poverty, so the sanctions hurt the people, but didn't hurt Saddam Hussein one bit. I think we can all agree SH was not a very nice man. But none of the rest of it actually makes sense. Oh yes and Afghanistan - do you think Bush's govt gives a damn about it now? Funny how all the money it promised Afghanistan to rebuild itself has not materialized, leaving a wide gaping hole for the Taliban to re appear and terrorize people once again.

Yes, ruty, having worked in the finance sector all my life, I am no Capitalist hater, but it does make me sick to the stomach that all these contracts to "rebuild" what they themselves have blown up and destroyed always end up in the pockets of Bush's mates, al la that t**t Cheney

I'm sorry but that argument makes no sense to me. It was the UN resolution which prevented further intervention after the first Gulf War - so to do the things that you suggest would have been illegal.
It was also the UN that failed to act effectively against Saddam Hussein.
Do you think we should have intervened earlier? if the UN didn't support intervention? would you not have had the same problems/objections to intervention as you did in 2003?

seems to me the UN is listened to selectively.

No it would NOT have been illegal to give financial support to the Shiites and Kurds.

Afterall, Israel is the largset single recipient of US financial/miliatry aid in the entire world and it most certainly is not illegal in terms of International Law for the US to keep sending them the money.

Iraq and Afghanistan are perfect examples of "we will attack when it suits us and it serves our political interests", sod the UN.

They can't find Bin Laden and they can't stop Al Quaida, so the next stop was Iraq.

Hence the dubious and as it turned out non-existent links made between Iraq and Bin Laden. There is and was no link, so one was conveniently created.

The point is the persistent lying and deception that was required to get us into the mess that is called Iraq.

It is ok not to like the UN or what it does, but it is not ok to pull the wool over the eyes of people living in a democracy.

"illegal" is a slippery concept in what people call international law. Partly of course because most of it is treaties between nations, and thus it's more like contracts, but of course without the over-riding force of the courts, and with no sensible way for the contracts to be enforced.

Also there is the rather rickety notion of "sovereignty". Many nations are not fit for purpose, yet we "respect" their right to behave in ways that would result in prison terms in a civilised country.

Also many people don't accept the symmetry of sovereignty in that if the poeple in a country do bad things that they are collectively guilty.
Saddam Hussein was an extremely unusual political leader. He killed people personally. GW Bush and Clinton ran away from their country's wars.
Both Hitler and George Bush snr served their countries bravely before political office.

But Saddam did not invade Kuwait, attack Iran, or gas anyone at all ever, certainly not the Kurds.

Iraqis did that. You can't run a war even as well as a Moslem country without the mjaority of people willing to go laong with it.

Afghanis are frankly incapable of running a country, and no one of any race including even the Chinese has tried to run a bit of Africa without screwing up big time.

Does that justify our actions in Iraq ?
Probably not.
But Iraqis have behaved appallingly to anyone who fell into their power, including and especially other Iraqis.
Rather than saying X are the good guys amd Y are the bad guys what we have is a system where pretty much everyone involved is at the very least dubious, varying from the French who sold Saddam nuclear reactors, the German who built his bunkers, the Americans who helped him get & stay in power, then lied about his WMD, and the British who elected a fuckwit who was outsmarted by Geroge Bush into believing Iraq was a threat to anyone we cared about.

harps - the UN is made up of its constituent members. You keep saing THE UN as though it is independent of the the Security Council, which happens to be dominated by the USA.

As I said several posts further down, the UN is and will only be effective if the Security Council members act in concert. If the UN fails it is because UN members wish it to fail.

The point is, the sanctions imposed by the UN on Iraq for over a decade DID work beacuse for once in fact the Security Council had acted in concert.

The sanctions had so weakened Saddam's economy that he could no longer pursue his militray ambitions, which is why it was discovered that he had no WMD.

His nuclear ambitions had been bombed to pieces by the Israelis in 1987, and as it turned out he hadn't been able to recover those facilities.

koolkat, to fund a group of people (in this case the Kurds) to depose the leader of a sovereign state is funding terrorism, surely?

DC - you have called the Iranians "fuckwits" and now using abuse on other nationalities. I think you will find that most posters on this website find that sort of language against a whole host of nationalities quite unacceptable.