Ye Olde War Vote - Poll added

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Zed, Dec 1, 2015.

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Should the UK join in air strikes in Syria?

Poll closed Dec 3, 2015.
  1. Yes

    17 vote(s)
    32.7%
  2. No

    35 vote(s)
    67.3%
  1. Terrordales

    Terrordales Nightshift

    It's like the Korean conflict, war was never actually declared so it was only a "police action" :rolleyes:
     
    vanorak and Fish like this.
  2. if anyone was listening to the 'debate' (o_O) today, how many times did you hear MPs saying despite all the emails, letters and correspondence from their constituents against this motion, it was their considered judgement to vote for, rather than against. Are MPs not paid delegates, whose role it is to express the consensus view of their respective constituencies?

    Proud Democracy my arse
     
    CollyP, jivedubbin and Jack Tatty like this.
  3. Fish

    Fish Administrator

    When do you ever hear an answer to a straight question?
     
  4. Surely the question is how to effect a change...
     
  5. Good point think i will start unknowing stuff. Life will be simpler.
     
    Jack Tatty and vanorak like this.
  6. What do you mean?
     
  7. I cant believe its just been on the news to report that RAF jets have taken off from Cyprus. wtf,

    On so many levels,!!!

    Fortunately only two of them so the modern journalists shouldnt have too much of a problem counting them back in again.
     
  8. Poptop2

    Poptop2 Administrator

    Mate I was stationary for three and a half hours waiting to come off at the closed m6,
     
    sANDYbAY likes this.
  9. Fish

    Fish Administrator

    You can avoid the question with another question, Isn't that the point of politics?
     
  10. Déjà Vu All Over Again
    Another reason for caution is the American government’s history of fabricating justifications for going to war. Dozens of examples come to mind, and, in the interests of relevance and timeliness, here are a few:

    The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is widely regarded as the event that launched America into a full-scale war in Indochina. On the night of August 4, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox radioed that it was under attack from North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Under dark of night, and in heavy seas, the Maddox fired wildly at suspected targets identified only by radar and sonar contacts without any visual sightings.

    Although the USS Maddox suffered no damage, President Johnson urgently took to the air to “inform” the public of the “unprovoked attack” by North Vietnamese on a US vessel in allegedly international waters.
    Soon after, Johnson had no problem convincing Congress to pass the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” The resolution gave the president carte blanche to wage war in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war, setting a Constitution-undermining precedent for subsequent presidents to use.

    Even more troubling, subsequent inquiries revealed that the Navy, the intelligence establishment, and the Johnson administration all knew the attack claim was a calculated lie, part of a deliberatestrategy of justifying a widened conflict. In point of fact, the CIA had been orchestrating the shelling of the North Vietnamese coast, and the Maddox had been sailing provocatively close to shore–in North Vietnamese waters.
    When North Vietnamese patrol boats approached, the Maddox fired on them first. This was not a case of North Vietnamese aggression. Yet, this story became the justification for a war that cost the lives of 58,220 Americans and well over a million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, plus hundreds of thousands of wounded on all sides.

    War with Iraq: Part One

    Then came a few small wars based on big lies: the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, and the proxy war in Nicaragua among them. But the Vietnam disaster had turned so many Americans against large-scale military commitments abroad that it wasn’t until 1990 that the US public came to support another big war-–this time following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the oil-rich kingdom of Kuwait.

    As usual, Americans were presented with a context-free story of what supposedly happened – a story that contained no hint of behind-the-scenes diplomatic machinations encouraging Hussein to think the US would not oppose his Kuwait. And this simplistic black-and-white tale was bolstered with emotionally charged imagery of dead babies – a staple of war propagandists going back to World War I and before.

    Saddam the Baby Killer

    Remember Nayirah, the young Kuwaiti girl who testified before Congress? She said she saw Iraqi soldiers storm the hospital where she worked, and dump newborn babies out of their incubators, leaving them on the cold floor to die.

    It was all an elaborate fraud. Soon after the war ended, a New York Times article outed the outrageously brazen trick being played on the American people by its own government. Nayirah, it turned out, was no ordinary Kuwaiti—she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. And her testimony about dead preemies “was arranged by the big public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton on behalf of a client, the Kuwaiti-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was then pressing Congress for military intervention.” In short, the “atrocity” never happened.

    War with Iraq: Part Two

    The public relations campaign to sell Americans on “stopping” Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait proved to be only a warm-up.

    The next time, however, the administration’s emotional ploy involved a ramped up range of terrifying dangers. George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, warned of the existential threat Saddam posed to the United States due to his vast arsenal of chemical weapons, as well as the likelihood he was building a nuclear bomb. The “proof” of this latter claim was that Iraqis had supposedly tried to buy “yellow cake” uranium from Niger. (Never mind that, even if true, there are years of work between obtaining yellow cake, which is just crude uranium oxide ore, and refining enough pure bomb-grade U-235 for a workable weapon.)

    As if this were not enough, Saddam was falsely portrayed as having cozied up to Al Qaeda.

    Those WMDs have got to be here somewhere…

    As the public learned far too late, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and no nuclear weapons program. After years of investigation, a Senate Intelligence Committee characterized the prewar WMD intelligence assessment as “unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
    Not only did the Bush administration “cook the intelligence” about Iraq’s possession of chemical/biological weapons, it became evident that they knew before Bush’s State of the Union Address that the Iraqis had never tried to acquire yellowcake from Niger. The letters Bush touted as evidence had been forged.
    A post-invasion Pentagon study also completely dispelled the Bush administration’s lie that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with al-Qaeda.

    When the monstrous lies—and the likelihood that they were deliberate-became painfully obvious to all, George Bush handled this problem with a joke about it at the White House correspondents’ dinner. The White House press corps was put in the awkward position of having to sit there and do nothing—since the joke was an implicit criticism of the reporters themselves for their embarrassing role in promoting the administration’s war-mongering lies.

    Judith Miller, a Real Prize-Winner

    And then there is Judith Miller. A Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Miller wrote a series of articles between 2001 and early 2003, breathlessly warning about Iraq’s alleged chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Most of her stories, it turned out, were based on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted embezzler put in charge of a CIA-sponsored opposition entity–the Iraqi National Congress

    Fool Me Once…

    Like the “non-toxic” gases the United States dumped on Vietnam, lying and disinformation have staying power. Despite the fact that the Pentagon itself categorically rejected any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, a 2011 University of Maryland study showed that, eight years later, as many as 38 percent of Americans still believed the United States had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.”

    Studies like that show how false information, wielded by powerful officials and reported uncritically by a lazy media has been used repeatedly to dupe Americans into supporting massive military intervention in far-off lands about which they understand next to nothing. .
    This history of calculated, continual deception is itself sufficient to warrant vigorous questioning of current arguments for the use of force to “punish” Syria, as a matter of purported principle and some vaguely defined “national security.”

    Of course, there is almost always more to the story. And surely this is the case with Syria, as it was with Libya before it. Any Great Power move in the Mid-East must be understood in the context of competition for natural resources, like oil. The original invasion of Afghanistan to dislodge Osama bin Laden after 9/11 may be a rule-proving exception, but reasons for doubt can be found there too, as noted in our earlier story on mineral resources in that country.

    After more than a decade of continuous Mid-East warfare, the economic costs are in the trillions of dollars. And the human losses–thousands of American dead and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, Syrian, Yemeni and other lives lost, not to mention the millions of injured and maimed –are both immeasurable and unconscionable.
    A quotation, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over, always expecting a different result. To commit America to another disastrous war based on highly questionable evidence fits that definition precisely.
     
  11. 2 jets full of toys I'm afraid.
    They was waiting for the nod !
     
  12. IS exist in the UK. When do bombers take off to target them in Luton, Leicester, London? There will be collateral damage, but that's OK as we didn't mind this happening to Syrians.

    So, NO COMPLAINTS , suckers
     
    vanorak likes this.
  13. Ask a politician the time and they will steer you around the houses
     
    Lasty likes this.
  14. So IS doesnt exist then. They made it up. Phew, thats better. I feel less frightened now.
     
    Top Banana Racing likes this.
  15. I would refer you to my previous question.
     
  16. I'm not saying that at all. Of course they exist, but how and why they came into being is the gargantuan elephant in the room that noone in the 'free west' is willing to admit. Similarly, how such an extremist organisation was able to gain ground and establish a meaningful foothold in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere is a question for the politicians, secret services and military intelligence to answer. As the above article (and countless other documents, reports and research) makes clear, the US, and many other empire builders throughout history, have sponsored coups, destabilised economies and undermined governments, through subterfuge, obfuscation, lies and ultimately, by acts of war...the spoils of which have been granted to corporations with a vested interest in the ensuing chaos, who, in turn, sponsor politicians to do their bidding....this much is glaringly obvious. It's a cycle, repeated ad nauseum.
    Call me a cynic, but given that the current powers-that-be are arch strategists, how many of these atrocities perpetrated in europe and elsewhere are 'allowed' to take place, in order to justify their agenda?

    Speaking out against injustice promulgated by our government, and those of our allies, doesn't make me a terrorist sympathiser, nor does it mean I condone extreme acts of violence, whoever commits them, but I think it is a willful act of myopia to believe that terrorist organisations exist in a vacuum, devoid of a knowledge of history and a sense of indignation against the 'evils' perpetrated by their enemies....we reap what we sow. War is war
     
    Lord Congi likes this.
  17. Youve burst my bubble. Im worried again now. Dont spose Oliver North has been on his hols to the region?
     
    vanorak likes this.
  18. By the way everyone. The NO's have it!
     
    vanorak likes this.
  19. Like most of the population, people who drive old VWs don't want a new war. Our Elected representatives, on the other hand have done something different.

    It's as if they get their marching orders from somewhere else, as if!
     
  20. Woodylubber

    Woodylubber Obsessive compulsive name changer

    So Iv'e been hearing about this speech all day so decided to listen to it all, From reading this thread it's clear we all have views on the matter either way but this speech really does go the the hub and apparently changed a good few votes last night, I have read and heard a lot of the old speeches from days in history when we needed a jolt to keep this country going and I reckon this one will go down in that same vain, This bloke is gonna be for those of you who vote Labour your next Leader

     
    chad and Lord Congi like this.

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