are the people going against our “nation” (which is divided and angry anyway and not as stable as many think) or against people in power who claim to lead and control us and play power games with all our lives?
(the video wasn’t even just mentioning the Iraq conflict – there have been multiple conflicts in the World in the last 10 years and UK troops have only been deployed in a handful of them).
Ordinary British citizens (of all cultures) and the military personnel are as much victims of the ongoing war as the civillians and soldiers in the Eastern nations.
Saddam Hussein is just one man; he may be in some prison but his supporters are still murdering people in Iraq as they were previously. No one is actually winning this war.
Today the diplomats admitted there will be up to 10 years of civil war in Iraq; I think they are being overoptimistic as there is still conflict in Northern Ireland today (albeit less bombs) and this was bad for about 30 years or so.
Incidentally the IRA killed far more people in our country than Muslim extremists, and were getting to the stage of launching rockets at stuff in the 90s – but no-ones decided to cluster-bomb Belfast as a reprisal….
Saddam was supported as a puppet and allowed by the West to massacre the minorities in his country until he started being “too big for his boots” and not handing over the oil cheaply.
During the 1991 Gulf War UK troops captured Iraqi positions and found the Iraqis using the same comms equipment that they were using in there; RACAL (now Thales) supplied both nations! (they kept the radios for their own use as the Iraqi ones had better components!)
When the presidential palace of Saddam Hussein was turned over the footage showed his “red telephone” to the military command centres; this was a 1980s vintage French Alcatel phone set – which would have been supplied by Thomson Defence (also now Thales!)
A mate of mine nearly ended up in Iraq – he got bored with raves, pissed off with doing drugs, doing crime and doing fuck all with his life and joined the Army. He got injured in training and was invalided out; and he was one of the lucky ones – he was the sort of lad that officers from public school backgrounds would sacrifice on a suicide mission.
The 7/7 terrorists were often also trained by angry young Asian lads from rich families that Thatcher encouraged to come here in the 1980s because they were bringing in money (these kids from the streets are the ones who get blown up – I bet the real Al-quaeda leaders are still about).
“Londonistan” could have been dealt with by dealing with the South Asian crime networks present in Universities in the early 1990s but the Govt didn’t want the cops doing so as it would cost them the revenue from the foreign students
The companies which supplied Saddam Husseins regime and other similar regimes are mostly based here and run by well to do people in Britain; often the sort of “self made businessman” who is seen as a “pillar of the community”, particularly in the “small high tech industries”. All around the SE of England you will find small companies making “precision assemblies”, “aircraft components” etc.
Nations go to war because angry young men (and older ones) enjoy fighting and it secures business interests (the original hope was that the Iraqis would just roll over and accept colonisation by Western oil interests) – not to try and make peoples lives better.
