I wonder if peace activist Norman Kember has a sense of irony.

I wonder if he realised that sometimes, no matter how obviously wrong they are, some people are just not going to listen to reason. I wonder if he eventually thought, " I can't get through to these people, I wish some men with guns would come and save me."

Now you know how Kuwait felt you prat.


















.

 

No. In an "Acky" like moral stand off

he probably thought..</p>



&quot;I'ld rather have my head cut off with that rusty knife than be rescued by those imperealistic english/american war mongers&quot;</p>

 

Apparently

he's refused every opportunity he's been given to thank his rescuers.

 

RE: Strap him..

To a tenk and let him negotiate with em from the front.

 

Some people are

.. so entrenched in their ideals and beliefs, that they can focus on nothing else in a rational way. That includes all of us.</p>

I would hope that, for his, his wife's and his family's sanity, he will retire from the maelstrom of peace activation and go for a walk round Asda instead.</p>

I would also hope that others who continue to run the gauntlet, knowing that they risk the same treatment themselves, as well as the safety of troops sent in to rescue them, will come to realise that their presence has hardly any effect whatsoever and only serves to delay possible progress.</p>

I wish the dedicated, but silly old bugger well. And I hope his missus gives him a reight good hiding - though she probably won't.</p>

 

Glad you posted that, I'd been wondering about that as well.

I'd been thinking that he was a fool but a well intentioned man but his refusal to thank his rescuers for risking their lives to save him from his own folly sends him way down in my estimation.

 

RE: Apparently

Some reports say he has thanked his rescuers.</p>

Don't annihilate the silly old sod completely.</p>

 

RE: No. In an "Acky" like moral stand off

Brave, honourable but very misguided and stupid man. Are you ready to admit you were wrong about Iraq, or are you just going to keep trying to frame me as the stupid one? Jesus, you're a joke man. What is it you tagline says?

Not compared to how people matter...

Well here's a few who obviously don't matter to you, at least not enough for you to change your mind.

-------------

And that's just from this morning.

 

Could it not be argued though Acky..

that these deaths, however unfortunate are no where near the levels seen under Saddam, and were laregly inevitable following the removal of a dictator?

All these groups are grasping for power. Whilst GB and the US may gave facilitated the bloodshed, I would think that the risk of it was there all the time.

 

Talk abart an easy catch

I did support the War in Iraq. It will lay on my conscience.</p>

Its not gone well so far but history will tell if it was the right thing to do or not.</p>

Not in terms of the number of lives lost in Iraq in a few years but in terms of world stability over twenty or thirty years time.</p>

Are you right?? lets see in the long term.</p>

While I appluad to some extent your opposition and stance you are short sighted.</p>

You appear to support in retrospect a man who gassed thousands of innocents and murderred on a daily basis while flaunting all international efforts to help his own nation.</p>

You call me a joke?</p>

Now that is funny.</p>

 

RE: Could it not be argued though Acky..

You're right all this was inevitable, but this was the main argument of those opposing the war in the first place!!!! *sigh*

Therefore the deaths weren't "unfortunate", they were entirely predictable by anyone caring to take a little time to read, learn and listen beyond the flag waving rhetoric of Messrs. Blair and Bush. As to whether the deaths are "no where near the levels seen under Saddam" is open to debate. The UN said that Saddam was responsible for the deaths of 300,000+ Iraqis. The Lancet report from last year said it estimated up to 100,000 people had died since the invasion. It's also estimated between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqi troops, many of them conscripts, were killed during the invasion itself. These figures dont include the massive increase in infant mortality rates.

If you take the figures at face value then it has taken the US and UK only 3 years to kill, directly or otherwise, a third as many people as it took Saddam some 30 years to knock off. Impressive going eh? :-( Don't forget that before the invasion US/UK sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqis.

The problem was that people backing the war simply didn't want to believe Iraq could get any worse by US/UK intervention. They wouldn't listen when people warned of an inter-regional conflict of civil war, guerrilla war, of terrorists using Iraq as a training ground, of the US and UK being bogged down for 10+ years in a country which would tear itself apart. Instead they turned it round and said "Ohh you support Saddam". Nope, I just recognised a huge ****-up when I saw one.

In essence you have N Ireland and the Israel/Palestine conflict writ large in Iraq. We all know that one of those took decades to sort out and the other is still decades away from sorted out. Iraq is only beginning this tragic journey. And sadly I fear the worst is yet to come, I hope Im wrong. I'd urge folk to spend just 15 mins every day reading about Iraq and what's going on. You can't get anywhere near a full picture of what's happening inside the country from watching the BBC or indeed reading it's website, which is frankly poor. Try these two if you're at all interested,

www.icasualties.org
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/ORR.htm


Cheers

 

RE: Apparently

Not according to R4 this morning, I haven't caught up with the news since so if he has, he took his time about it, and irrespective of your views on the whole conflict it is only right that he should.  People risked their lives to save his, if that isn't worth a thank you I don't know what is.</p>

 

both of which are unbiased publications

as can be seen from their web addresses

 

RE: both of which are unbiased publications

Read those, read the BBC, read the Sun, make up your own mind.</p>

 

RE: Talk abart an easy catch

Spartacus said,

I didn't back Saddam, that's a lazy and cheap shot. I supported not adding to the mounds of dead by letting the country I was born in become complicit in killing more innocent people. You and others chose to be part of that. Like I just said in the reply to the previous poster,

Spartacus said,

Ahhh moving the goalposts - first it would be over and done in weeks and months, now its twenty or thirty years on which you'll be judged. Handy way of putting the issue on the back burner. How about those Iraqis dying now, you know those you were so concerned about before the war. Where's that concern now? How about the state of the world now? How about the level of world terrorism now? You all claimed this would improve the situation, but we're all going to have to suffer for your folies.

Funny, pro-war people said Saddam was such a great danger he had to be dealt with immediately, but now we have 20 or 30 years grace according to you.

Joke? You said it.

 

RE: both of which are unbiased publications

They both gather news reports and place them on their website. Most of them are Reuters/PA reports or articles from well known newspapers in various parts of the world. The second of the two is anti-war in many of the opinion pieces it uses, but that doesn't discount the validity of the news rerpots it uses.

You'll find out far more fromthese than reading the BBC web site as they don't cover a fraction of the events in side Iraq each day.

 

RE: both of which are unbiased publications

And by the way, what's anti-war about icasualties.org ? Do you care so little about dead UK/US troops that the act of listing their names and ages somehow makes it anti-war?

 

I wished I lived in your simple world

where everything can be resolved easily by Acky's dictat.</p>

When did I say it would be over and done with quickly? When did I move the goal posts?</p>

We were already complicit.</p>

Its a complicated, violent world, get used to it.</p>

Even if now its a mistake what do you suggest?</p>

How would you resolve the situation?</p>

By pulling out immediately and forcing all out civil war?</p>

Have you polled the people of Iraq for their opinion?</p>

I despair</p>

 

RE: I wished I lived in your simple world

LOL Simple? Agreed, the world is not a simple place, but taking the view that invading Iraq was the best way to solve the issue most certainly was SIMPLE. It's funny that I'm accused of being the 'idealistic dreamer' but when it came to Iraq I was being pragmatic and those on here backing the war were the 'idealistic dreamers'.

Ok, so you wern't saying it was going to be over and done with quickly. But if you werent saying that you must have surely accepted that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the "20 to 30 years" it was going to take to sort it out. So what were your reasons for backing the war? Were you one of the "Liberation crowd" or one of the "WMD Crowd"?

There is no real solution, Pandora's Box is open. At best this level of violence will continue for a long time at worst it will dissolve into civil war or inter-regional conflict with the possibility of Iran putting their size 12's in to support the Shia's. If that happen's then it will make the current situation look like a kids tea party.

I appreciate that doing something with good intentions (if for example you believe thats what Blair and Bush had in terms of Iraq) can lead to disastorous results. Therefore I think that withdrawing troops would more than likely make the situation worse, not better. What do Iraqis think? Well if you took some time to read you might find out thatwhilst many Sunni's hate the US troops for bombing Fallujah and killing many of its people, they also realise that possibly the only thing that's stopping them from being slaughtered wholesale by the Shia forces are ironically, the US troops.

Either way the US won't withdraw, they have too much to lose geo-politically by leaving. Some large sections of the Shia population want the US out, Sadr in particular. Others like the Iraqi Government want them to stay. The Kurds are frightened of Turkey over the border (the Turks killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the 80's, ironically whilst the US stood and watched), so most of them done want them to leave.

Also, Rumsfeld said the other week that the US wouldn't interfere in civil war - so if you choose to believe him, who knows what the US would do. Maybe they'd sit in their bases and wiat til it was over. Trying to do anything about it would most likely see lots of US dead soldiers, which again somewhat ironically might get them home faster.

You despair of me? I hate to wake you up here and break your little 'Acky bashing bubble', but im not the problem in this mess, im just trying to challenge folk and get them to think for themselves rather than believing the message Blair and Bush pedal.......................

 

He has now.

My guess is he wasn't going to but thought better of it once he realised how strongly people would react.