World Politics / Terror / War

[techmouse]

isnt it funny how we dont care when israel/india/pakistan get nuclear weapons, but if its iran/n korea... acutally it isnt funny, its fuckin ridiculous!

It works like this: If a country actually has WMD, we can't touch them because at the end of the day they can just launch them.

If a country definitely doesn't have WMD then we can accuse them of having them, and invade in order to ensure that they never do.

See?

[ifp]

COMPLETELY SAFE Nuclear power

[shonky]

Mind you, got an Israeli friend at work and she's got family out there, and she sees things rather differently. Hamas were firing rockets from Gaza (I think) nightly, before the soldiers were kidnapped, and although I think Israel's response has been massively disproportionate and made things far worse, Hamas as far as I'm aware did seem to kick off proceedings by their actions.

I'm not pro or anti either side, and there's a lot of history on both sides which should be reconciled, rather than exacerbated, but in this incident, it appears that the governments of both Lebanon and Palestine have not made any effort to distance themselves from these activities (not that that excuses the bombings and the loss of civilian life).

The majority of people on both sides seem to be caught up in a conflict they don't want to advance the agendas of some particularly shitty ideologies. The UN should try and get some peace-keeping force in there before things go so far, and the US should be a little less hypocritical in their dealings out there

[obiwan]

isnt it funny how we dont care when israel/india/pakistan get nuclear weapons, but if its iran/n korea... acutally it isnt funny, its fuckin ridiculous!

It works like this: If a country actually has WMD, we can't touch them because at the end of the day they can just launch them.

If a country definitely doesn't have WMD then we can accuse them of having them, and invade in order to ensure that they never do.

See?

Hillarious No devastating The funniest things are always the ones that hurt the most

[obiwan]

COMPLETELY SAFE Nuclear power

Yeah there is a way of using hydrogen instead of uranium to create the reaction, no radioactive waste, no leaks, sounds safe wouldn't you say? Look it up lunkhead

[spaceboy]

sad times! and lebanon was on the mend, proper fixed up like the 70's...but NO! can't have 2 soldiers being teefed can we. er excuse me, its collateral in war...no other country i know would literally murk a place dead...

anyway before i get the FBI on my ass. imma shut up, mind my business... man dont want no orange boiler suit u get me.

[obiwan]

^^^^^
Agreed;

There are a lot of bully's on the scene and bullying breeds bullies

[zgk]

War is really useless, solves nothing

Two nations hate each other

They Fight thousands die, before seeing the difference they made.

One nation wins the other is destroyed

Years past they rebuild and do it again

The war on terror and war in general is bullshit that could been prevented long ago by avoiding the arms race all together. Humans as a whole have gone from throwing rocks to weapons capable of global annihalation(sp)

[shonky]

Think this could be resolved quite easily by demanding that whoever thinks it's a good idea to kick off hostilities has to lead them into battle. Seeing how chickenshit our tough talking leaders are (and the same for those glorious types who strap bombs to teenagers), I think we'd see world peace pretty sharpish.

I get the feeling these types were probably the small kids who used to hang behind their tough mates trying to get a fight going and then disappearing until it was all over.

[pk-]

THERE IS PLENTY OF OIL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil_theory

i mean...it's a theory, but it's certainly got a fair bit of evidence to back it up. i don't pretend to understand all of the technicalities, but it certainly makes for chilling reading

its collateral in war

this is what's so baffling though; why the hell did they kidnap the soldiers, when they were at (an admittedly uneasy) peace with israel and especially after they saw what israel had started doing to Hamas in their pursuit of the soldiers they kidnapped? why the fuck would you poke a tiger in the arse with a sharp stick when it was already pissed off?

[shonky]

this is what's so baffling though; why the hell did they kidnap the soldiers, when they were at (an admittedly uneasy) peace with israel and especially after they saw what israel had started doing to Hamas in their pursuit of the soldiers they kidnapped? why the fuck would you poke a tiger in the arse with a sharp stick when it was already pissed off?

Totally agree. Does seem amazingly foolish in the circumstances. Newsnight said that Israel is already pointing the finger at involvement of Iran's leaders - so don't be surprised if they become involved in the near future.

Seems amazingly shitty to kick off a war in someone else's territory though, and I can never understand what Muslims gain from getting their fellows killed (or as in Iraq cutting out the middle man and killing them directly). If there was peace why jeopardise it in such a pointless manner.

I do recall from a few months back though that when Hamas were voted in, loads of countries that didn't want to be "soft on terrorism" stopped funding to Palestine, which resulted in a shortage of medical supplies and other necessities, so it may be that they felt that the world had turned it's back on them yet again. Not that excuses anything.

[ifp]

israel has thousands of lebanese still held prisoner in israeli jails. kidnappings like this have happened in the past, and in the past israel has been willing to swap prisoners. they probably thought that kidnapping soldiers after what happened in gaza would put more pressure on the govt to do a deal.

i think the important thing to note is that none of this has anything to do with any of the 3 soldiers. you dont invade a country because of 2 soldiers.

if you look at what the spokespeople have been saying, for the first couple of days they were saying the military action was to get the soldiers back, then it was to find tunnels (in gaza) and to stop rockets being fired (lebanon). after about a week they change again to saying that it is to remove hamas from office and to destroy hezbollah. which gives them an excuse to stay there indefinately.

[shonky]

It's very difficult to figure out either sides motives in this given the eventual repercussions

For Israel - re-igniting the whole hatred of the other countries when it had pulled out (to a certain degree) of each countries affairs

For Palestine and Lebanon - risking the full wrath of the Israeli armed forces

Seems like both are more for pursuing all out war at any cost than any other reason I can think of - I just cannot see any benefit to either side by acting like this.

By the way, am I right in thinking that Israel has more UN resolutions against it than Iraq, yet the UN has never enforced any of these or imposed sanctions against them?

[3dm]

COMPLETELY SAFE Nuclear power

I am utterly opposed to wasteful and dangerous Nuclear Fission power, which is what we currently use, but wholly in favour of Nuclear Fusion power (our Sun is a fusion reactor and still has at least another 5 billion years to run yet before it goes crazy), as the side effects of this energy source can be effectively shielded against (UV radiation etc), plus it doesn't produce all those nasty by-products that Fission does.

However, there lies the rub!

There have been some very successful tests conducted by building test reactors right here in the EC (effectively cranked up particle accelerators), but the funding was withdrawn funnily enough.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you can't can't get weapons grade materials from a Fusion Reactor...?

Or maybe, just maybe, rather than taking a leap of faith and funding more research into how to make these machines more efficient (therefore a cheaper energy supply), the powers-that-be would rather play safe and stick with nasty dirty Fission Reactors, despite the mess this creates for the next X thousand years.

****

The Israeli government are and have always been a bunch of Zionist Zealots, so don't expect them to EVER be nice to Palestinians.

Now it would be very easy for Israel to be brought to it's knees if the US decided to freeze/withdraw the $5bn p/a funding they give it, but then there are a quite a few Zionists (including most NeoCons of course) lurking about Capitol Hill too, which is precisely why Israel gets funded in the first place.

[doomstep]

War is really useless, solves nothing

makes alot of money tho

its proper nuts still, as is thinking the UN can do anything usefull, other than try n minimize the civilan casualties - but who is a civilan in this case? it gets so murky - the conflict is older than the UN, & the UN, its creation and the politricks that surounded that move, have only ever made the problem worse.

Outsiders in general have never really done anything worthwhile to defuse the situation, its an inherantly local conflict being fueled by international money & international interests, the only usefull thing the politictians can do, is the only usefull thing they can/could ever do.

Tell the truth once, and shut-up forever.

not gonna happen sadly

[pk-]

if you look at what the spokespeople have been saying, for the first couple of days they were saying the military action was to get the soldiers back, then it was to find tunnels (in gaza) and to stop rockets being fired (lebanon). after about a week they change again to saying that it is to remove hamas from office and to destroy hezbollah. which gives them an excuse to stay there indefinately.

it's a domino effect though isn't it; the initial reason for mobilising their military was to rescue the soldiers, then rockets were fired in retaliation for this military action and so now the sights have been shifted.

it seems pretty banal to quote him, especially considering the complex nature of the situation, but there's a sentiment in the first few pages of Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears that really rang true for me; that once the Palestinians realise the power of peaceful protest the Israelis are completely buggered. Sit downs, marches, demonstrations; the Israelis might very well be much further in the wrong but as long as Hamas fight fire with fire they're never going to gain the overwhelming international sympathy that their cause deserves.

[obiwan]

u get me? that place is about to get very seeerious.

Kind of sick of all this. We wouldn't be having this debate if Israel wasn't the largest reciever of US economc and militry aid. Its just so predictable. Yet avoidable. They got out of Gazza so they could increase the land grabs and incrochments in the Wast Bank.

Whats Paul Gascoigne got to do with Israel?

[shonky]

u get me? that place is about to get very seeerious.

Kind of sick of all this. We wouldn't be having this debate if Israel wasn't the largest reciever of US economc and militry aid. Its just so predictable. Yet avoidable. They got out of Gazza so they could increase the land grabs and incrochments in the Wast Bank.

Whats Paul Gascoigne got to do with Israel?

Both renowned for comedy tits

[obiwan]

The scariest thing is that all of these countries US, Russia, Britain, Israel, could be using extreme branches of their secret services to attack themselves thus justifying the taking away of civil rights of people they want to move around/steal land from, so that they can gain the oil territory/water reserves/natural resources that the civilians liveon top of, this may very well have happened in Moscow RE Chechnya, US RE Afghanistan/Iraq 9/11, UK RE July 7th Ditto, and Israel for the last 20 years but most of all right now!!!

[shonky]

The scariest thing is that all of these countries US, Russia, Britain, Israel, could be using extreme branches of their secret services to attack themselves thus justifying the taking away of civil rights of people they want to move around/steal land from, so that they can gain the oil territory/water reserves/natural resources that the civilians liveon top of, this may very well have happened in Moscow RE Chechnya, US RE Afghanistan/Iraq 9/11, UK RE July 7th Ditto, and Israel for the last 20 years but most of all right now!!!

Well it worked for Hitler didn't it.