Except when they aren't. In Syria for instance a significant percentage of the insurgents are not "Islamic extremists" nor were the ones in Tunnisia or Egypt.
No, we don't have to be yes men or goose step around squeeling "sieg heil!", but neither should we sink to abusive comments and insults that we probably wouldn't use in a public non-virtual place with minors present. The kind of language used between mates at a pub, is perhaps best not used on a internet forum for debate.
I think on this forum any racial or such comment is not tolerated. Its policed pretty well. Unfortunately folk will always have a problem with their elected or unelected leaders. Some will always read their problem as being racist or feminist inspired...Two big yank things I've noticed over years even on here...but not just yanks...we do it too in Britian..is the continual debate surrounding Obama and The Tea Lady...I've forgotten her already...But when folk have critisized either of them over the years on here...their defenders usually imply a loose racial or feminist tone is being used...Most of it goes over my head...One is from the right if we have sides..and one is from the left of the right...again if sides exist...I'd rather one was from the trampoline and one was from the diving board but thats life...they aint.. They have both been used to highlight racism and anti feminism by both sides even on here over the years...usually their supportors intimating there is some underlying nastiness with the critisisms being used... Surely Obama is just a left wing warmonger and the Tea lady a right wing banshee...Colour and sex not being a part of it. Then again, if they are left wing and right wing...then a trip outside American borders may be necessary to fulfill some folks education. I'm more left wing than Obama, and at times more right wing than the T lady...And I'm quite a decent peaceable chap...So I'm told.
They only claim to be moderates to fool idiots like McCain and Kerry. They are allied with terrorists and arms given to them are shared with terrorists. Egypt? We backed the Muslim Brotherhood who later got thrown out for being extremists. They are still creating havoc across the country.
Just to keep the record straight in Egypt the army staged a coup to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood who had won the elections, the legally elected have every moral right to resist / "insurge" / "create havoc" or whatever. Of course the self designated "champions of democracy" hurried to side with ..... [fill in the dots] though the state department has tried with some success to avoid taking sides in what is a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. IMO terms like "moderates", "extremists", "terrorists", etc. are totally inadequate to define the Middle East situation (not that I have any claim of understanding it, I do have some ideas about what "it's not" but none about what "it is").
Well yeah, but they are attacking Coptic Christians, murdering political opponents - terrorism. They are all extremists and terrorists, no matter the side.
What abusive comments are you referring to here? So far I haven't seen any on this thread involving any potty-mouth language. I'm sure the mods would have swooped in and tended to business if some inappropriate language had been used.
War has changed. Why can't we change the way we wage it? War used to be huge machines/armies powered by money. Why can't we do it like Israel does. Kidnap, insinuate,assassinate. Subtle. Fight the way the terrorists do...Why can't we do that?
That's the theory of Col. David Hackworth's way he led his battalion in Vietnam. His mantra was "out G the G" which meant out guerrilla the guerrilla, or beat him at his own game. It works at local levels, but then the generals and politicians won't share in the glory that is won on the ground where the action is up close and personal.
Poppy because when its done that way...some across the pond start feining outrage...we did that in Ulster...And the world went mad at us...Its done with UAV today and I do agree heavy army against terrorism will never win.
I've seen some pretty rabid language, when referring to democratically elected representatives. I get that policies and decisions are made that are impopular. But I'd rather see a calm discussion on those policies, without the personal attacks on elected officials of any party, in any democracy. There's a difference between calling a decision idiotic & foolish, supporting that with reasoning, and just name calling and flaming. I have no vested interest in the politicians of either the US or the UK. I'd just prefer to discuss policy without the vitriol.
That doesn't appear to be the case from what I've read. Some of them are some of them aren't but when you are fighting a war and someone offers to help it's pretty hard to turn them down especially if you need the help. On the other hand one of the things that's hurting the rebels in Syria is that they are fighting against each other at times and usually when this occurs there are fanatics on one side. ??? It's not clear to me that we ever backed the Muslim Brotherhood. We did applaud the over throw of the previous dictator. When the Brotherhood rose to power due to it being more organized than its more numerous opposition I saw significant signs of nervousness in the US Administration and certainly didn't see any sign we were supporting them.
Dictator is a questionable word given that he was elected under the Egyptian constitution, such as it is. But yes, we threw him under the bus in favor of Islamic extremists. I just don't see the point of helping any faction in the middle east. In Syria, the current dictator has at least respected minority populations. Small Christian communities have flourished as have offshoots of Islam. The revolutionaries are murdering Christians and Alawite Muslims and when (if) they take over, there will be a bloodbath. Why are we helping people like that?
One big point of the Baathist party that produced the "dictators" in Syria and Iraq was to have a non Islam inspired government that could move those countries towards the modern world, it's far from clear that it was not "the lesser evil" from an internal perspective (there is of course the tendency of dictators to be aggressively expansionist but then Islam is a very proselytism (sp?)oriented religious view and not likely to do that with missionaries so it's little improvement). Luckily for the Turks Kemal Ataturk had to deal with the Foreign Office not the State Department, though the Armenian and Kurd minorities may not share that view. Jumping to anti terrorism tactics ..... aggressive patrolling historically worked, but must be adopted on a large scale and it does mean partly giving up the firepower advantage a regular army has over guerrilla, better training means you will be the ambusher most of the time but not always so you will take losses, a professional army can usually accept that, an army that includes large numbers of conscripts like the US army in the later stages of Vietnam is a lot more fragile especially if from a country where the conscripts relatives get to vote, resorting to conscription without having strong popular support for the war was the "big mistake" the US military did in Vietnam, once they did that they were in a race to win quickly or fail. There is a huge difference between aggressive patrolling and remote control assassinations, the former is targeted at eliminating the enemy "control" of the territory, the second at the enemy leadership, the biggest mistake the French did in Algeria was the kidnapping of Ben Bella, the most likely outcome of the elimination of a leader is that he will be replaced by a more radical one, the replacement may be less competent and have a smaller political support base but it's far from a sure thing, "natural selection" tends to eliminate the incompetents rather quickly in a shooting situation. Israel's objectives are different from those of the western world, for Israel it's enough to have the Arabs weak and disorganized enough to pose a reduced threat, and removing effective leaders is a good way of achieving that, the rest of the western word wants countries where there is an effective "rule of law" so that we can trade with them. This discussion is pretty pointless if we don't have a shared definition of "terrorist" and "insurgents" and it ought to be one that doesn't include "not pro US or US backed". My definition is that you are dealing with "terrorists" when the enemy has no real backing amongst the local population while we have "insurgents" when they do. Terrorists use hit and run (or hit and die for suicide attacks) tactics with the aim of influencing enemy political decisions while insurgents aim to take control of the territory by making the enemy decide staying there is just too costly, the distinction is important as the tactics appropriate to fighting them are different, confusing the two is likely to lead to bad choices. Here again Israel is facing mostly a "terrorist" threat though it does have to deal with a latent "insurgent" threat in the occupied territories and possibly even inside it's own borders due to the large numbers of Arabs present, while the US is dealing with a number of "insurgent" threats with non domestic "terrorists" being a very rare occurrence of late. But note that under this definition the same group may be an "insurgent" at home and a "terrorist" abroad so the choice of counter-tactics is not as clear cut as it seems, if choices were simple and clear even our current poll driven politicians would get them right, but using emotionally loaded words is not helping to making right decision.
You are correct that the semantics in this discussion are important. It is unfortunate that much of the discussion is based upon reports by the modern media and they are lazy and don't use the proper terminology to describe the complexity of different groups. When the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars started, the news media referred to all the non-uniformed combatants as "terrorists". Then this became non-PC and they switched to "insurgents" to refer to all groups even when some should have been referred to as terrorist, some as insurgents, some as sectarian religious factions, some as foreign mercenaries, etc. They don't want to spend the time to differentiate the nuances. In Afghanistan it has become the habit to refer to all non-governmental combatants as the Taliban, which is only one group and depending upon the area not necessarily the dominate group. In many cases the accurate definition changes over time. In Syria "rebels" was probably the legitimate term to describe most of the fighters involved. With the influx of huge numbers of foreign, Al Queda alligned, fighters, "rebels" is no longer accurate for all the anti-government forces. In fact the Al-Queda, terrorist, alligned foreign fighters are, based upon most intelligence reports going back for several months, the majority of the anti-government forces there. They have in fact attacked legitimate "rebel" forces on a number of occasions and are using the threat of physical violence, physical violence, murder and intimidation to control the population in areas they control. They use Mafia/Gangster style tactics to keep the local populace in line and those terms might be better used to describe them. Their true nature will not be described in most of the main stream western media because these groups they are describing are very adept in information warfare, something the western politicians and military are not as good at. The media, the politicians, the media, all fear being painted as anti-islamic, racist, or any number of unflattering terms, while our opponents have no qualms about painting us in any unflattering manner as long as it advances their agenda and allows them to expand their control. The use of the term IED is a perfect example. It is an accurate term used to describe the weapon in question an Improvised, Explosive Device. The media has latched upon the term and uses it interchangeably with roadside bomb, which was the predominate type encountered in Iraq. In Afghanistan where the dominant type of IED is an improvised anti-personnel mine or "booby" trap intended to kill or injure foot patrols and as a matter of collateral damage also kills and injures civilians due to their nature the media in most cases calls them roadside bombs. They don't like the visual imagery of the use of anti-personnel mines which most of the world has spent years trying to eradicate, and they're lazy and just choose to lump them all in the same category where they won't offend anyone. If they accused the enemy of using land mines, the press would appear to be taking sides and lose their illusion of impartiality. I'll get off my soap box now, except to say most people wouldn't sleep well at night if they knew the true level of the threat facing us, the true number of planned attacks on our civilian populations that have been thwarted in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Africa and the Phillipines and all over the world in the last decade. We've been more successful in our counter-insurgency efforts that we give ourselves credit for, our problem is the western media wants to measure success in western terms. They are not westerners, they are a foreign culture with foreign ideas. They are tribal and clannish, they have evolved that way over centuries and they won't be mirror images of our societies anytime soon. I personally hope they don't imitate us too closely because there are good attributes in their culture and weaknesses in ours.
I thend to use a somewhat different defintion of "insurgent" vs "terrorist". To me a "terroist" targets civilians if not most of the time on a very frequent bases. "Insurgents" target militiary and/or governmental targets for the most part and are native to the country in which they are operating. I guess one could state that some insurgents are also terrotists. Of course in the case of Syria where many of the terrorist are from outside the country I wouldn't label them as rebels or insurgents.
Simple...I'm just waiting for new media to say...the badies...cos we are obviously the goodies...That would end all semantics and clear up any problem....
