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U.S. Refuses to Hand Over Fighter Source Code to UK
orbitalia writes "The UK is heavily involved in the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter program) but has recently considered abandoning the project because the US refuses to share the source code. The UK had intended to purchase $120 billion dollars worth of aircraft to operate on two new aircraft carriers, but is now seriously considering Plan 'B'. This is likely to be further investments in the Eurofighter Typhoon project." From the article: "It appeared that Tony Blair and George Bush had solved the impasse in May, when they announced an agreement in principle that the UK would be given access to the classified details on conditions of strict secrecy. The news was widely seen as evidence that the Prime Minister's close alliance with the American President did have benefits for Britain ... 'If the UK does not obtain the assurances it needs from the US then it should not sign the Memorandum of Understanding covering production, sustainment and follow-on development,' the MPs insisted."
The EuroFighter is a much more advanced fighter anyway. The JSF is the US Military just trying to "Cut Costs" by consolodating which seems to be what most of the military is doing. Pretty soon a tin can will do everything from cook a meal to shoot off a nuke
It is not often that world events show us just how deadly serious a problem it is to keep source code hidden from those who use the software on which it is based. Somehow I am not surprised that the petulant little child George Bush won't hand over the code. But I am glad he is drawing attention to the problem of closed source code and the danger it poses to all of us.
"The UK had intended to purchase $120 billion dollars worth of aircraft to operate on two new aircraft carriers, but is now seriously considering Plan 'B'. This is likely to be further investments in the Eurofighter Typhoon project.""
Possibly. Or they could throw some open source code in, and be done with it.
...give me the ROFLcopter!!!
they make aircraft from programs now?
As unpopular as any kind of ground strike other than laser-guided has become politically, I have to wonder why the UK or the US would continue to waste money on these machines. They are not as stealthy as the current F-117, which is apparently all that will be in use for some time to come. Close air support is no longer granted unless the target is in a location which can absolutely guarantee no collateral damage. This means that CAS is no longer granted. If you are lucky you might get a helo with a chaingun. What a waste of money from the budget of both countries.
the article clearly states that Britain was going to spend $12 billion, not $120 billion. Would would spend $120 billion for something like this?
If that does't work, there should at least be a LGPL version, right?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I am not sure how to interpret this. Does it mean that if the UK request the source code with a license to make changes then they get the code 20 days later and presumably come up with their own version after a year (at best?). Or do they get the code up front with the ability to request a license to deploy modified versions on application?
The second interpretation makes more sense to me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Al Quida probably already has it and would sell it to the UK for a discount. After all, they cracked our radio codes in Somolia.
Table-ized A.I.
12bn pounds not 120 billion dollars
Every country involved has been told the same thing. And more importantly, all co developers are PROHIBITED from installing their own avionics.
Allowing another country to design military machinery is one thing, but software? Why did they even consider this in the first place, thats like a huge national security risk. I can see it now...
As the British fighters approach the American jets, they all suddenly lose control and crash into the ocean.
PWND.
We have to step back and ask ourselves another question, "Why go to war at all?"
I don't care if you're a liberal, conservative, libertarian, communist, fascist, moderate, or anything else. Regardless of your political beliefs, it has to be admitted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with justice, freedom, or "weapons of mass destruction". They were merely done to exert increased Western geopolitical influence in central Asia. A major part of this is to counter the ever-growing power of China, but also because of the extensive energy supplies available in the region.
Thinking about this situation further, we have to realize that war is not a valid solution. China's 1.3 billion people dwarf that of the United States. While they may not have the hardware, their location and resources make them militarily superior in central Asia. As Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, the US doesn't have a damned chance.
Think further. What if all the money spent warring in Iraq and Afghanistan had been put towards research in the US, namely in the area of alternative energy sources. With so many billions upon billions of dollars in funding, it's doubtful that we'd ever need to consider oil for any purpose ever again. Our understanding of solar technology could have jumped years ahead with such funding. We could no doubt be making better use of tidal energy to power our homes and businesses.
So not only could the American dependence on Middle Eastern oil be avoided, but perhaps with virtually free renewable energy we could have seen manufacturing return to the US, thus reducing the American support that has allowed China to grow so rapidly. At that point, two of the major reasons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been elminiated, the US is far better off than it is now, and it's actually still respected in many places.
The Joint Strike Fighter is the F-35. Much less stealth, much lower price, and likely just a little below the EuroFighter, in my opinion.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
The US government is really just too embarrassed to hand over the source code since it's all in Visual Basic 6.
A few pointers:
1) The F-117 has no air-to-air capability. It also has a rather small payload (basically 2 bombs), high maintenance costs due to early technology and is (generally believed, though I think it is still classified) to be a subsnoic jet, in other words, slower. Stealth isn't everything. Also, as it only fills the one role, it is less economical than an all-in-one type aircraft.
2) Uh... since when did anything other than a super-precision ground strike become unpopular politically? The U.S. has certainly used "dumb" bombs in many campaigns, including Afghanistan and Iraq, to good effect under certain conditions and on certain targets. JDAMs - much more economical than laser guided munitions - are also quote popular and while they aren't as accurate, "close" is often good enough, assuming they're fired under certain conditions, of course. Furthermore, this particular aircraft is capable of using laser-guided weapons.
3) You know, there are areas without civilian populations present where Close Air Support could still be a concern... like, say, the mountains of Afghanistan perhaps? Or in the middle of nowhere in the Iraqi desert? Or hundreds of other battlefields? Not every battle in the future will occur in third world cities, you know.
4) A helicopter with a "chain gun" has a limited operational range and exposes itself to a great deal of enemy fire. Helicopters' armament tends to be lighter than what an aircraft can provide, focusing more on armor-piercing weapons (Hellfire missiles), and smaller weapons more useful against vehicles and lighter targets (rockets, canon, etc.). A strike fighter, on the other hand, can deliver 2000 lb. bombs on a target when necessary, enablig it to knock out, say, a heavily reinforced building or bunker than a helicopter would stand no chance against.
I mean, if you don't like this plane, that's cool and all, but there is still a mission out there for it.
But then, according to Wikipedia, it's not like most of the countries involved have any significant amount of the development costs at stake. The UK is the biggest contributor, and it foots only 10% of the bill. It's not cool, but it's to be expected. Hopefully these countries will learn to not invest money into American hardware except when they are buying it with the expectation that it is full featured.
Let's also be a little realistic here. No country with military hardware as advanced as the United States, Japan, Russia or Israel is going to play entirely fair when selling to other countries. No country wants to risk its prize weapon systems falling into unsavory hands when it's fully functional. Personally, I would be surprised if the MiGs that Russia sells to China and other countries are as kick ass as some of the stuff their own air force uses.
I love the dept. line for this one. The UK is reading the "EULA" first, and that's why we're threatening to cancel a multi-billion dollar order.
After all, would you leave the ability to maintain your air force in the hands of another nation? (And seriously, even if the order goes ahead, would the US seriously expect the UK to honour some contractual agreement not to install working software in its military aircraft?)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ah, well...
If you saw the premiere pilot episode of Battlestar Galactica - you know how dangerous a few 'software updates' can be...
Why fight your enemy if you can hack their fighter's source code,
and knock them out of the sky with a remote shutdown command?
I would expect military grade source code to be a very closely guarded, and heavily tested secret !
>The American military machine, touted as the strongest, most efficient, lethal, modern and advanced, has just got a beating from AK-47 wielding thugs of IRAQ.
Only because of restraint. That really isn't relevant to modern fighter planes. No one is shooting f16s with ak47s. Get real.
The sad thing is that it has takes three years and almost 3,000 coalition deaths for the military authorities to acknowledge this.
Single battles have gone over 46,000 or 51,000 even... small scuffs can raise several dozen or even a couple hundred. 3,000 is quite a low number for a few months of occupying a country.
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You're crazy. The AK-47 is indeed a fine weapon, but every time somebody toting one engages our forces, they get shot/killed/blown the hell up.
You're comparing light weapons to aircraft? Rather have that, you say? How about you shoot at me and miss because your weapon, while reliable, doesn't have the accuracy to hit me from any farther than maybe 300m, 50m if you shoot like an average Iraqi. (It's reliable because of the tolerances built into the bolt mechanism but that makes it far less accurate. Marines have to qualify at 500m.)
Have fun with that while I'm calling in air support and deciding whether I want to just kill you or to drop the entire building you're in.
This will give you the idea.
~ some jarhead
Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Seals "submerge" themselves every once in a while. Marines? Well, we never get near water, right?
Yeah, let's dump all our aircraft, tanks, submarines, nuclear weapons, and ships because some soldiers got shot by AK-47's. Clearly the AK-47 is the ultimate weapon and will win all wars from now until the end of time.
Or maybe, just maybe, local insurgents killing soldiers on the ground in a country they're occupying has no relevance whatsoever to this topic. Maybe aircraft aren't meant to kill every enemy of the US in one foul blow. The ability to destroy any building, vehicle, or person whose location is known might just be enough to make aicraft like the F-35 worth investing in. You know, assuming someone with an AK-47 hasn't got there first and destroyed it with those new Bunker-Buster-Bullets I'm sure the Russians are about to release...
I for one welcome our new assault rifle wielding overlords.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Very few weapon systems can fire just after being under water.
Nuclear submarines are pretty advanced, can fire under water, and carry a wide array of missiles and fusion bombs...
Right, like the SU-27 is any match for the Raptor. Get a grip. And besides, even if the Russians had a competitive air superiority fighter, they don't have the most critical piece of air superiority - airborne command and control. Russians might be able to defend their airspace for a few days, but as for bieng able to project air power outside of Russia? No way.
The American military machine, touted as the strongest, most efficient, lethal, modern and advanced, has just got a beating from AK-47 wielding thugs of IRAQ. The sad thing is that it has takes three years and almost 3,000 coalition deaths for the military authorities to acknowledge this.
As opposed to how many terrorist/insurgents bagged? We take them out 10 to 1 or more. We're not getting our asses handed to us in Iraq, we're getting our asses handed to us by the American news media and the general impatience and lack of fortitude of the average American.
An urban insurgency nullifies some of the technological advantage of some weapons systems, but by no means does that mean weapons systems like the JSF and Raptor are worthless.
Sadly without this agreement the UK really should simply say no to any involvement, however I would suggest that the UK will still splash out anyway. The entire US/UK Special relationship is pretty much a myth anyway and more to the point it has been regarding foreign policy matters for a long time, placing even more dependence on the US in areas of defence is a bad idea.
There seems to be (in the UK at least) a memory lapse within political circles, that the US has in the past simply not stood with the UK.
The Lack of US support during the Falklands war, and outright opposition to the Suez crisis, should show that the UK cannot rely on US military power to support the UK's own operations and aims, and nor should it. The US will always look after itself, it will only take action when it feels its own perceived interests are involved or if there is sufficient domestic political pressure to do so, and the UK really should follow suit. Frankly that is a sensible position for any nation state to take. The UK governments current position of "follow the US's lead wherever it is demanded" is downright treasonous.
The UK needs to continue to maintain forces, equipment and any other capabilities independently or with allies as long as the UK is capable of maintaining the same, in the absence of their allies. It would be foolhardy to rely on the US (or France/Germany/Italy etc..) for equipment, parts, support, or armaments in the case of war, especially if any of those allies were opposed to the conflict.
The one thing I do feel that is surprising with this scenario is that the US will happily sell the aircraft to the UK. I would have assumed that any sensitive information about the aircraft would be available from the aircraft itself, which of course presents the question as to whether there are either surprises in the software that would give the US any advantage in the unlikely event that these aircraft were used against them. Although ignoring that (slight conspiracy theory) surely it should also raise questions about the quality of the software.
Anyway, I see no reason why the UK cannot simply continue to work on its own or with allies who full trust the UK, rather than be treated as an interloper or a poor cousin by the US.
On the surface, this seems like a stupid decision; but it's really impossible to say exactly what the motive is because... that might be secret too!
On the one hand, you might ask... "so what if Al Qaeda has the source code for the programs that run the fighter? It's not like running it on a PowerBook is going to make it fly mach 2 and shoot missiles". OTOH, a more sophisticated military, like the Chinese, might find a bug in it, develop an exploit that could be used in combat, and give it to North Korea or something.
Now, the Brittish wouldn't send this stuff to China... not as far as we know... so... maybe the US thinks there is a problem with the UK's ability to keep secrets.
OK, that's a bit far fetched. Maybe the contract under which this stuff was developed doesn't permit this. Ha-ha. Maybe it's tied up in legal limbo. That'd be more in keeping with the US that I know these days.
Maybe they're just afraid the Brits might find a bug, or come up with better code, or just laugh at all the "fucks" and "shits" they left in the comments. That wouldn't surprise me either.
The bottom line though, is our grandchildren find out the answer to "Why?", but we may never know. It might be top secret.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So you want them to engage you on your terms so that you destroy can them as you mention? No way! These guerrillas (or insurgents as you call them), are smarter than that.
In fact they are engaging you on their terms and from what I have seen and heard, it's working for them. Again, it's very saddening that the war had to take all these many lives and time, for American military leaders to realize that it's not working.
SU-27 is sooo last century. Meet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan_MiG-35 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-31 .
They both have phased array radar which just doesn't care about 'stealth' technologies.
The American military machine, touted as the strongest, most efficient, lethal, modern and advanced, has just got a beating from AK-47 wielding thugs of IRAQ.
Only because of restraint. Unleash the military, and you'd have it mopped up quickly. You'd also have no population left, but that's the choice you make.
The US military (and allies) made quick work of Iraq's military, twice. The police action that has followed this second time is more problematic. But that is not a military problem.
perhaps it would reveal something like a logic bomb or some sort of remote cutoff/disabler, just in case and all that
which would be rather embarrasing seeing as the USA is supposed to trust the UK
When I buy a new computer, (Dell, HP/Compaq, etc.) The first think I do is format the drive...
right and thats how you won against the vietcong. oh wait, they fucked you up remmeber?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Way back when, Polland had bought a complicated piece of hardware to run their electric grid from the U.S., the CIA had a killswitch secretly installed in it.
Polland was a friendly nation at the time, but you never know how the wind can change, so the switch was there, just in case.
You can't take the sky from me...
...are the only thing of value in aerospace code. Once you have seen the implementation (in Ada, most likely) you can re-implement it in a different language and along the way make it very difficult to prove that you ripped it off.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Air superiority, I dunno! One thing I know is that the Russians do not advertise themselves that much as compared to the Americans. Even when they were the *only* link to the ISS after the shuttle disasters, they were cool about everything. If Americans were in their place, they (Americans) would be "blowing their own trumpet." Look, just this evening, it was all over the news about the shuttle launch, but Russians do their thing quietly and without much fanfare.
When it comes to projecting power abroad, let's examine what the US is getting in terms of results:
- Veitnam? Heck, the US was whipped hands down! Talk to any American.
Americans have a problem. They think that if a country does not do things the conventional way, they that country is "not worth much." That's why they've been surprised in IRAQ. Mind you, IRAQ's command and control infrastructure was "destroyed" in the first two weeks of the war. So half of the mission was complete. Despite all the technology, IEDs are still hitting them hard. By the way, IEDs are 1940s technology.So you tell me how this power is really useful when widows and widowers are being created in IRAQ every single day. Tell me.
The US government doesn't have the right to give them the source. The JSF is a product that is being developed for the military by Lockheed Martin and major partners BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman. Would you expect Dell to give the source to every program installed on it's computers to any customer on demand? Why would this plane be any different. There are many proprietary software programs being used that are very protected trade secrets. The UK is part of the EU and giving them those secrets would be tantamount to giving away literally billions of research and development dollars.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Yes, I want to engage them on my terms. That's the goal of every fight. And the case I mentioned does happen a lot. But I won't talk any more about specific strategy though, even stuff that's public knowledge.
Tell me when insurgents have won a single battle in Iraq. In every case insurgents are overrun, overpowered and out-thought. No, I'm not saying they're stupid or that the fight has been easy, but they don't engage our forces head on anymore. They'd all die and they know it.
Did you even read my submission? Key word: Very few..., and the systems you talk about are among those very few.
He said "after being under water". How well do nuclear submarines perform when they're not under water?
This is not just about source code. In a system like that software, hardware and system integration are inseparable. You either give no information or have to give it all. These are the crown jewels of the platform. Revealing them also reveals any number of critical points for interested adversaries: thrust and manoeuvrability limits, reaction times, counter-measure schemes and logic, EMC-characteristics etc. all of which can be used to find weaknesses and design weapon systems to be more effective against it.
Also, since the UK is only conributing 10% of the development costs, its no wonder the US isnt keen sharing. Usually with mil-tech you only give a bad, incomplete user manual to the client so he can barely operate the thing and then wait for him to pay more for extra features that are already implemented by disabled in software or simply undocumented. You never ever allow the client to have exact specs, schematics or software which would allow him to reverse-engineer and develop his own extentions and applications to it.
Here in Finland we bought old C-model F18 Hornets. When the first upgrade cycle came, the US told us of these new fancy secure ground-to-air datalinks and avionics for combat close formation flying they wanted to sell us. We just told them we had developed our own by then, thankyouverymuch. But that was because the platform was getting old and most of the stuff in there was already open knowledge with multiple nations having purchased them years ago. Also with old-gen mil-aircraft there are a lot of avionics standards which were developed and adhered to during the cold-war to easy manufacturing, lower cost and allow inter-service operations. These JSFs will probably have special new-gen custom avionics to do with flight and weapon control, targeting, radar, stealth, communications and electronic warfare that the US definately wants to keep wrappers on.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Trying to force someone to share sourece code is always almost impossible. Even if they share it, it will probably be a different version, some modules will not have the same version as others, and you can never build a good image.
Just look at how well MS has "shared" their source as mandated.
Only when the producer genuinely tries to make it work is it possible, and even then often a challenge. I can only imagine trying set up a full (top secret)developmnent environment and to build a complete set of images for multiple proprietary, top secret targets.
And if there is a flaw in your build, you dont hang a PC, all your jets crash and burn.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Yes, even the ones that can't walk yet. One problem is the troop numbers are far less than the operation in Kuwait and there have been a lot of situations where the best of a bad situation was to shoot everything that moved, and it's easier to count unknown dead bodies than spotting live insurgents first. Unfortunately this turns others against the army and there is this new situation of a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers. What to do? The British couldn't work it out in Iraq with comparitively bigger forces and a similar technology advantage in 20 years but that doesn't mean there is no answer. The nationalists still see it as a puppet government - if we can work out why that could solve some of the problems. They've had sixteen years of war that sent Iraq into the third world and a long war with Iran before that that drove the nation so broke they invaded Kuwait to do a bank robbery on a national scale - a few more bombs alone are not going to stop them.
Modern weapon systems can win wars.
Modern weapon systems do not occupy the country, soldiers do. Occupation is required if you want a friendly regime to take power. Anytime you have a foreign army occupying your streets, there's going to be deaths on both sides. Take away the AKs and give them sporks and you will still see people on both sides die.
Now, lets maintain the status quo. When I balance up the "equation", Americans do not have much to show for the almost 3,000 coalition lives lost so far. An average of 4 have been killed this month alone. Please pay a visit to http://www.icasulaties.org/ to see what I am talking about.
You want to know which battle the insurgents won in IRAQ? Please have a look at http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_0105 _Fallujah-P1,00.html then come back and tell me.
You could also tell me who controls Sadr City now. The only place the US has total control in IRAQ is the Green Zone. That's why the Commander in Chief, and all important US officials will NOT venture outside the Green Zone. To me, that means that someone else and NOT the Americans, are in control in areas outside on the Green Zone.
Put the code on SourceForge, make the plane run Linux and let millions of coders around the world fix your bugs. It's fast, cheap and works wonderfully well... most of your secrets are already kept by some type of Linux derivative.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The sad thing is not the nearly 3,000 coalition deaths but the estimated more than 650,0000 civilian deaths (or 2.5% of their entire population). To downplay that is insulting to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis suffering.
But the thing that puts Americans over the edge is the deaths of their troops? I don't quite understand that logic. Can someone be so kind as to explain that?
That depends on who you ask. According to the Pentagon and the White house that may be true. According to various human rights groups and other observers the US military in Iraq is writing off an awful lot of dead civillians as Al Quaeda fighters and sundry Iraqi insurgents.
It has everything to do with protecting the US defense industry. Maintaining these new aircraft involves lots of money and no country but the US would want them to have a virtual monopoly. If I remember correctly Australia has similar concerns.
EOR (End-of-rant)
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
The USA has all the technology but other countries know how to do more with less. When the US plays war games with other countries the US sometimes has to rig them to win,
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
What, you think US military systematically targets civilians while at the same time trying to win the trust of the local populace? Don't be an idiot!
Funny you should mention that. 2/1 is my battalion, mentioned in that article. You have no idea what you're talking about.
6 /fallujah/index.html
That was a political decision.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/09/1
Tet 68 was a case of The NV Army egging on the Viet Cong to be shock troops. The VC were ground to pieces, (no more VC) and the NVA had a convenient vacuum to fill.
So, yes we DID win against the Viet Cong. NVA promised to start playing nice at the Paris Peace talks and we left.
Well, what do you know, they had their fingers crossed.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
When I balance up the "equation", Americans do not have much to show for the almost 3,000 coalition lives lost so far.
We DON'T have a new tyranny. That's something.
Do we have a strong, stable ally? No. Are we going to do something about that? Yes. Will whatever comes out of the rubble respect the US military? Only if they don't want to fall as quickly as Saddam.
B-52's are pushing 50 years now, but they are nowhere near retirement. They have been comprehensively rebuilt, upgraded and overhauled over the years to continue service. And the big ugly fat fuckers are useful, when you absolutely positive positively have to pound something into dust they are nice to have around.
I wounder what the economics of rebuiding and upgrading the f-117s may be. My suspicion is that it would reduce the profits of the denfense contractors and so an idea like that would be DOA.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I hate to rain on your parade, but the US did provide loads of support to Britain during the falklands. Though, I suppose you could argue this was at a time when we "free nations" had to "stick together" to oppose the "red menace". I've read else where that other supplies were provided to UK forces for the conflict from the US, in addition to what wikipedia mentions, though the source escapes me at the moment (probably one of Jim Dunigan's books).
Ungh
about being American. It seems like every day my government does something retarded, making us look worse and worse. Thank God the Dem's won in November, It's going to be a long road back to respectability. It's getting harder and harder to remember when the rest of the world used to look up to the U.S.(or at least not have contempt for us).
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In the past (with the F16, F18 and others) countries such as Britain (and Australia I understand) not only had access to the source, but also substituted their own code for parts of the weapons systems and avionics software. This was necessary to meet their own requirements, which *are* different from those of the US Air Force and Navy, those countries have smaller forces, facing different threats in differing environments, need to integrate with different weapons and fire-control infrastructure and operate to diffing doctrines.
This is the first time that the US has imposed onerous restrictions like this:
- no you can't see it,
- no you can't substitute your own
- yes we know you're paying towards the development, but !@#$ off
Fine you go into a fire fight with your dominant eye covered and hop on one leg. Lets see anyone in that position win a gun fight.
You mad
"... and then all our vipers suddenly when dead, it was like someone threw a switch..."
... contingency plans. Especially the current crop of loonies.
I don't blame the brits at all. I certainly wouldn't trust the US military not to make
Single battles have gone over 46,000 or 51,000 even... small scuffs can raise several dozen or even a couple hundred. 3,000 is quite a low number for a few months of occupying a country.
I don't think it's the casualty rate that is damaging the current US administration. What is really doing it harm is the fact that after three years Iraq has progressed from the state of anarchy that it was in during the days after the fall of Saddams régime to a strange form of low intensity civil war. You can actually win a war and lose the 'peace' (if you can manage to call the current situation in Iraq that without blushing) and the US is well on it's way to acieving that in Iraq.
It's not a military problem to control the situation they created? Yeah I suppose that about sums up America. Believe it or not, there is more to a war than the initial occupation. But then when has America ever managed to subdue anything bigger than a small Caribbean island?
Forgive me for answering anonymously but features are turned "off" in the code. It would be too difficult to modify the source and remove the lines that aren't needed. With that said, several features would become "known" to people outside of a predefined need-to-know group. Secrets are not kept secrets if people not needing the information have knowledge of it. Most of the US pilots who fly fighter aircraft are unaware of some of the technologies that the weapon system they are flying has to offer. Of course, they would be told very quickly if they have the need-to-know. It is not a question of trusting the British. By all means, they are our closest ally. It is a question of keeping the knowledge of those technologies limited to a small predefined group of software engineers and scientists.
Kodos: That board with a nail in it may have defeated us. But the humans won't stop there. They'll make bigger boards and bigger nails, and soon, they will make a board with a nail so big, it will destroy them all!
But a soldier from brazil is worth most of all.
That's just the point, isn't it. The outcome of 'battles' is a metric for conventional war, and a bad measuring stick for uncoventional/asymetric war.
One side can claim all the battle victories they want, but if the other side is not fighting battles (nor has any interest in doing so) then the claim of victory is meaningless. How many conventional battles did Geronimo win? Is he revered as a tactical genius because fought on his enemy's terms or because he tied up massive numbers of troops while continuing to raid and elude capture for 30 years?
The greatest mistake the US makes about Iraq (other than being there in the first place) is thinking that it is about battles and direct confrontations, or imagining that once troops are in a town then that town is 'held'.
American troops can raise all the flags they want in all the provincial outposts they want but it will do very little good when the 'enemy' simply melts away, returning sporadically to disrupt supply lines and make actual administration impossible. Raising a flag only means something when the local population recognizes the flag as symbolic of control and submits accordingly. Geronimo did not, Ho Chi Minh did not, and the internecine groups in Iraq do not
As long as the US keeps thinking that this fight in Iraq is about territorial control (particularly when the US military cannot even control Bagdhad), they are destined for failure. The insurgents don't need to control cities. They don't need to win or even fight battles. As long as they disrupt the business of running a military occupation and survive, they achieve their goals. Strike and evade, strike and evade. There's no need to hold any particular ground since they have far more ground on which to hide than the occupier can possibly cover.
And the harder the US tries to hit them, the more collateral damage is done; the more collateral damage, the stronger the insurgent groups are supported. The more support they have, the more sophisticated their attacks become and the easier it becomes to melt away and evade the counterattack (which of course does more collateral damage and begins the cycle anew).
If insurgent groups in Iraq were dumb enough to stand together and fight the occupying US Army head on, of course they would be obliterated. But the situation is far more analogous (though by no means akin) to that of competing gangs -- their real beef is with each other. One or another side may try to use the police (the occupiers or their puppets) as intermediaries to get at their enemy but only as a means to an end, and without trust. The intermediaries are disposable, and subject to attack at any time.
Such is the nature of occupations, and why they rarely work out.
Note: My sympathies go out to all those in uniform in Iraq. I truly believe that the vast majority of you are good people (and those that aren't weren't before they were sent there). You have sacrificed far beyond what you were asked to, and have served well and admirably. I only wish that those who sent you were compelled to learn from your experience, and forced to undergo the same danger and hardships to at least understand and appreciate your stories.
The US army probably loses many more than 4 people a month to accidents in peacetime. The Iraqis aren't defeating the US troops militarily; the US is defeating itself politically.
The smart thing to have done would have been to leave Iraq completely shortly after capturing Hussein, turn him over to be executed, and to let the various Iraqi factions kill each other to their hearts content. Instead, Bush chose to keep troops there "until the nation was stable". Big mistake.
If you're going to forcibly stabilize another country (which I don't recommend), you have to actually be FORCEFUL. That means eliminating whomever opposes you quickly and decisively, shrugging off civilian casualties and international opinion. Right now, the US is trying to do it "nicely", which simply doesn't work. The different factions just laugh at the US soldiers knowing that they aren't authorized to do anything that will really have an effect, or even effectively defend themselves.
Whenever US troops do take a major action, civilians are killed and citizens are horrified. Occasionally a few soldiers get pissed, go crazy, and kill innocents, and citizens are horrified. It's like fighting a small dog. You can easily kill it, but everyone will hate you for doing it. You can try to capture it without hurting it, but you'll get bitten a lot and everyone will laugh their ass off at you.
Aside from any code with the purpose of fascilitating a "shutdown" of the plane, the code for the radar data processing is what the US is most concerned to keep a well guarded secret. Also, 90% of the code for the F22 is written in Ada. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/air craft/f-22-avionics.htm
and this has what to do with the fighting on the ground? sorry but trying to cover over your wounded nationalist feelings and claiming you didn't lose vietnam doesn't change the point that all the technology in the world is no good to you if your enemy refuses to engage you in pitched battles.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
How did you do against Germany?
I would think that the US population thinks that war is a few high alltitude bombing missions, this is after all the portrayal of war in popular media. When american soldiers start dying on the battlefield, then of course the public is outraged.
So you want them to engage you on your terms so that you destroy can them as you mention? No way! These guerrillas (or insurgents as you call them), are smarter than that.
You are quite right. They hide among civilians, and then try to make us feel sorry when one accidentally gets hit, even though it is they who put the civilians in danger. When that's not fast enough, they go to a market and blow up civilians themselves to prop up the casualty rate.
At least the Vietnamese had enough honor not to kill civilians on their own side...
In the end, at least half of the insurgents are guaranteed to lose in the imminent civil war, and its likely to be quite long and drawn out like the Iraq/Iran war. The civilian deaths in such a conflict will make what has happened up to this point look minor. But, the Americans will be gone. If that's what the insurgents call "victory", then I guess they will "win". The way I see it, everybody loses.
I can see from the fact that the AC I am responding too has been modded "insightful" that there are no shortage of smart asses and smart ass admirers on Slashdot. But lets not kid ourselves, its only human nature for a country to care about its own soldiers and their well being vs the casualties of anyone who is a foreigner. Its not an American trait, or a British trait or an Iraqi trait, its a human trait.
So yes, to Americans the 3,000 coalition deaths are a bit more important than the 650,000 Iraqi deaths.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"It's not a military problem to control the situation they created? Yeah I suppose that about sums up America. Believe it or not, there is more to a war than the initial occupation. But then when has America ever managed to subdue anything bigger than a small Caribbean island?"
Japan? Germany? Italy? The South Eastern United States?
Those big enough for you?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Wow. I agree very strongly with your point. You're one of the few I think who have the courage to say this.
In truth, regardless of whose side you're on, war is supposed to be nasty and brutish. I can imagine the worst thing to happen to the US military is pervasive media and the internet. It magnifies everything a millionfold and filters war through the eyes of civilians. It should not. It hampers the efficacy of military operations because the military now attempts to please the public.
I agree with you - this war has become a nightmare of public relations because the US refuses to use crushing force to annihilate insurgents for fear of public outcry. Thus the irony of a military force doomed to failure for attempting to please the very people already predicting their demise.
Any military treatise preaches on the psychological aspects of war. For better or worse, the United States airs its dirty laundry for the world to see - on the news, online, message boards, etc. It sends a message of a country divided... a military CASTRATED. It's a shame, mostly to the soldiers who are in the field. Incidentally, your points about speed and decisiveness are key tenets of basic military philosophy as well - but group think in the US is a serious handcuff to that prospect.
There is no tactical reason for this conflagration to still exist - it's like the heavyweight pulling punches against a flyweight in the ring because the crowd is crying foul/unfair... etc. The same crowd will point derisively when the lightweight pulls out the decision. smh.
George Bush is an idiot - and the hesitance of this administration to close this out is damning. They've already taken the PR/IA hit... just close it the fuck out and pull out already.
un burrito me trampeó.
Everyone needs to stop comparing weapons. I believe it's all in the pilot. If you have a good pilot in a MiG, I wouldn't be surprised if he could take either of these next generation fighters. Both of these fighters are great and they almost fly themselves but like I said, it's all about the pilot.
Thought UK was paying for most it while u.s. was designing it and paying a much smaller part of the bill. The problem is you can't buy these things in dollars because dollars have no asset value. Only the silver backed Pound has enough value to pay for huge projects like this.
"One moment, please hold for the Prime Minister"
(pause)
"Hello, Mr. Stallman? I understand you have some experience applying political pressure to closed-source vendors, I wonder if..."
Sure, but we should remember that there is NO record of either side immerging it's 'plane in water until the enemy past by then flying out hiding the water to attack from the rear. The AK47 is a fine weapon and very superior to the M16; but neither of them fly.
I think we have a chalk and cheese comparison issue here
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
You do understand Iraq is a nation, not an acronym, right?
PS: The 'trap' concept dates back a bit further than the 40s. If you mean frequency agile remote detonation of multiple stacked shaped charges collected from Soviet era mutions and/or laser ignition anti-armor warheads from French military depots in Africa, then sure I guess that's a bit closer to the 40s... sorta. Not really, though.
The reason "things are bad", as you so quaintly put it, is because the "insurgent" scum have no problem with slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, while western soldiers get blamed every time an Iraqi slips on a bullet casing and twists his ankle. Advanced technology already helps us keep our own deaths low while inflicting much higher casualties on the opposition, however, if we wanted to go on a mass murder rampage the way our opponents are doing, then you'd see those high-tech weapons making a massive difference. And if people like you continue to have their way, we WILL go back to the old way of fighting wars within the next decade. Which is rather sad, really. Yet another example of misplaced idealism causing greater harm than the evils it's trying to oppose.
Let's be careful with blanket statements. Anyone who's spent more than 15 minutes studying the military history of the late 20th century knew damn well that Iraq was going to turn into a guerrilla nightmare. You can be assured that the military academy graduates who run the US armed forces fall into that category.
One of the problems with being a senior military officer in a democracy is having to say, "Can do, Sir!" with a smile on your face when your civilian leadership asks you to carry out an order. Even when you know those orders are stupid.
By the way, IEDs are 1940s technology.
You were doing so well until you hit that, but now I know you are talking out of your ass. IR transmitters, cell phones, and radio interruption switches with electronic delays are not 1940s technology. IEDs started out primitive, but quickly advanced during the tit-for-tat arms race between measures and countermeasures. The insurgents are not dumb, and are using all the technology available to them. The only thing from the 40s are their AK-47s.
So you tell me how this power is really useful when widows and widowers are being created in IRAQ every single day. Tell me.
Why don't you ask the anarchists who kill Iraqis in markets and mosques, kill anyone trying to form Iraq's own police force, and kill people just for voting. The US would already be gone if they hadn't done that. Blood is on US hands for the initial invasion, but since then, it's been 90% Iraqis killing other Iraqis. The US cannot take 100% of the blame for their actions, just like you cannot blame a police officer for failing to protect you from being robbed by your neighbor.
Awesome post, but you're wrong about one thing: it CAN be done peacefully, it just takes a LOT of time. It's like teaching a dog not to shit on your carpet...you can shove his face in it and smack him hard a few times, or you can keep saying "no!" a million times, and withholding treats. Both methods work, one just takes a lot more time and patience. Unfortunately the US people and media have absolutely zero patience.
You wish. And so do all the ground forces engaged in Iraq. It should be as you say, but "wishing will NOT make it so"
You are correct. But they don't submerge themselves with either their M16's or with either of the 'planes that this discussion is supposedly about
Right! And I've often wished you would try the mix of fresh water and soap. More often, at least
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
The army is nothing, but a tool for the public.
The army is just doing the will of the US people. It is truly important that the people knows the facts so they can change and advice their workers (the army) in their task to help the peoples interests.
It's not restraint, it's using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Let's contrast the first gulf war with the current one.
In the first gulf war we did not plan to occupy iraq so we flew something like 300 sorties a day dropping an ungodly amount of bombs on the place. We targeted and destroyed all kinds of crucial civilian infrastructure such as bridges, electrical generation facilites, water treatment plants, roads, factories etc. Our goal was to make the iraqis suffer so much that they would rise up and overthrow saddam so we worked very hard at hurting as many common iraqis as possible. As a result of these efforts and the sanctions that followed we killed close to two million iraqis including hundreds of thousands of children.
That was using the right tool for the right job.
In the second war we wanted to occupy iraq so we didn't want to destroy any infrastructure that we wanted to use ourselves so we didn't target water treatment facilities, bridges etc. We wanted to keep saddams palaces so we could move into them and set up shop. Wrong tool for the wrong job. The US military is awesome at killing, destroying, and making millions of people as miserable as possible. It sucks at police work and occupying an angry populace.
Wrong tool, wrong job.
evil is as evil does
The problem is that aside from you and a handful of really right wing nutcases nobody else really wants the US to conduct genocide at the scale you are calling for. When you are trying to occupy a country the size of iraq you are going to have to destroy anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of all building in the country and kill tens of millions of people in order to snuff out all opposition.
There is a minority of about 20 to 30 percent of americans who would rather enjoy killing ten million iraqis but since most americans would revolt at the thought it would be political suicide.
evil is as evil does
"Prime Minister Blair" is very much an Americanism, I'm fairly certain it's not a title that you would use as a prefix. Being British I'd call him Mr Blair if I was talking to him (well, I can think of a couple of other things to call him as well, but they would probably get me arrested saying them to his face). I think when he's announced it's something like "The Right Honourable Mr Tony Blair, The Prime Minister".
That's all fine, dandy and understandable. But for countries taking place in this project, wouldn't you think they'd be scared about the features that *are* enabled in the code version they get, such as EjectPilotOnSignOfUSTrouble(), or ChangeMissileTargetFromOvalOfficeDesk().
You may think this is funny, but not in the least by your current president I think the world has turned into an uglier place over the past 6 years. Who's not to say an even more lunatic guy gets elected/bribed/bought/wiggled into the White House and he happens to have a feature to turn our JSF's against us by the flip of a switch??
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
OMG that was terrible....................ly funny!!
If you must!
The US probably won't release it because the blue nackground colour & white bunches of hex numbers are so embarrassing.
They should send sr71.rb instead. They've got dozens of those Habus in museums. A tank of fuel, literally a couple of hours, and they're delivered. Just add a handful of light missiles to each (shells are too slow) and you're away!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Informative-- and the nation's called Poland, FFS.
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
This srceen is asking me for a registration key. Dubya gee aye, it calls itself. Weapon's Geniunely As... oh, never mind. Does anyone know how to pray?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In all those places they had massive backup, and in several of them the people there actually didn't mind their presence. And I don't think you should really get credit for conquering your own country.
The problem that the US military is running into is one that is inherent in urban warfare. When you're fighting in forests or open land, there are fewer places for people to hide. Sure, they can hide behind a tree, or in a hole, or whatever. But compared to urban warfare, it's nothing. This is the first real conflict that America has fought in the urban warfare environment, and we're getting our asses handed to us because of principles of asymmetric warfare: One asshole sitting in a window can take out two or three guys before they even figure out where the hell the fire is coming from. And then, if you have a mission with rules of engagement to protect civilians at all costs, you AREN'T going to go throw a HEAT round from a tank into that window.
Ah, the old "stab-in-the-back" excuses already.
0 1/neocons200701
In the first place, not enough troops were sent to occupy Iraq. Then the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi Army and ripped apart the Ba'athist infrastructure leaving a lot of *trained guys running around with grudges against the US military. Privatisation of occupation duties plus lack of control (for the sake of "efficiency") has led to rampant corruption - http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html This has led to an almost complete failure by US corporations to restore Iraqi infrastructure.
Let's face it, the US Main Stream Media has been controlled and castrated for years now - see the NY Times and it's suppression of the wire-tapping. The US military embedded journalists so as to control them. I see you're polling for control of the internet as well. How much does it take for you to say that the US fucked up? You sound almost like these guys: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/
As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong. In the US, the neo-cons have even gone to the extreme of committing crimes (re: Valerie Plame) in order to justify this war. In the UK, the pressures of this power has forced an honest man to commit suicide. If the need to go to war was that just, why all this pressure?
And I have to say that the current US intransigence towards their supposedly closest ally smacks of, at the least, ingratitude. Brits are currently dieing in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying in blood for a "speicial relationship" which is being revealed as worthless when push comes shove. In contrast, I bet the US would hand the code over to the Israelis in a similar situation.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
The US and UK are so tightly bound in military and intelligence matters, you really should not believe reports like this. This kind of news is "for public release." Grain of salt.
Let's get a few things straight here:
:o)
1. The primary reason for the invasion of Iraq was USA's need to prop it's depleting oil reserves. Excuses such as:
a) Search for WMD's (They found none)
b) Ousting a tyrant (There are many of those, Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe etc etc, why not pick on a country that actually needs help?)
c) The 'War on Terror'. (There were no connections between Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein, even though they desperately tried to find one).
2. Dubya is carrying on where his Father left it incomplete. The man couldn't even find the place on a map.
3. In the first Gulf war, the British lost more servicemen from American 'friendly fire' than they did from the Iraqis. It's about time the US employed trained soldiers instead of Gung-ho idiots that think they are John Wayne. (And even John Wayne didnt rape kids and torture civilians)
4. The usual US military procedure is to carpet bomb an entire area from a great height to minimise casualties. (On their side, of course) - See Bosnia for reference.
5. Often tyrants are the only thing holding disparate factions together, obviously with an iron hand. Remove the lynch-pin and the entire edifice comes tumbling down. They return to hacking each other to pieces. See Romania, Yugoslavia and many African states.
The entire 'Gulf War II - The Sequel' was grossly undermanned from the outset. Look at any major military takeover in history and you will see it requires massive manpower, NOT a reliance in technology and weaponry. One would have thought the US would have figured that out from their failure in Vietnam. I heard USA recently described not as an empire, but an "impire", as most people are going there, rather than leaving. An empire relies on the expansion of it's people in huge numbers to achieve an effect. The fact that less than 20% of US citzens possess a passport explains a lot. Dropping 50,000 men and billions of dollars worth of technology is NOT going to prevent urban terrorism and guerilla warfare. The only way is to come down like a ton of bricks with a huge deployment of manpower and pin them down so hard they cannot sniff without anybody knowing. Then you can slowly release your grip once you have all your 'good guys' in place.
Well that's my view of the world and I've been wanting to say that lot for quite some time.
PS: Oh, and as for the Aircraft sales, we all know that the British/American detente only goes one way. They don't call Blair a poodle for nothing. The sooner UK drops its ridiculous snivelling attitude to America, the sooner it might earn the respect of the rest of the world again.
"I like to skate on the other side of the ice"
Since it is of such small value, there is no hardship in doing so, is there?
That is a completely false concept.
The Generals and Admirals, according to the Nuremburg Trials, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, are required to say NO when the orders are as bogus as the ones to invade Iraq this time. Their own intelligence told them that President Bush was either lying or simply insane. It was a war crime for Bush to issue the orders and for the Pentagon to proceed with them, just as much as the orders by Adolf Hitler, and compliance by the German military, to invade Poland. Further, the American officers didn't face the Gestapo. Too bad they lacked the integrity and courage to tell the President, behind closed doors, they it was simply not going to happen. What we should be doing is asking the Germans to refurbish Spandau Prison, toss the top three layers of the White House and Pentagon in, and lose the key.
I don't buy the method used to calculate 650,000 civilian deaths. It's easy for an intelligence agency or insurgency group to compromise the study and the fact that the study discounts such a possibility weighed heavily against them in my view. Further, it reports deaths far greater than any other source including a UN study that apparently uses the same methodology but a greater sample size. When there are multiple studies indicating the same figure rather than consistently indicating a number about a quarter to third as large, then I'll take this study seriously.
In truth, regardless of whose side you're on, war is supposed to be nasty and brutish.
And in practice, the features of a war has little to do with the individual desires of a participant. After all the opponent usually has reason to try to deny. Eg, you want your wars to be short? Then let's fight for a couple of decades.
George Bush is an idiot - and the hesitance of this administration to close this out is damning. They've already taken the PR/IA hit... just close it the fuck out and pull out already.
My take is that the US will pick up a big strategic loss, if (and perhaps when) they pull out. Bunch of countries, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc are teetering. A clear loss in Iraq might bring down the whole house of cards for the US.Yes, 3k Americans should be very important had they been defending their country against a violent invasion. However, in this case it was USA who attacked and should be held responsible for the 650k innocent people they've murdered.
But lets not kid ourselves, its only human nature for a country to care about its own soldiers and their well being vs the casualties of anyone who is a foreigner.
The notion of "foreigner" is quaint and should be abandoned. The instinct to defend our "tribe" is there, but you must remember that the US was supposedly invading Iraq to "liberate" the population from the oppressive government. It then has a really bad smell to kill 2.5% of said population. Myself I feel a stronger allegiance to my family and friends than to national borders. My friends have perhaps 50 different nationalities. Don't kill my friends, please.
And let's not forget that Bush did this for Halliburton and oil. Just like Vietnam, a US president started something that was bigger than he could not control.
a right tool for the job of "police work and occupying an angry populace"
Let us suppose for a moment it was reversed and the Iraqi army had invaded the US. You might have really hated Bush, you might have gone to protests against him, but I can't quite imagine US citizens welcoming in an invading force.
My best guess would be that the US hoped to get what they had in Iraq - puppet government to control their people, given the tools and blind-eye to do so by the US (in return for smoothly flowing oil).
The entire argument that the intention was merely to bring democracy is obvious jive. Take for example the recent elections in Palestine (which were considered to be free and fair) - the democratically elected government there was fair less corrupt than the PLO, but as the democratically elected view of the country moved away from desired US policy funded was halted (EU did the same). This was funding for hospitals etc and the lack of is is accepted as causing deaths of civilians.
You can only draw the conclusion that the stopping of funding was to punish the country for electing the 'wrong' democracy. While this punishment for voting the wrong way continues, I cannot see how any election result produced can be considered democratic.
Germany?
Which just shows how important the attitude of the population is. The German population was just happy when the war was over. They basically focused on rebuilding their country the day the war was over. I don't think there was any serious military confrontation between Germans and the occupying allied forces.
No, the truly sad thing is that anybody believes those nonsense numbers. (Which, oddly enough, were released just before the US election, just like their last survey.)
655,000 War Dead? A bogus study on Iraq casualties
The Iraq Body Count project strongly rejects the 650,000 number as well.
I think that there are lies told in the pursuit of "peace" that equal or exceed those claimed to have been told in the pursuit of war.
As to Iraqi suffering, I don't recall there being massive protests around the world when Saddam invaded Iran, Kuwait, gassed the Kurds, or filled various mass grave sites. That leads me to believe that very few people in "peace movements" outside Iraq are genuinely concerned about Iraqi suffering. I do remember massive protests by the "peace movement" when the large multinational coalition prepared to eject the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in 1991. The protests were against the liberation of Kuwait, which leads me to believe that few people in the "peace movement" were against the suffering of the Kuwaiti people under occupation, or against the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam who was waging aggressive war to incorporate Kuwait as a province of Iraq. During the period that Iraq was under sanctions, there were protests against the US and not against Saddam for misusing the corrupt Oil for Food money to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food. The evidence seems to point to the "peace movement" being against the US and not against Iraqi suffering.
But the thing that puts Americans over the edge is the deaths of their troops? I don't quite understand that logic. Can someone be so kind as to explain that?
Americans don't want to see other Americans killed. They understand that people are likely to die in war, but prefer that it is the enemy soldiers if it is going to be anyone. That isn't hard to understand, is it?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"they don't engage our forces head on anymore. They'd all die and they know it."
very true. As I recall my history there was another army that was absolutely devestating when fought on its own terms. That was the british army in the days of cavalry and muskets. We even built a sizeable empire around it (and our navy). That army even defeated the supposudly unstoppable napoleon.
Then some people in one of our colonies learned to fight us on their terms. As I recall, they didnt march out with flags to meet us like gentlemen on the field of battle, but would ambush us.
The effect was devestating, and that army won. In fact they kicked us back to our own country and declared independence.
I believe its now called the united states of america.
Its amazing how many empires there have been, the greeks, the romans, the british, the french, we have all controlled vast empires through military might at one stage. And we have all learned the futility of relying purely on force of arms to maintain control of foreign countries.
I guess it's impossible to accept that lesson when you *are* the current military top dog. It took humiliation of our army to learn that lesson. I'd rather the US learned it without having to lose any more of its own servicemen.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I tend to believe that a significant percentage of the intelligence community (and I include senior military commanders here) actually did believe that Iraq represented a legitimate threat. You can argue all day that this belief was based on laughably thin evidence, and I wouldn't disagree with you, but that's not the point.
I have absolutely no doubt that there were senior officers who voiced their opposition because they thought the intelligence was bad, the invasion plan was bad, the post-invasion scenario was unrealistic, or any combination of the above. They made their doubts known, and they were ultimately ignored by senior civilian leadership at the pentagon.
What then? Refuse to obey based on the theory that they were being issued illegal orders? Interesting. The UCMJ says...
A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, or lawful superior orders or for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it.
I suspect that not even the Supreme Court could render a consistent verdict as to whether or not the order to invade Iraq violated US law based on the evidence available to senior military leadership at the time. Stupid? Yes. Illegal? Debatable.
I don't now about you, but I wouldn't be willing to risk my career and (likely) criminal prosecution on the likelihood that my interpretation of the legality of the Iraq invasion was correct.
There were protests in the US Senate when the Kurds were gassed. However they were vetoed by their own president who considered supporting Iraq against Iran was more important. And so Iraq was able to continue buying chemicals and other war materiel.
But the thing that puts Americans over the edge is the deaths of their troops? #### You really expect Americans should care about the enemy casualties?
One critical object for the US government is to prevent Iraq from allying itself with Iran. Due to the population demographics that would happen in an instant if allowed, which is why the US army can't pull out until a stable government adequately representing US interests is in place. But the longer you're there, the less liked you become and the less likely you are to achieving your goals.
What?! The US gov't do something underhanded and dastardly? Naaaw, never (as long as you don't ask the torture victims of Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or any of the CIA's other secret prisons).
It seems the "special relationship" is only "special" as long as Britain remains on its knees.
Kirk offers to surrender himself and beam over, if Khan will let the Enterprise and its crew go. Khan accepts if Kirk also turns over all information the Enterprise has on Project Genesis....
a th_of_Khan
Kirk stalls, claiming difficulty in retrieving the data. This allows Kirk and Spock precious moments to retrieve the Reliant's security access prefix code from the Enterprise's computers. The transmitted code lowers the Reliant's shields, allowing the Enterprise to use its last bit of phaser power to damage the Reliant enough to force its retreat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_II:_The_Wr
So you don't feel compassion for the death of another human being because some politician tells you he's the enemy.
Milking cow is a closer analogy.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Even school bullies know that war comes with a declaration ("hey snotface, at recess I'm going to pound your face in"). Regarding the Iraqui mess, a section of the US government acted alone without backing from the international community (well, ok, Poland). So it wasn't war proper, it was some sort of large scale police action which went exactly as predicted. By everyone but its instigators that is.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
If America didn't worry about world opinion then they could have won in Iraq in a very short time by simply pummeling opposition into the ground with overwhelming force. That wasn't the plan though, and that's not America's MO since Japan, which it seems a fair few Americans think was a stupid thing to do.
Also in Japan they didn't disband the military....
How much more military can occupying a country get. Not a military problem? Then pull out the military!
So therefore surely a significant percentage of the intelligence community should be out of a job by now, right?
Our goal was to make the iraqis suffer so much that they would rise up and overthrow saddam so we worked very hard at hurting as many common iraqis as possible.
What lunatic thought *that* could work? It will have had exactly the opposite effect.
The press make sure they don't (and this isn't a US thing it happens in all wars).
So they're not people, they're 'insurgents'. In WW2 they weren't people they were 'nazis'.
On the other side I'm sure they call the US troops infidels or invaders or something - same principle.
Meanwhile if one of the US troops gets killed we get news reports about 'Joe from Ohio, and here's film of his greiving family'.
I'm sure the other side do the 'Joe from Baghdad' story as well.
The crazy thing is we've been falling for it ever since mass media was invented...
Who do you think we've been fighting for the last three years? These people we're killing aren't members of super secret terrorist organisations or foreign insurgants that have entered Iraq, we're fighting the Iraqi population.
But the thing that puts Americans over the edge is the deaths of their troops?
Their invading troops. It's not like they were home on a leave.
Can someone be so kind as to explain that?
If you've ever heard a speech by any american politician, especially in the period right after 9/11, you're probably familiar with the term "american lives". Some lives are apparently worth more than others, and the american ones are at the top.
Do we have a strong, stable ally? No. Are we going to do something about that? Yes. Will whatever comes out of the rubble respect the US military? Only if they don't want to fall as quickly as Saddam.
You're joking, right?
The US is getting its ass kicked. Even george bush has finally admitted it.
The only strategy left now is how to get the hell out of the country without getting the remaining troops slaughtered. You really think they'd go back in after that kind of debacle? It'll be 20 years before the US embarks on anything like this again.
in fact they're using much the same tactics that the Boars used against the british, and the americans used against the british in the war of independance...
I feel regret for the death of enemy, indeed. However, if the enemy don't surrender, it should be killed. About politicians - these are politicians I elected. My vote never goes for greens or pacifists.
Funnily enough this is exactly what Nixon said during Vietnam, that all the bad publicity was why the US was getting its ass handed on a plate. It was bullshit back then too.
The parent didn't advocate genocide, if you had read his post properly you would see that
The Chinese bought Sukhois from Russia but some features were locked down. They simply got a bunch of hackers and gave them a plane to play with. In no time they had all the codes at hand.
2. His father didn't leave it incomplete, he called it mission accomplished in 91 and left. This was *after* shooting down French-led demands to march into Baghdad and taking out Saddam.
As it stands Kuwait shouldn't of been protected by the rest of the world, as they got what was coming to them. They were slant drilling across their borders into Iraqi oil fields and stealing their most important national resource.
In the first gulf war we did not plan to occupy iraq so we flew something like 300 sorties a day dropping an ungodly amount of bombs on the place. We targeted and destroyed all kinds of crucial civilian infrastructure such as bridges, electrical generation facilites, water treatment plants, roads, factories etc. Our goal was to make the iraqis suffer so much that they would rise up and overthrow saddam so we worked very hard at hurting as many common iraqis as possible. As a result of these efforts and the sanctions that followed we killed close to two million iraqis including hundreds of thousands of children.
Our goal in the first Gulf War wasn't to make the Iraqi people suffer, but to cripple the Iraqi war machine. Armored vehicles and supply trucks generally need bridges to cross deep water, and wars don't go well without them. Supply trucks and many military units need roads. Roads that have craters from bombs make for slow driving, assuming you can do it at all. Aircraft need landing strips to fly and fight. Airport landing strips are unusable with craters on the runway. Military units that can't move, fly, or fight are going to fail. Factories making ammunition, weapons, spare parts, and other essentials for war don't get work done without electricity. Government workers without electricity for light and computers aren't very producctive. The Coalition forces went out of their way to avoid damaging protected classes of targets. What you've written is false.
It wasn't we who killed Iraqis due to sanctions; it was Saddam. If Saddam hadn't abused the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, far fewer Iraqis would have died. If you have 10 kids and spend all of your paycheck on booze and drugs, whose fault is it if your kids are starving? Is it your fault, or your employer's?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Never is a strong word... if you want to imply that you'd never change your vote, even if your prefered and elected government handles against your interest, then sir, you are an idiot.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
No, there is not "a lot of GPL" in military systems, as most "military systems" are built by contractors and agencies with large budgets and lots of contracts with Sun, IBM and others, meaning that they don't need to copy code from GCC, GNOME, tar or anything like that, because they already have enough manpower to build it or already have contracts giving them access to better products. It's not about the quality of GPL code, but the fact that all GPL'ed products are nothing but trivial (yet time-consuming) software projects.
If you really think that the military needs to copy the source code from things like GCC and GZIP, making their whole source base GPL (enclosed GPL, but still GPL) because of that, it's pretty obvious that you completely forgot that the entire history of Unix and most of computing has passed in the hands and pocket of the military research system. They don't need to copy recent GPL'ed clones of Unix and its utilities, as they financed and licensed it since the beginning.
The military doesn't need GPL'ed code for anything at all.
way to go, America.
Politicians, worthless hippies, and squabbling among military commanders were the bane of Vietnam, and same with the current Iraq War. My friend is over there right now in the Special Forces, and he's said time and time again the major problem with operations going down is each military commander has his small sector to control, and god forbid if someone else's unit can do an operation into his territory. Read accounts from Vietnam, the same thing was happening, hell, they were WARNING the Vietnamese, just as some commanders are doing in Iraq warning Iraqi insurgents about incoming operations, when people were doing ops in their sector without letting that commander get the glory for the op.
This is the thanks the UK get for trusting in George 'Imbecile' Bush. You'd think that whilst campaigning in Iraq we'd be seen as people you can be trusted with source code, but I remember the series of posts on here when we first asked for the source. UK has a long history of getting bumfucked in this way by US. I'm sure this and other things will slowly bring us to the end of the special relationship, and the beginning of a more fereral Europe.No doubt at the speed of re-educating europhobes - Good
These sort of collaborations need serious planning, and in the UK such projects are handled through the MoD DPA (Defense Procurement Agency). The model they work with is called IPT (Integrated Project Team) who handle such projects, and there are (AFAIK) quite a few that collaborate with the US on various things (the simplest example is the adoption of the DODAF framework into what they call MODAF).
Now, I have just one, very simple question:
Why the hell wasn't this requirement flagged up and secured at the very beginning of the project? The IPT leader for JSF should have his nuts removed for dropping such a major stitch, but I guess the real culprit has already silently wandered off in the 2 year rotation that people enjoy there.
Result: millions of UK Pounds of tax money at risk, and they're in no position to negotiate either - the US knows they've got their backs against the wall as there is no Plan B (despite what the politicians want - it takes years to get something like this off the ground).
The ability of people to walk off after 2 years without ever being held to account for cockups during their reign (however much later they emerge) is IMHO the single biggest risk to everything the MoD does, and it needs to be fixed. But I guess that would be rather painful politically. Better waste some more tax payer money because that's free anyway, or that is at least what Tony Blair and cronies seem to think..
From what I have read, the package being given by the US to the F-35 partners (Australia, UK etc) is going to have avionics and equipment that is not as good as that which the US military will be using on its own F-35s. The US probobly doesnt want the partners to turn around and restore this missing functionality (either by modifying the existing avionics hardware and software or by replacing it outright).
Also, the US is probobly worried that the partners (and those contractors the partners choose to work with) may not have as strict rules when it comes to protecting the secrets of the F-35 from "the bad guys".
Again, it's very saddening that the war had to take all these many lives and time, for American military leaders to realize that it's not working.
We apologize for that, Recently it was noticed by the Secret service that George Bush had a very shiny Paperweight on his desk. It has beenthere for nearly 4 years now, removing it last month solved many of the decision problems he was having.
Research shows it was left by the Clintion Administration...
So this war is Bill Clinton's fault, he left something very shiny and distracting on the oval office desk which distracted the President.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It also locks you in to buy only the missiles that the US wants you to buy (i.e. theirs).
You don't need a lab to make mud.
The US doesn't have to kill tens of millions. We could just pull out and let them do it to themselves. If they don't then Saudi Arabia and Iran will when they use Iraq as their battle ground.
Just my opinion of course.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
"I think that there are lies told in the pursuit of "peace" that equal or exceed those claimed to have been told in the pursuit of war."
Well, okay, except there's a difference between lies that don't kill anyone and those that result in the deaths of thousands!
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
Case in point: the Tet offensive. Technically, we won that campaign. But we lost the war largely as a result. The North Vietnamese and VC weren't supposed to be able to do that kind of anymore. We didn't lose. We found out that most of the progress we'd thought we made wasn't real.
When the enemy knows our history better than you do, you're in trouble.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The US never intended to share the fighter, the original commitment from the UK was to make it easier to keep the US side funded (we need to keep this going because we owe the brits $120B worth of planes...). Once we figured out our funding was safe, we could start throwing obstacles into the purchase. The source code argument is cool because it polarizes the geeks against the purchase (OMFG the US IS TEH SUCK FREE SOURCE CODE OMFG!!!111 ELEVENTYTWO).
The brits are not stupid, they won't want a black box into a war plane if they don't know what it does, so they say no thanks. We say oh well, national security, etc., we just can't sell it to you.
Scratch one country off the list of "allies" that were to purchase it. The other partner countries will look at that and follow suit, so the JSF will end up a US-only platform.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The UK wants the source code because it wants to be able improve it and get it working to its own standards, as well as wanting proof that the Americans haven't jammed it full with backdoors. This isn't about Iraq, its not about the US military being useless in a heart & mind war, its about the US military's need to hold onto secrets. Considering how often the pentagon has shafted the UK military in the past concerning inteligence, and R&D. Can you blame the UK for wanting to review the code?
I swear we could have a news article on the BPI giving away music for free and demanding an abolishment of copyright and I'm sure the entire comment list would be about the RIAA.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Why are you not in Iraq getting killed?
I take it you are just another armchair general without any experience in the armed forces, not to mention during an invasion of another country.
Do us all a favor, enlist and get killed!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Does the DoD still use Ada? Only for legacy systems? Just curious.
If you're seriously accusing 20 to 30% of the US population of genocidal leanings, you'd better have some damn compelling evidence. Share...
The actual military objectives of the NATO campaign had to be abandoned after a few weeks, since NATO's well-planned air strikes kept missing their targets and obliterating decoy after decoy. The total amount of damage among the enemy on the ground in three months of NATOs bombing campaing was 14 tanks, 18 APCs and 20 artillery pieces.
That's less than one piece of military equipment per day of the campaign. Air superiority looks different.
Targeting defenseless civilians and civilian infrastructure, otoh, is something the US forces managed to do quite well. They bombed TV stations, passenger trains, embassies, refuge columns, villages, markets, bridges, etc. killing thousands of civilians in the process.
Superiority my ass. You're the same kind of genocidal scum as Milosevic's brand of human waste in uniform.
Was "speicial relationship" a typo, or a deliberate mistake? The relationship does indeed seem to be becoming more and more specious...
Very nicely written. More importantly though, it is crucial to realize that we cannot win in Iraq because victory is not defined to be anything realistic or satisfactory.
What would G.W call a victory? A stable country? There never will be a stable country given sectarian divides and a lust for power, with or without American troops. Saddam kept it stable using tyranny to repress the Shiite desire to rule (the doctrines of that sect are political by nature). We cannot do the same. In addition, we cannot be satisfied with stability if it involves a shiite theocracy that crushes the other groups into submission.
Weird thing about dictatorships is: people come to accept them, to be content with them. War wakes the ambitions in people up. To succeed, we need to crush those ambitions and force our version of "democratic" government on the citizens, then be ready to go back and do it again if needed.
Of course, that is a kind of success we could do without.
You have to remember, The UK are only Americas "allies" and "friends" when we are doing what America want, Like, Oh i don't know, Helping America out in an illegal war.
God Be Gone
Yes, Andy, they are terrorist orgs: "On June 30, 2006, Osama bin Laden released an audio recording in which he stated, 'Our Islamic nation was surprised to find its knight, the lion of jihad, the man of determination and will, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in a shameful American raid.'" Oh, and BTW, al-Zarq was JORDANIAN, you know, foreign. And his replacement, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, is an Egyptian - you know, a foreigner.
And no, they are not the "Iraqi population", for the most part they are members of the following insugency/terrorist groups: Mujahideen Shura Council, Mahdi Army (Jaish-i-Mahdi), Badr Organization, Fedayeen Saddam, Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Tantheem Al-Qaeda fi BiladirRafidain), Jaish Ansar al-Sunna, Mohammad's Army (Jaish Mohammed), Islamic Army in Iraq (Al-Jaish Al-Islami fil-Iraq), Iraqi National Islamic Resistance (Moqawama al-Islamiya al-Wataniya, "1920 Revolution Brigades"), Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat Al-Moqawama Al-Islamiya), Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance (al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Moqawama al-Iraqiya - JAMI), Jaish al-Mujahideen, Jaish al-Rashideen, Asaeb Ahl el-Iraq (Factions of the People of Iraq), Black Banner Organization (ar-Rayat as-Sawda), The Return (al-Awda), Nasserites, Wakefulness and Holy War, Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq, Liberating Iraq's Army, Abu Theeb's group, Jaish Abi Baker's group, Islamic Salafist Boy Scout Battalions (Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi).
These are not innocent men, women, and children, these are terrorits groups comprised of individuals who have made a decision to kill or maim other Iraqis and Coalition forces in order to further their own agendas. They are an impediment to peace and security and are legitimate targets.
Sieg Heil to that!
Although I agree with you, it's still partly due to restraint too. Without restraint, we could just nuke the whole of Iraq into glass and be done with it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, except that when the next time Americans goto 'liberate' some country-run-by-an-idiot, the world's gonna take it with a pinch of salt. After all half the population's gonna become 'collateral-damage' anyway.. man, are we good with coining phrases !
As a result of these efforts and the sanctions that followed we killed close to two million iraqis including hundreds of thousands of children.
Two million?! LOL, please back that up because I find that hard to believe. I'm sure you will point me off to some Taliban funded study.
Large parts of the code in question (flight control code for the STOVL variant - which is what the Royal Navy and RAF will be getting as their JSF will be a Harrier replacement) were originally written by various DERA sites based around RAF Boscombe Down and the RAE in Farnborough. Google for VAACS and "Unified Flight Control".
So effectively, the situation is one where the US won't let the UK have a modified variant of the original UK code.
Sure, as soon as you link your source. I'll assume its reputable.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
To care more about fellow countrymen is indeed a normal human trait, by 200+:1 ratio it becomes an inhuman trait.
On the other side I'm sure they call the US troops infidels or invaders or something - same principle. ...
but they're right on this one
It's completely different, because here it's the good guys doing it.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Regarding your last two sentences, you're sounding like the NUTCASE much in the way you like to point your fingers at those you cast stones at.
No kidding. Somewhere along the line the parent poster forgot the military branch works for the civilian population in a democratic republic, not the 'leaders'. Disclosure is part package. Maybe he was thinking Cuba.
No the problem isn't people shooting f16's with ak47's.
The problem is thinking you can use an f16 to shoot a guy with an ak47.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So there is no genocide in Darfur then?
'Cos it's the same guys with the same methodology that came up with those numbers too.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Amusing that you've copy and pasted a list of organizations the majority of which have formed in the wake of the occupation, so in effect you are proving my point. However you decide to label them the people opposing the coalition and fighting in what is now a civil war are the Iraqi population. I haven't made any assumptions as to their motives, there are conflicting power groups in the country that are trying to gain power this was to be expected.
However I for one will not demonise human beings responding in an entirely anticipated way to a situation that we have created.
Things never to say on Slashdot, but
MOD THE PARENT UP!!!!!!!!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The war in Iraq was "winnable" by controlling people and ground. You need BOTH. So at start of the war, you needed about a million troops to control Iraq with maybe 300-500k in Baghdad. That would put maybe 50-100k on the streets at any given time, or a ratio of about 75:1 (population to troops). You can control the city this way. But US went on the bloody cheap! They couldn't even control the looting!!!!
Anyway, now, the war in Iraq is "winnable" but you'll need about about 2,000k troops with a million (1,000,000 for some here) in Baghdad alone! That would put you maybe at a ratio of 10:1 or 15:1 at any given time (remember, troops have to sleep too! and eat and transport supplies!). Then you can scale that down to 500k over a two year period IFF the conditions permit and you do not get insurgencies.
But US has freaking NO troops in Baghdad!! I see useless things as "US Plans to Send 3,500 More Troops to Baghdad". WTF? That's nothing. You *may* increase the number by a 1000 on the street any any one time, but that in a city of 5 million is a 5000:1 ratio!! If you have any insurgency in a city, this will just give them more targets. You need to clump down on a city where the troops are everywhere and control ALL access and everything. Then continue that for a year until people get used to peace and not pieces of their relatives blown up every day. US is bloody lucky it is only as bad as it is!
Anyway, the US lost the war in Iraq before it even started. If they were not able to commit 1 or 2 million troops to control Iraq allowing the new government to be built, they should have left the old one in place. Saddam was the *best* ally of the US in the region (aside from Israel). Not a religious whacko and a Stalin-wannabe without the resources. I mean - one can understand someone like that (psychologically) and make him the best puppet US had.. (see 1980s). But no, he makes one mistake (Kuwait) and the Bush idiots make it personal!
Everyone knows we have to steal the Firefox.
I'm glad someone rational answered that ignorant rant.
Douhet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet
Never mind that it was disproven during the Second World War, since 'round-the-clock strategic bombing certainly didn't make the German populace rise up against Hitler (or Londoners rise up against Churchill during the Blitz). From my grandfather's personal experience as a POW, it made the civilians hate Allied airmen.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You guys make a strong point, except I feel like I've seen this philosophy play out in Israel... and it doesn't sound like it has worked well for them. Clearly they worry less about public opinion, and more about pounding the opposition. In fact, they seem like they fit the cowboy model better than even the US. However, their problems stand unresolved.
I'm not really disagreeing with you (I'm no tactician), I'm just wondering why it doesn't seem to work for the Israelis.
Simple: it's a product of killjoe's paranoid fantasies, and terrorism/mass murder actually happen in the real world.
There is a problem with the JSF source code: it is written in cyrillic! The JSF is based on the soviet Yakovlev Yak-141 supersonic VTOL fighter jet from 1988.
Otherwise, the Eurofighter Typhoon will not fly from carriers. In fact, the french split from the project and created their own more beautiful version, called the Dassault Rafale M for this very reason. The Eurofighter has too weak landing gears and airframe to fly from carriers, due to initial design decisions on cost saving.
I think future british carriers would be too small for the Rafale. It is either JSF (without source code) or a future Harrier upgrade for them.
Oh you mean like when the US Air Force lost to the Indian Air Force. The odds were stacked four to one against the US and the US wasn't using AWACS at the time. Like that, right? Not to mention the AA-10 Alamo was the real reason the battle was won by India.
Make it one to one and let's see what happens, chump change. In terms of lethality to the enemy nothing tops the US military. People make the mistake of sending in the military to do the job of the police or nation building and then lambast them for doing a crap job. Fine. Make a peacekeeping force then, but in terms of the combat services I want them to kill the enemy dead. Fuck occupation. Fallujah should have been hit with FAEs just to make an example.
Don't even get me started on the so-called "war games" I'd been in with other NATO forces. What a fucking joke. Aside from the UK the EU is defenseless.
Don't fool yourself, many times both lies kill people. Lies told to keep us out of WWII lead to thousands of European casualties, lies told to help us go into WWII lead to thousands of German causalities. Under Saddam many Kurds were killed in Iraq, under America many Arabs are getting killed in Iraq. In matters of corrupt government the lies only effect who is killing and getting killed, either way there are still people dying.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The difference there is that they a) handed control of the country right back to the locals and b) gave them huge loans to rebuild. It would have worked in Iraq, but then the USA wouldn't get control over the oil.
And, incidentally, Germany is only 1 for 2. Occupying them after WW1 didn't work out very well, and the Soviets helped the second time (as an example of what an occupation could be at least).
If you've ever heard a speech by any american politician, especially in the period right after 9/11, you're probably familiar with the term "american lives". Some lives are apparently worth more than others, and the american ones are at the top.
Seeing as Americans are the ones who elect said politicians in office I am pretty sure a politician is going to value those people more. As a politician those live are worth more, for those lives can vote. Lives that can't vote are meaningless unless they are a factor in the lives of the people who can vote.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Most humans have a tendency to form "them" and "us" groups mentally. We care about us, but screw them. This causes racism, nationalism, and lots of religious groups. It is not a unique attribute of Americans.
One of my greatest hopes is for people to start thinking of themselves as citizens of humanity, rather than citizens of whichever country they are randomly born to. We have the technology and resources to feed and educate(=grow the local economy of) the entire world. But we don't to that now, because it isn't so much "our" problem. End nationalism--it's as bad as racism.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Crummy RADAR is like a homing beacon.
Good RADAR sends out a directional beam that rapidly hops frequency in unpredictable ways.
in the US there are a lot of hunting and fishing brigate around. When you're out hunting with a gun and friends ,if you can't tell what is it YOU DON'T SHOOT! It's kind of obvious 'cos it could be uncle bob in them bushes...
Yet, when you give a jar-head a gun and put em in uniform, they forget this and it becomes "If you don't know what it is, shoot it."
Maybe because if it wasn't an enemy before, it is now...
So, let me get this right: The US is gonna turn down 120 Billion dollars because they don't want to show their code, to their only remaining supporter?
That's dummer than Dumbya on a bad day. Scratch that, that's the dumbest shit ever.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
"What lunatic thought *that* could work? It will have had exactly the opposite effect.
Most likely it was James Baker. He was running the state dept at that time.
evil is as evil does
Ask for a bare-metal discount. It's like buying a PC without Windows and writing your own OS.
Surely the UK can write radar software? You could then refuse to give it to the USA.
The aircraft is still a nice piece of hardware.
Nope. And I'm lying to you to protect the lives of American soldiers who would have to go in there to sort out the mess. See, lies against war always protect lives! The ends justify the means (...as long as you have a certain distorted perspective...)
Not at all, you made a blanket statement that implied we are not engaging terrorist organizations and non-Iraqi elements in Iraq, and that is demonstrably false. Do you think Zarqawi was the most wanted man in Iraq because he was a marginal, ineffective player??? Think about it.
Do I believe that the majority of terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are not Iraqi? No. But most reports suggest that external elements are responsible for some of the most deadly attacks against both coalition forces and Iraqi civilians - inlcuding the vast majority of suicide bombings.
Amusing that you've copy and pasted a list of organizations the majority of which have formed in the wake of the occupation, so in effect you are proving my point. However you decide to label them the people opposing the coalition and fighting in what is now a civil war are the Iraqi population.
They are NOT the Iraqi population - if they were comprised of the entire population our 130k strong contingent would be completely eliminated within 60 days. They comprise SMALL ELEMENTS of the Iraqi population, most of whom are acting on behalft of interests that have little or nothing to do with bringing peace and prosperity to the population as a whole. They are being used as pawns by entities attempting to gain power through terrorist tactics because they either know they cannot get what they want via the political process, or they are affraid they won't be able to get same.
However I for one will not demonise human beings responding in an entirely anticipated way to a situation that we have created.
No, you'll screw the ENTIRE population by fighting for a premature withdrawal of coalition forces before the Iraqis can fend for themselves. You'd be happy as a pig in shit if Saddam were still shredding Iraqi people, Uday raping newlywed brides in front of their grooms, using rape as a systematic tool of terrorism - if it meant the US gets some comeupance. You're happy as heck to see the coalition fail and embolden Iran and Syria. You myopic fool, you selfish asshat. Sitting in your nice, safe western home, you'll throw the possibility of ME democracy down the shitter because you lack the stomach to make the sacrifices necessary to change the paradigm in the ME. You truly make me gag.
Well, here's a question for you: which scenario do you think will preserve more human life, promote more prosperity, lead to less religious extremism, a situation where we make the sacrifices now to plant the seeds of democracy, self determination, and economic freedom amongst ME residents, or one where we ascribe the status quo, supporting dictatorships and kingdoms that oppress their peoples? Which will be a better scenario when the oil starts to run out and the ME becomes even more important than it is today?
Your myopia is immensely frustrating.
A significant percentage of those tasked with interpreting intelligence, yes.
More importantly, the civilian leaders who elected to launch a war based on what they knew should be out of a job. Many of them now are. Unfortunately, we have to wait another two years for the last of them.
With the Democrats now controlling Congress, I imagine we'll see investigations of the events leading up to the war. If those investigations turn up enough evidence to prove criminal conspiracy as opposed to just plain stupidity, then obviously those involved should be prosecuted.
That's one cold way of looking at it, and is probably the philosophy that's been turning most of the world against the US.
Around here, if a plane crashes we hear "300 lives were lost", and not that "100 portuguese lives were lost and there were also a couple of hundred bodies spread around the plane remains".
What effect would that have on army morale and recruitment?
Sure, I realise these things are already taking a prolonged hit from the mess in Iraq as it is. But if the army were unabashedly in the business of killing civilians by the millions (instead of the mere hundreds of thousands), and the burned bodies and maimed children get a reasonable amount of TV coverage (which there is probably no way of preventing) - would ordinary Americans, if there are any such people, not feel differently about their army?
And supposing, instead of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", GWB had simply opted for "Operation Arab Smackdown", as some on the right are now saying he should have. What you would see then would be oil prices at least three times where they are now, Iran the undisputed leader of the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia collapsing like - well, like Iraq is now. You may disagree with Bush's call - but to describe it as "idiotic" is just naive. And it was his call to make. That's his job.
It sucks at police work and occupying an angry populace.
I will get modded to hell for this, but here we go....
The populace is angry because Saddam (who, don't get me wrong, was a complete mental case) was about the only thing stopping the country descending into all-out civil war. The US have gone in, removed the complete mental case with no plan as to how they will prevent the descent into all-out civil war, and now are finding it hard work because there's angry locals everywhere they look. Well surprise surprise. Wonder why they're angry?
Japan?
By using nuclear weapons, yes. And the fact that half the Red Army was about to land in Hokkaido probably had something to do with the Japanese eagerness to surrender.
Germany?
A few revisionist historians have recently proposed that the British Army might on occasion have found room in between tea breaks to fire the odd bullet. Oh, and remember where the other half of the Red Army was? Right.
Italy?
See above re Britain. Also, it may have helped that the Italians hated the German occupiers and welcomed the invaders with open arms.
The South Eastern United States?
America lost that war as well as winning it. That's kind of how civil wars go.
I wasn't aware it was a mystery, but YMMV.
Cheers,
CC
Although I agree with you, it's still partly due to restraint too. Without restraint, we could just nuke the whole of Iraq into glass and be done with it.
Gonna make it a teensy bit expensive to get the oil out after isn't it ? Forgotten the real reason for this whole thing so soon ?
Not only have you flattened all the existing infrastructure, but your guys are going to have to rebuild it in 40C heat whilst wearing NBC suits.
I love how you two have no problem what-so-ever with the idea of never having tried at all to prevent out and out genocide.
a) Keep troops there to prevent mass murder.
b) Pull out immediately so "we have nothing to do" with the mass murder and total genocide that takes place.
For some reason you think b is the best option of all in the world? You have no problem with it. Because "our troops" aren't involved.
Why?
I'm guessing by "groupthink" you mean democracy... and we could've all admired the Bush administration's "speed and decisiveness" to send troops over to Iraq in the first place, if in the end there were WMDs in Iraq and the war was won with the same number of troops (and other resources) we committed at first.
To correct your statement: Democracy in the US are the necessary checks and balances to declaring wars. So far, in this war, democracy failed.
You may not buy the method, but the person who headed up the survey for the Lancet is a very experienced person in this field and the same methodology has been used to estimate deaths from natural disasters without receiving the hail of criticism it suddenly did with something more politically charged.
For anyone who wants to know more about it, the guy in charge answers some of the questions people have asked here.
But to be frank, would you care less if it were only 300,000 people your invasion had killed?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
FYI, NSA published SELinux, period.
They made the original stuff that was improved later.
It was quite an event too, and they're still hosting the mailing list IIRC.
GPG 0x1B479C78
As to Iraqi suffering, I don't recall there being massive protests around the world when Saddam invaded Iran, Kuwait, gassed the Kurds, or filled various mass grave sites.
That's because you weren't watching European TV.
Yeah. One American life is worth more than 20 non-American lives.
meh
Here, have as many sources as you want.
Lancet's PDF here and the Wikipedia summary (including criticism) here.
if you want to talk responsibility,whos responsible for all those who died under saddam while trying to weaken sanctions like russia and france? wheres the moral responsibility there? and even worse wheres the moral responsibility of the so called "peace" movement? when they are so against bush that they basically shed all responsibility for their actions, because all they want is failure of policy and vindication of their position. basically they want to be right at all costs, and this is shown in how they have basically given tacit support to the insurgency from day one. its one thing to be against the war, but its another thing to be so quiet about the insurgency or not addressing it that you just basically have given it your support. the insurgency has gained as much strength as it has based not only on bushes bungling, but by the moral support and legitimacy given by the anti war movement and all the states who opposed this war without also opposing the insurgency. well you could say that it was unintended, but thats a cop out. bush didn't intend many things either, but he's responsible regardless, and the same should be for many of the voices in the left and in europe who frankly have lost their way. the anti war movement has simply become irresponsible and lacks any moral authority anymore. just like their most hated enemy bush they disregard the consequences of their actions. instead of delegitimizing the insurgents as strongly as they argue against bush they have made them stronger through their silence. they try to ignore them or pretend its not their problem. well insurgents also kill many civilians, but well thats just fine for these people as long as its not americans doing it apparently.
i see no moral high ground here. i just see a west thats lost its way.
you made a blanket statement that implied we are not engaging terrorist organizations and non-Iraqi elements in Iraq, and that is demonstrably false.
I made no such claim that there are no foreign combatants but I fail to see why you're making such a big deal when the number of foreign combatants is probably a fraction of a percentage. Again, you seem to be suggesting that it's not the Iraqi's who are fighting the coalition? Besides that I was actually I was commenting on how it is proving almost impossible to 'win over the population' while you are actively fighting them in a guerrilla war. Go back and read the post I was originally replying to for some context.
They are NOT the Iraqi population - if they were comprised of the entire population our 130k strong contingent would be completely eliminated within 60 days.
How obtuse. When did i claim that the entire population of Iraq is engaged in combat. I said "we are fighting the population" obviously this does not include all 26 million Iraqis.
They comprise SMALL ELEMENTS of the Iraqi population, most of whom are acting on behalft of interests that have little or nothing to do with bringing peace and prosperity to the population as a whole. They are being used as pawns by entities attempting to gain power
If you stop for a second, take a deep breath... and re-read all the way through my post. You'd realize you're repeating exactly what I said in my previous post.
~"I haven't made any assumptions as to their motives, there are conflicting power groups in the country that are trying to gain power"
Next I really have no idea what you are talking about...
No, you'll screw the ENTIRE population by fighting for a premature withdrawal of coalition forces before the Iraqis can fend for themselves. You'd be happy as a pig in shit if Saddam were still shredding Iraqi people, Uday raping newlywed brides in front of their grooms, using rape as a systematic tool of terrorism - if it meant the US gets some comeupance. You're happy as heck to see the coalition fail and embolden Iran and Syria.
Since I never actually voiced an opinion on what would be the best policy for Iraq it's amazing how you've drawn that conclusion. Personally I don't think a complete withdrawal will be feasible by the end of the decade.
You myopic fool, you selfish asshat. Sitting in your nice, safe western home, you'll throw the possibility of ME democracy down the shitter because you lack the stomach to make the sacrifices necessary to change the paradigm in the ME. You truly make me gag.
No I haven't made any sacrifices, have you? Did anyone ask the Iraqis if they wanted to make the sacrifice we imposed on them?
This really underscores the problems with one government supporting another. It makes the recipient beholden to the donator. It can work reasonably well when the nations in question are peers (or a reasonable proximity thereof), like American financial support and commonwealth material support of Britain during WW2. But when the nations have a major power inbalance between them? The results are usually destructive. American and Soviet influence over small nations during the cold war typify this.
It's one thing to help the people of another nation, by financing the construction of hospitals and schools and that kind of thing. But giving money to the government just buys influence over that government. It's great the Hamas can't be as belligerent and stupid as they would like ... but without the opportunity to make their own mistakes and get beaten down for them, wont Palestinians just keep blaming America for their troubles? It's kind of scary that the majority of the Palestinian government's employees were being bankrolled by America and the EU in the first place. That is NOT a reasonable way to run a nation.
If America and the EU want to help, they should do what America did in the past to spread democracy -- set up a trade structure where the people of the recipient nation get tons and tons of cheap American-made crap. It's hard to hate the people that manufactured your espresso machine or underwear. Voting only takes place two or three times a decade. Church/Synagogue/Mosque is once a week. Coffee is two or three times a DAY. MP3 players can offer DOZENS of hours of entertainment a week. A microwave can easily save you an hour of labour each day. A comfortable pair of shoes can make you feel better with every single footstep for an entire year or more -- no political movement in history can offer that kind of comfort. Would you rather spend four hours playing a videogame, or four hours getting brainwashed to hate people that you've never met? There's a reason that consumeristic nations don't have many civil wars, genocidal militias, or tribal warlords ...
Consumerism has its own negative consequences, but it's done more for world peace than any other factor in all of history. Why should I die in a pointless war of conquest, when there are so many things that I don't own yet? I'll kill defend my nation -- after all, that's where all my stuff is. I'll try to keep our army here; sending them out to wage war costs money that I'd rather spend on videogames. Etc.
The when Hamas officials churn out their desire for the obliteration of the Israeli state - even I with my lefty love of the underdog, feel that that's unacceptable.
My point is that something similar is happening in Iraq. The Iraqi people don't want a foreign force occupying their country.
Most of them aren't going to kill US/UK/etc soldiers, but they don't want them there. Given a free choice, they want them gone now and to take out the puppet/courrupt government they installed.
The current government will not survive if it is left as it is - hence while the people want the US gone, the government need to keep them and are frantically trying to build a security service for when the US goes.
Why would they need a security service? Because they're going to be damn unpopular with the people - and their just going to have to get 'quelling'.
Sooo Iraqi people now have a choice, they can keep current government and US funding - or elect whoever they choose and get their funding cut. If the funding goes, we end up with a civilized educated country, with a fucked infrastructure descending into a civil war.
Harsh truth is, that for Iraq to survive as a single country, the people need to be oppressed by their government - doesn't matter if it's Saddam or current government. If you want Iraq to survive as a single country, then a shit-load of innocent people are going to die..
If you believe in democracy - then you can't elect the wrong one. People vote and get the government and representation they want.
You might then feel compelled to kill the lot of them for making that decision, but that was their democracy. If they'd been given their second choice - then things might work out better, but that isn't democracy.
A totalitarian state isn't necessarily bad. Tito's Yugoslavia really wasn't a bad place - but as soon as he died and democracy crept in, the whole place just fell apart.
Australia is intending to replace its aging F-111 fleet with JSF. However there's been a significant amount of resistance to the idea, since the JSF is not able to fill in the same roles that the F-111 currently performs in the Australian Air Force. 'Upgrading' to JSF theoretically will reduce the crippling maintenance costs associated with the F-111, but at the expense of a lot of our strategic strike capabilities.
I wonder whether the US not wanting to play nicely with JSF source code might have further implications on the debate.
It took humiliation of our army to learn that lesson.
I would have thought that Ireland taught you that you failed to even learn that lesson. The only thing the English were good at was mowing down musketmen with machine guns. Even the current shambles in Iraq can be blamed upon their staggering ineptitude, thanks for that, Churchill.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
It sucks at (...) occupying an angry populace.
Well, was there ever a right tool for the job?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Following Tet, the VC weren't able to do that stuff any more -- they were eliminated as a fighting force, leaving the NVA to continue the fight.
The British "lost" because France was keeping them occupied in Europe and they decided it wasn't worth the time, effort, and money to keep the colonies, not because the Americans had superior tactics.
Now, if you take Comrade Stalin in 1940s - that's what I would call not caring about the world's opinion or showing restraint (you know, resettlement of Volga Germans, Chechens, Crimea Tatars, Kalmyks and other treasonous peoples inside the country and Germans, Hungarians, etc. outside.) And they controlled everything there was worth controlling - much more than you're controlling there now. The forces were only pulled out of there due to the overall defeatist politics of Gorbachev on CIA payroll.
uh...you can. You just need to know where that guy is... which is the problem.
Nope, there's no genocide in Darfur.
>So yes, to Americans the 3,000 coalition deaths are a bit more important than the 650,000 Iraqi deaths.
Something is seriously wrong with you. And anyone else who agrees with your rationale.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
I think his point was something like that if the american people have to fear people with AK-47s shooting at them no amount of advanced air crafts or whatever will help them since the people will still be at risk. Sure the air craft is nice vs other air crafts and maybe some ground vehicles and so on but it doesn't help a lot when the enemy hides and ... whatever, you figure the rest out :)
Nowadays, half of the cost of developing new aircraft is the software. You'd think the super-advanced F-22 would have required billions of dollars at materials development and design, but no, over half the cost was software alone. So with how much the US has spent on the software, you can see why giving it away for free would bug them.
No, that's not the only problem, what about the other people in the house, who you may not want to kill, or the people in the house next door, or...
You can't just keep killing innocents and claiming "oh, sorry, we didn't mean to do that" when you know it is a predictable consequence of your actions.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
We're planning on renewing our air-force by buying some new figther-planes, and it looks as if Eurofigther, SAS-Gripen and the JSF are the most likely candidates.
The first suggestion from the US was that we'd not even be allowed to *see* the sourcecode for the JSF under NDA. I think that may have gotten resolved, but being allowed to *change* anything is out of the question.
It's ridicolous. Why would any sovereign nation accept buying military material where they're *dependant* on a foreign power for even trivial bugfixes ?
You can do that math because in "America"...everything has a price.
unfinished: (adj.)
"if you have a mission with rules of engagement to protect civilians at all costs, you AREN'T going to go throw a HEAT round from a tank into that window."
Tanks are all but useless in urban settings anyway, as the Russians discovered to their cost in Chechnya. All you need is a couple of guys on rooftops with RPGs to lob a missile through the roofs of the first and last tanks in a column (top armour on tanks is thin (by tank terms!) and not made of chobham or equivalent advanced composites), and the whole lot become immobile, and thus vulnerable to infantry attacks. Modern tanks are designed to fight other tanks in places where they can manoeuvre, so they have big direct-fire guns with large breeches that prevent them from pointing upwards by more than 20 degrees or so, massive frontal armour but relatively little anywhere else to keep weight down (and they still weigh upwards of 60 tons, with some exceeding 70 tons), lack the bow machine guns that were present in many WWII examples, and their top-mounted MGs can't usually point downwards far enough to engage infantry at close range. Wise generals thus tend to keep them away from urban settings and forests (because trees can prevent them from turning their turrets towards targets, and provide lots of cover for people who are just waiting to put an RPG round into your thinly-armoured rear) unless they have extensive infantry support that can clear an area before the tanks move into it, while the tanks sit back and provide heavy fire support to the infantry when required.
NB: the Israelis are one of the few whose tanks are actually designed for urban engagements, but they've still proved vulnerable to cheap, primitive weapons such as improvised explosive devices, as well as more modern ones like the Russian SPIGOT anti-tank missile that Hezbullah used to disable or destroy around 70 of them in the recent Lebanon conflict.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
The magnetrons in microwave ovens radiate at 2.45 GHz. They won't be of much (if any) help against GPS. However they still could serve as decent baits for HARM missiles; for their electronics they may look quite similar to continuous-wave radars. A $100 microwave oven for a $250,000 (or whatever) missile, now that I call a fair trade.
A fan with metal (or tinfoil-wrapped) blades then can be used as an optional beam modulator if the missiles would start ignoring unmodulated sources. The thing then can look substantially similar, EM-wise, to a missile guidance radar.
Just wondering, is it possible in your worldview for a three year old child to be "enemy"?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
God Bless Wikipedia, huh?
I've not been understanding what people have meant by 650,000 Iraqis. I thought it was directly-related deaths caused by American troops and bombs, not indirect effects like lawlessness and reduced access to healthcare.
But my ultimate jist of the survey is this: the Iraqis would rather live on their knees than die on their feet.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
A democracy that elects the Nazi party is rotten and not to be befriended.
Hammas is an organization bent on destruction and jihadism, it has nothing positive to offer to try to fix the general situation, so frankly I don't see why the West should welcome them as bearers of the true democracy in the Middle East.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Where are my mod points when I need them ? +1 Insightcastic.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Hamas has said multiple occasions, in no uncertain terms, that they want the destruction of Israel.
If they are so willing to neogtiate peace, what the heck are they waiting for to recognize the right of Israel to exist? That is a step that would cost them nothing (except the support of fanatics) and would clearly state peaceful intent.
For goodness sakes, thses people act like if Ghandi, Mandela and Luther King have never existed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong.
I thought we had gotten to the point I wouldn't have to ask this question again. I explain to my 4 year old son that lying is saying something you know to not be true. Can you please point to me references where anyone prior to the invasion gave evidence that Saddam didn't have WMDs? I have asked this question at least a dozen times, no one has stepped up to the plate yet. Are you ready to be the first? I doubt it, since essentially everyone prior to the invasion was certain Saddam was in possession of WMDs or the ability to produce them. Given that everyone thought that, it is not lying. I continue to wait for evidence to the contrary.
I am not saying this is a justification for the invasion, merely pointing out that the context was not a lie.
War is not fought for its own sake. It is not a football game.
War is fought in order to achieve political objectives.
After the Vietnam war has ended all of North Vietnam objectives have been achieved and non of the US's had.
Now tell me, who won that war again?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Look it up in a map buddy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hope you enjoy doing it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your source of valuable information are drunk Germans.
Way to go buddy, waaay to go.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's nothing wrong with me. There is however something wrong with people who place the interests/well-being of strangers over the interests of their fellow citizens.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
There's nothing inhuman about it. We go to great lengths to lessen collateral damage. If we intended to kill civilians there wouldn't be any left.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I can only really refer you to my earlier post. The Hamas government were not in any sense about to launch an effort to wipe Israel off the map. Look at the disparity of the situation and tell me the idea is not absurd. Furthermore, they had swept to victory on a platform of ending corruption and the vast majority of the palestinian people were in favour of a two-state solution and Israel's continued existence. Both the Hamas government and the palestinian people knew that the election was not a statement of hostility towards Israel.
Leaving aside the reality of the situation, Hamas itself has been making negotiation noises for years now. One of their founders, Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi, said back in 2002 that "we can accept a truce with them and we can live side by side and refer the issue to coming generations." Unfortunately he was later assasinated by the Israelis. Hamas had also declared a cease-fire and a truce at the time of the elections.
I don't have time or inclination to dig out interviews from the time, though the BBC gives a few opinions hree.
Like it or not, the government that the palestinian people chose was not a threat to Israel at that time, and certainly not a threat to the US or its people. Nevertheless, the US and Israel saw fit to destabalise that government for political reasons. And the clear message was sent to the palestinian people that democracy was allowed to them only subject to US approval.
If a government is freely elected by its people, and with such an overwhelming majority as Hamas was given, then that government represents the people and it is that government that must be negotiated with if you wish to negotiate with that people.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'm sorry. I almost forgot to answer this:
There are over a million palestinians living in refugee camps. We now have a generation that has known nothing but being a refugee. The answer to what are they waiting for before accepting peace, for a lot of palestinians, is for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories that it invaded in 1967 and give back their homes. The invasion was condemned as illegal and remains so, but with the continuous backing of the US government, Israal has never relinquished control of the land it seized.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I can't see how Iraq Body Count could be anything other than an absolute lower limit on the number of deaths. In fact, the two projects are measuring very different things.
As far as I can see, the methodology is sound. It's used all over the place and it's only generating complaints here. If somebody has a serious objection that can be backed up with real statistics instead of a gut feeling about sample size, please let me know. Lots of interesting study on the topic over at Good Math, Bad Math here and here.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Why not just buy the Gripen from the Swedes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripen
Correction,
They declared independance and the British withdrew to Canada and the Carribean after dozens of engagements of which teh Americans lost the majority. American tactics had nothing to do with it. It was down to Admiral Rodney and the RN at the battle of the Chesapeake in Sept 1781 which led directly to Yorktown and the fall of Parliment (I must add its was a French effort in design adn execution).
The moral of the story though.
Don't trust Americans, neither then nor now. GB handed over all its documents about radar and enigma etc in WWII while the yanks simply took it and charged us money for taking it. If this is a special relationship then source code please otherwise the US is the old US who's policy is fuk you jack I am alright.
Also The British army has had much much more success at policing hotile nations than the smash em attitude of US forces who'es priority seems to be how many kills they achieve.
When the US army can do what the British army has done then I will listen to advice from americans about hearts and minds but untill they grab the concept of hearts and minds there will always be bloodshed on a grand scale.
I.E Bahgdad.
America may have avast army but like GB in the days of old its worthless unless your fighting a standing army of your own magnitude. When one man with a bomb can destroy men and machines worth billions for perhaps £10 a time then you know your in the shit.
Ibbo
Linux user #349545 (GNU/Linux)iD8DBQBAzWjX+MZAIjBWXGURAmflAKCntuBbuK
You are correct but far too rational. Ego trumps reason every time.
I thought that all soldiers were tools http://bymyreckoning.com/
Australia commits to F-35 strike fighter.
Draw your own conclusions... (Hint: What a bunch of fucking morons.)
you had me at #!
I'll bite. Who provided the "massive backup" in dealing with Japan? I must have missed that part.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I can and have pointed out so many people saying that there were weapons. Please support your point that the weapons inspectors said there were not, as opposed to pointing to them saying they couldn't find any. Those are different things. After the first Gulf War, it was known that Iraq had chemical weapon stores. Evidence of their removal/destruction was unavailable. That is pretty close to proof that they still are in existence, no? I am not saying the war was good, the war was handled well, anything of that sort, I am simply saying that turning around afterwards and saying, "see, we told you there were no WMDs" when approximately zero people were saying that prior to the invasion is a bit childish and silly.
I continue to wait for you (or anyone else) to provide me with references to people prior to the invasion saying definitively that Iraq did not possess WMDs. I would be overjoyed if you were able to provide this, it would make me feel much better about my current hatred of the situation, but as it stands, no one has. All we have is people turning around and saying we were lied to by Bush etc. when as I remember, everyone was saying the same things he was in the build up to war.
Personally, I feel a continuation of the first Gulf war was justified given the fact that Saddam refused to adhere to the terms of the cease fire he signed. I am extremely upset that this was not the justification given for the "second" war. Regardless, we (the US) currently has a terrible disaster on our hands. How to get out of it is a tough question. I think I certainly stand in the "if they tell us they want us out, out we go" camp. From my perspective, the reason for the reactivation of conflict (failure to comply with the terms of the original cease fire) has been alleviated, so if they (the Iraqi people) decide they are better off with US troops not around, more power to them and sent the troops back home. What this will do long term is a tough question to answer, and something I should probably share my thoughts on in a different post.
The weapons inspectors found nothing which means that there is no proof that weapons existed. Which eventually was confirmed after a lot of "banging and crashing" about. Unfortunately a lot of Iraqi's have paid with their lives for our exploratory operation.
No the Iraqi people have the disaster on their hands, the US just has an inconvenient and expensive problem by comparison. It will soon be forgotten about. Easy to say It was apparently much harder to say "if they tell us they don't want us, we won't go".Weren't the UN supposed to have a say in whether
this was the right course of action.I think the US is more likely to withdraw because/when the public back home can't stomach having their young men and women killed in the field, regardless of what is good for Iraqis or what they want.
I think it's always interesting when looking at any nations approach to conflict, to make a note out when they last fought a war on their home soil, or when they were last invaded themselves. Peoples memories are remarkably short and they are easily manipulated by politicians selling war with talk of surgical and arms length conflict. IMHO it usually provides useful background info when trying to ascertain why certain nations are more gung ho and others look to diplomacy first, with war as a last resort.
Never mind I'm wandering off topic now :-)
http://bymyreckoning.com/Not true as of Jan 27th, 2003. From the link:
Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tonnes and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.
Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.
There are also indications that the agent was weaponised.
And later on regarding chemical bombs:
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.
The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized.
Since then it [Iraq] has reported that it has found a further 4 chemical rockets at a storage depot in Al Taji.
There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991.
This report indicates (by my reading at least) that yes, the inspectors did find weapons of mass destruction and believed there were most likely more in Iraq's possession. I have been unable to find any indication that Blix changed his opinions between that report and the war, in all seriousness please let me know if you can find any. I much prefer being corrected when wrong.
Other than the documented inventories following the first war that were unaccounted for, there was no conclusive evidence of new weapons. Apparently, there was enough evidence to convince a lot of people they (new weapons or at least the programs to develop/build them) existed though, including John Kerry, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Pelosi, Albright, Sandy Berger, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, and Tony Blair.
I am still waiting for someone to show me anyone who said Iraq did not have these weapons before the invasion. I am beginning to believe it will never occur because approximately zero people believed it prior to the invasion.
While I see your point, I don't agree. Personally (that's all I can speak for) I feel we (the US) have a responsibility to help them (the Iraqis) out of the mess. I feel we are responsible for it (with which I am sure you agree) and must not "abandon" them unless they request it.
Not sure I agree with that one. My recollection of the first war was that the UN said it was OK, then the US declared war (along with the "coalition"). The cease fire was not signed with the UN, it was signed with the US (and the coalition). I may not have a correct memory there, but because of that, in my mind's eye, it is p