Being the educated gentlemen I know you all to be, I am sure you are all familiar with Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan. Now, here we go. Somalia 1991 - Brutal clan/warlord conflict. The UN, led by a US force, arrives for peacekeeping. As the conflict escalates, US special forces arrives to try to seek out the aggressive leader, Aidid. Result? Black Hawk Down, and the US public has a major freakout and the Pentagon is forced to scale back operations, and limit them to peacekeeping. Eventually we leave altogether. Rwanda 1994 - Massive genocide occurs. Western world doesn't do anything. Estimates of a death toll run up to 1,000,000. The US is heavily criticized for sitting on its rump. Clinton believes that if he sent 5,000 US troops, he could have saved 500,000 lives. THATS HALF OF THE DEATH TOLL. But, what if we lost 19 men? Would the public and the bureaucracies have gone berserk again? Now, the question? What is a country supposed to do? We try to help, but then we lose our balls after we lose 20 good men. They died for NOTHING now. Three years later, we don't try to help, and the citizens at home rip up the administration for doing exactly what the previous administration didn't do. Either way, there's public anger. Oh...I love democracy.
Firstly, i dont think those rangers died for nothing. Rememberance wise there are some on here that could probably name the guys. They may not have known at the time but their action can be encompassed in that big tent... The war on terror, even the warlords didnt know it at the time. We forget at times the old adage cause and consequences.. Which tends to lead us into other folks messes, that we may in the west have forestalled many years before. That leads to us rightly in my view having to intervene in later years when the problem sometimes of our own making needs sudden and urgent attention, urually by our kids who now have to do the same all over again. I wouldnt beat yourself up over rwanda. Nations closer to my home are guilty of the duplicity there. Not you. I hate tony blair but his policy not withstanding who did what and where of pick your battles.. Do what you can where you can is probably the only answer.. Or else brits would have ignored iraq and gone into zimbabwe. Its the politicos lies i object to. Your generation is paying in blood for them and their whipped up false patriotism. They are ok though.. Blair is a multimillionare now. You might pay for that. Which brings me to iraq. No surprises here.. Iraq wrong afghanistan right.. And moving to iraq has probably lost us afghanistan. Again cause and effect play their part in afghanistan but the consequences of the past to present have to be faced up to.
I believe the rangers didn't die for nothing...until we pulled out. If you look at it then, what did they die for? The outrage of the American public, and hundreds of dead Somali militiamen, with the continued chain of consequences leading to hundreds more of Somali civilians. I actually am quite the fence-sitter on Iraq. I believe something should have been done, because of human rights issues, but not quite the bulldog way Bush handled it. I just don't know what was the right course of action, so I avoid discussions on Iraq. As for Afghanistan, the American public itself cares very little, sadly. As long as they don't feel the direct threat of the terrorists, they won't even think of Afghanistan until another good man gets it on the news. I believe Al-Qaeda and Taliban are quiet and not doing anything because they know the West is getting more and more complacent with every day of peace. If they conducted another major terrorist attack, efforts in Afghanistan would increase, and Al-Qaeda would simply get the worst of it.
Folk need to look further than mogadishu and pirates when they see somalia. Look to the north in that failed state at a functioning peaceful region that has had enough of failure and is not making front page news as it is working just fine. In large part due to being tired of the violence. Iraq.. Yes,there were reasons enough so why lie? Helmand claims a uk soldier almost on a daily basis now. Your own list will soon outgrow iraq. The taliban are far from quiet. I understand no attacks in usa means safety to public at large. This is the reason for the 3 pronged attack recently not just the elections. Paks at last did their bit we both did ours. Al quaida or at least its loose allied network must have no hiding place. Some need millitary, some old fashioned policing, some diplomacy. Ignoring them is not an option. Afghan mission is just 1 arm of that role but must be fought if you want to keep your recent security record at home.
The recent mumbai attack although far from me and you scared the crap out of me when i saw a recent uk doc on the attack with commanders on sat phones to terrorists as they did their thing. They are far from defeated and we are far from safe. The planning and their fanatacism there showed me we have to beat these animals.
We don't lose our balls we just lose the ability to dangle them in the face of those who wish to visit ill will upon us.
We have a very similar problem over here, Op Panthers Claw saw us loose a fair few guys in a couple of weeks and so the media have condemned it (cf. Northern Ireland when we were suffering far higher casualties and nobody cared). This is all very well except the attitude seems to be that if soldiers are dieing then something must be going wrong. Sadly what they don't appreciate is that actually the deaths of good men can not be avoided, that is the nature of war (a glib thing to say were my personal circumstances slightly different), in actual fact by deifying soldiers and attacking the military every time we suffer a casualty they nibble away at our ability to win. IMHO we could win in Afghanistan, maybe not turn it into new-New York but we can certainly get to a stage where we can hand power and responsibility over to the Afghan government and people. What they do with it then is very much up to them but at least they will hopefully have a fair bash at national self-determination. Unfortunately the way things are going the media is going to keep hammering away, haranguing the MOD whenever it is revealed that a soldier wasn't safe inside an armoured vehicle or in a chopper without realising that ultimately this may just result in more casualties (without troops patroling on foot we can't dominate ground ergo can't actually achieve anything thus will have to be there longer and so on). One thing worth thinking about though, isn't it better that the fighting takes place there than here, every time I hear about folks from Birmingham or Bradford winding up fighting for the Taliban I can't help but think 'well, at least they aren't exploding on public transport over here.'
