Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

I think that people are missing the point over the Syrian crisis : it should be about disposing /destroying the ISIS/ISIL cult (never sure if it's isis or isil)....or whatever they are and just bombing is not enough...by the time our lot get out there I presume most of the work will have been done by the USA, Russians and French....all this debate/nonsense about whether we join in or not ; labour are a pain in the arse actually...(sorry to put it like that)...and the Saudis/Iranians should be at the forefront of getting rid of these monsters as they are mainly muslims and know how to deal with these people.....troops on the ground is what is needed.....anyway apart from that JC is doing an excellent job remaining Labour leader......(please don't topple him)....might even get Boris sporting a T-shirt with the slogan :"labour left is good for Britain"....(just to keep things going)...

The Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is facing a coup at the hands of his own Labour MPs.

Backbench rebels are gathering signatures for a letter to be sent to John Cryer, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, calling on McDonnell to resign.

The extraordinary letter, which is being circulated among moderate MPs, states: “We have no confidence in John McDonnell to continue as Shadow Chancellor due to his incompetent response to the Autumn Statement and ongoing issues”.

They want him gone by Christmas

Bravo the GB Davis cup team.....fantastic achievement !...

This isn't a just war – it’s 'recreational bombing' by our Churchill wannabe

Columnist Peter Hitchens expresses his concerns over war
Admits he is no pacifist and supported the retaking of the Falklands
However he says that we can do no 'conceivable good' in the conflict

By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday

Published: 03:03, 29 November 2015


Once again, as a patriotic Englishman from a Naval family, I stand amazed to find myself so lonely in my doubts about a foolish war.

I am no pacifist. I supported the retaking of the Falklands, national territory illegally seized by foreign invaders. I was thrilled to see that the Royal Navy could still do the hard tasks for which it is paid too little. Could it now?

Yet, on the basis of an emotional spasm and a speech that was illogical and factually weak, we are rushing towards yet another swamp, from which we will struggle to extract ourselves and where we can do no conceivable good.



Coincidence? David Cameron managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris earlier this week



Heaven forbid that it will lead (as other such adventures have) to more melancholy processions, bearing flag-wrapped coffins, from RAF Brize Norton; or to quieter convoys, carrying terribly injured men to special hospitals.

Why must good, brave, dutiful men and women die or be maimed for life because our politicians are vain and ignorant?

But there is no knowing the end of this, especially given the Prime Minister’s absurd belief that we have 70,000 ‘moderate’ allies just waiting to help us in Syria. Among these scattered ‘moderates’ are those who last week murdered a Russian pilot as he parachuted to earth, and mauled his corpse.

When this phantom army turns out to be non-existent, or hostile, how long will it take Mr Cameron to return to the House of Commons, pleading oh-so-reasonably for ground troops to follow?


More:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3337618/PETER-HITCHENS-isn-t-just-war-s-recreational-bombing-Churchill-wannabe.html

Haze,

You remind me of a cuckoo without a nest!


Why, if your and Cameron are so sure that his decision is correct is he trying to avoid a vote.

=-==-=

Interesting to see commentators swinging against him more and more.

You don't just bomb people.....there are enough planes already I would think but the extremists are a serious threat to everybody....something has to be done without doing what they did in Iraq during the invasion....

.

simple(ton) fred ..... because even if sure that you are right, no point and indeed marginally suicidal going for a vote unless you are at least 95% certain of winning it

A cutting from The Observer.


They see hypocrisy from an international community that ignored the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians at the hands of their own government for years, then was apparently spurred into action by Isis killings of Europeans and Americans.

“Why is this just in response to Isis? Why was no one moved when the regime was bombing us in Syria? Is it just because [terror] came to western countries? For us, it doesn’t matter which bombs are killing us,” said Mona, a teacher and activist who fled from Isis James Bond-style over the rooftops of her neighbourhood.

Most of all, the Raqqa exiles worry that western and Russian definitions of victory will mean removing one tormentor to give free rein to another, President Bashar al-Assad. Many of Raqqa’s exiles spent time in his prisons as well as in Isis jails, and see him as the main cause of their misery.

“If I went to the UK parliament to make a speech, the first thing I would say is ask them to remove the cause [of our problems], which is Assad, not the symptom which is Isis,” said Abu Ahmad. “Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last few years, and no one came to bomb Damascus.”

To me, the abuses the tories showed to the "young tory activists" seems to point to the same systemic abuses associated with the present tory party in regard to the weakest members of society.

It is not just Shapps is at fault, but the upper "echelons" of the ruling elite of the split tory party.

A self-righteous prig like Fallon fails to understand the tory's problem and it will be interesting to see what the smother-up will be.

For Mao's red book, read Cameron and Osborne kowtowing to the Chinese wheeling the Nation's Nuclear Power and other possessions to the Communist Party of China.

Thinking it is a "clever" idea.

I wonder if negotiations to hire the Nuclear Subs from them is in the diary.

Should go down well in the Shires.

my goodness fred, but you really are so unrelentingly boring in your predictablility
can you really play no other tune?

It's all very well having a pop at Fred, but how do you stand on bomberCam charging in where others fear to thread?


Afghanland, Iraq, Libya: All splendid successes, and poster boys for the delights of intervention.

Lybia was a success. The purpose was to stop Gaddafi massacring his people. It is the same with every dictator that is deposed. The result is a power vacuum and factions that are previously suppressed by the dictator start fighting it out. That will happen when eventually Assad leaves and in North Korea, Azerbaijan, China, Venezuela, Saudi, Bahrain, Zimbabwe and all the rest of the dictatorships. Like it or not, there is not much we can do about it until each party has killed enough of the other(s).

lol, i'll have some of whatever you are drinking/smoking Hays.

Libya was relatively stable until the chaps decided that G'daffys face didn't fit anymore (also a little something about water, not to mention dropping the US$ in oil trades) so they popped him, and the results are plain to see to anyone with even half an ounce of objectivity.

I know Isis fighters. Western bombs falling on Raqqa will fill them with joy

Jürgen Todenhöfer

Friday 27 November 2015 06.00 GMT


Militants in Syria dream of a big showdown with the US and Europe. There are other ways to defeat them


‘How can it be that leading politicians learned nothing from 14 years of counterproductive anti-terror wars?’ Illustration: Ben Jennings


Since the Paris attacks, western politicians have been walking open-eyed into a trap set by the terrorists – just like they did after 9/11. They retaliate with bombs, even though bombs are one of the main reasons why we are facing terrorism in the first place: because bombs predominantly kill innocent people, and thus help to create fresh recruits for the terrorist cause.

As I learned from spending time interviewing Islamic State members in Syria and northern Iraq, George W Bush’s “war on terror” turned out to be a classic terrorist recruitment programme of this kind. In 2001 there were roughly a couple of hundred terrorists in the mountains of the Hindu Kush who posed a threat to the international community. Now, after the war on terror has claimed what some estimate to be as many as one million Iraqi lives, we are facing some 100,000 terrorists. Isis was created six months after the start of the invasion: it is Bush’s baby.


How can it be that leading politicians learned nothing from 14 years of counterproductive anti-terror wars? How can it be that they still believe that the best way to get rid of an infestation of wasps is to batter the nests with a sledgehammer?

The Syrian city of Raqqa, which is now populated by only 200,000 citizens, has become one of the favourite targets of the French president, François Hollande. American, Jordanian, Russian and Syrian military jets have been reinforced by French bombers. British ones could soon be joining them, dropping their deadly load on what remains of the city’s foundations – even though out of 20,000 Isis fighters who used to hide in the city, only a couple of thousand remain at most. The majority have long ago fled to Mosul, in Iraq, or to Deir Ezzor, also in Syria.


France is currently bombing everything that looks like camps or barracks: small factories, communal buildings, hospitals. The majority of the Arab world has seen photos of dead children in Raqqa – Isis is doing everything it can to spread them. And for every murdered child, there will be new terrorists. War is a boomerang, and it will come to hit us back in the form of terrorism.

Of course, Hollande has to react. But no one is stopping him from reacting with a bit of brains. As a head of state he should know that urban guerrillas cannot be defeated with bombs. He should know that Isis fighters only march in tight orderly lines or drive in convoys in their propaganda videos. Off camera, they avoid hanging around in large groups and spend their time among the local population, preferably in apartment blocks that house families. That’s the very first chapter in the dummies’ guide to terrorism.



More common sense here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/27/bomb-isis-west-learned-nothign-from-war-terror-defeat-muslim-world-equal-partner

The rebels in Lybia started revolting against Gaddafi way before we got involved. The trigger was when he cornered a group of rebels in eastern Lybia and was threatening to massacre thousands by air and ground forces. A number of countries, including the French and then the UK. The action was taken as an emergency. We did have a plan, but events overtook us because the eastern and western factions started a civil war.

max - read my posts and you will see where i stand .... 65518 will do as an example

I'll ask again.

Who do you want to bomb?

Targeted missions against ISIL. Command control centres, hardware such as tanks, APCs, trucks, oil tankers and oil terminals, ISIL units in transit. These are the targets that involve several hundred strikes a day currently.

Don't forget that there are special forces on the ground pinpointing targets and drones and satellite gathering intelligence. They are also eavesdropping on mobile and social media 'chatter'. That is how they targeted Jihadi John recently. We have staff in Cyprus and inside the rock in Gibraltar working in what are called 'listening posts' who intercept radio and phone traffic apart from GCHQ in the UK. The Israelis are providing a huge amount of intelligence as a result of intercepts.