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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183725)	3/18/2006 4:03:51 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Okay, I can see why you misunderstood my comments: < think my father should have been shooting at the judge, not the Germans on the other side of the world. Might as well fight for freedom at home. Of if not shooting at the judge, refusing to help until the vaunted freedom of his cousin was allowed by the scummy hypocritical rulers of state serfs.> If your family is attacked by the government you are defending against totalitarian thugs, then it's questionable as to who is the real enemy [or the main one]. If one is on the opposite side of the world, one could be forgiven for paying attention to the problem in the neighbourhood. I don't really think he should have been shooting at the judge. But I can quite imagine refusing to serve such hypocrites. In the rest of your argument, you persist with the idea that expressing an opinion is helping the enemy and such people should be imprisoned. You would have a LOT of people in the USA in prison right now if that was the case. Something like 30% - I suppose you could argue that they are keeping their opinions to themselves. But not all of them are. I have read, even right here in SI, some opinions that fighting a war in Iraq is a bad idea. You think they should all be imprisoned in defence of freedom. Some of them would think that that's a distorted idea of what freedom means. Why on Earth should Ormond Burton, a WWI war hero, emigrate to Germany and be forced to serve their military in a work camp for example? King George II made the childish 12 year old comment "You are either with us or against us". Not so. People might be simply indifferent. They might not even know he has a problem with Al Q. People have lives to live and aren't all worried about deciding whether to be for him or against him. That was a silly egocentric comment. I wouldn't want all my comments scrutinized and held up to ridicule for years. Plenty of things I might say and temporarily think worthy of consideration change with time and more information or being corrected by somebody. So I wouldn't get too hung up about his comment, but it's indicative of quite a trend going on and you reflect the same idea. If you want to be a pacifist - go and join the enemy. Huh? Not exactly logic or reason or sensible. Regarding the pilot, we'll find out in due course on what the outcome is. <To say that the war in Iraq is illegal is ridiculous except from a pacifist perspective (which is against ALL war).. It is a war that was authorized under UNSC binding resolutions that his nation signed onto. As a soldier, he has an obligation to uphold the laws and treaties that his nation enters into. If he does not care to do so, he has no obligation to renew his contract. That is his right. But so long as he's a soldier, he has a duty to fulfill his contractual obligations in the interest of preserving good discipline and military order. > I think you'll find that the UK government is going to treat it a bit more seriously than simply show up in court and assert his case is ridiculous, ipso facto, he's guilty and time for gaol. I'm not a military or other lawyer, though I'm happy to give free legal advice on international relations and military law, but I think there might be a bit of an issue in this case. Did you read the background of the bloke who refused the order to attend pistol training and uniform fitting preparatory to being given a job in Iraq? There will be quite a bit of focus on the case I guess. I think the UK government will have the hottest lawyers they can bring to bear. I would not be surprised to see the case be judged by the Privy Council. I would not be surprised to see Britain withdraw. If it's found he was given an illegal order to attend the war, that has implications for liability in other ways - what did the British soldiers think they were doing shooting people in Iraq and damaging property? Should Tony Blair attend where Milosevic used to sit? Some British soldiers committed war crimes in Iraq and Tony sent them there. There is a vacant seat in Den Hague and the lawyers need to replace the cash flow somehow. Carla was really put out!! Al Jazeera comments: aljazeerah.info Milosevic presumably thought he was fighting Islamic Jihad and his life ended in Nederlands, where the namesake of Van Gogh was hacked and stabbed by Islamic Jihad in the street and other threats are made. Maybe Milosevic was just first in line to stop Moslems in Europe from taking over. There is more to come in the interaction between Islamic Jihad and Europe. All very interesting. Politicians are increasingly unable to casually launch wars and think they can get away with it. Mqurice