Right. Which is not an unreasonable point, I would suggest.
next labour leader
- Thread starter sun_tzu
- Start date
Disappointed in Farron. Generally quite like him. Seems more opportunistic than I would've expected of him.
I've never believed in the bin Laden takedown story, so Farron's point is moot.
Corbyn's words from 2011
There's nothing wrong in that what so ever. Also before Farron get's the digs in, it can't be forgotten Farron's incredibly slimy answering and voting when it comes to homosexuality.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but this one is fecking stinks of something dodgy, still the reasoning for not showing the pictures of a dead Bin laden was because they might scare us or that the pictures were too gross.
He is probably in an orange jump suit being waterborded somewhere
I think the right thing was done with Bin Laden. Any trial would have been a circus and made him even more of an icon to Islamic extremists. He was buried at sea to ensure that his final resting place did not become a shrine to those extremists. I think the reasoning was solid enough.
He's definitely dead but I believe Seymour Hersh's account more than the official story (which changed an awful lot). [Basically that Bin Laden was being held by the ISI. Someone sold that information to the Americans for their reward. An arrangement was made with the Pakistani's whereby the Americans could execute Bin Laden]
There's definitely something wrong with it. And yeah Farron's a douche too.
I finally got my ballot through and voted today.
must say the whole process (online) was very easy - I do wonder why they have not found a way to use this in general elections - Im sure it would boost turn out and help engage with a younger generation (or perhaps the established parties are scared it would boost turn out and engage with a younger generation???)
Couldn't bring myself to vote for mrs ed balls though - just had this nightmare vision of ed balls effectively being the first lady and that put me right off.
In the end I went for Kendall as I actually believe here vision is the best way to be in power and introduce policies rather than shout from the sidelines
But I put corbyn ahead of burnham (I just dont like him) and Cooper (first lady syndrome)... I think it will be a disaster for the party... but sometimes like with kids you have to let them fall down / make mistakes so they can learn for themselves. (and end up with Chukka and Jarvis uniting the party further down the line I hope)
didn't find myself massively energised by the deputy contest but opted for creasy as i used to do some debt advice counselling and although I don't think her stance against pay day loan companies was the best thought out plan at least she did something
must say the whole process (online) was very easy - I do wonder why they have not found a way to use this in general elections - Im sure it would boost turn out and help engage with a younger generation (or perhaps the established parties are scared it would boost turn out and engage with a younger generation???)
Couldn't bring myself to vote for mrs ed balls though - just had this nightmare vision of ed balls effectively being the first lady and that put me right off.
In the end I went for Kendall as I actually believe here vision is the best way to be in power and introduce policies rather than shout from the sidelines
But I put corbyn ahead of burnham (I just dont like him) and Cooper (first lady syndrome)... I think it will be a disaster for the party... but sometimes like with kids you have to let them fall down / make mistakes so they can learn for themselves. (and end up with Chukka and Jarvis uniting the party further down the line I hope)
didn't find myself massively energised by the deputy contest but opted for creasy as i used to do some debt advice counselling and although I don't think her stance against pay day loan companies was the best thought out plan at least she did something
Can't be many who vote;
1) Kendall
2) Corbyn!
1) Kendall
2) Corbyn!
I know but burnham just makes my skin crawl and the thought of Ed balls as first lady... well it scares meCan't be many who vote;
1) Kendall
2) Corbyn!
It certainly made sense from their perspective, for the exact reasons you give, but murdering someone and dumping them in the ocean, because it's more convenient than putting them on trial, isn't justifiable by any argument but 'the greater good' which is a worrying avenue for governments to go down.
exactly - I'm sure there are lots of governments who would find it more convenient to execute people rather than have to put them on trial but are probably worried the USA will bomb them into liberation and freedom if they do. Its hypocritical at best - but extraordinary renditions to countries that are known to have a somewhat medieval approach to
It's the avenue I'd like my government to go down - certainly if the 'greater good' included my own. Politicians aren't elected to agonize over the finer points of morality. And this is a bit of a quibble. Governments do, and always have done, far worse.
Mr Corbyn's lumping of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq under the bland rubric of 'tragedy' is disingenuous. The overthrow of a homicidal dictator, or a conventional military operation against a bunch of medieval bedlamites who had attacked the US, doesn't belong in the same category as the deliberate murder of 3000 innocent people.
More Americans died in Iraq after the invasion than on 9/11. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. I don't know how that is anything but a tragedy.
I've read some shite on this forum before, but this really takes the biscuit.
But then again, you were the poster talking about Iran nuking Dublin, or some nonsense.
'Trouble is, it's never truly about 'the overthrow of homicidal dictators', is it? Those would the very same homicidal dictators that the Western powers habitually court and indulge (at least until those dictators decide to do their own thing...) The moral 'good v evil/freeing oppressed people' rhetoric is for public consumption, merely.
There's no logic of any kind in your reply. What's the point?
How tragic something is very much depends on the words you use to describe it, it seems.
That's fair enough; but he was, in fact, a homicidal dictator, who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, and his removal was hardly an abomination. Many post-war polls showed that, while they may not have loved the Americans, the majority of Iraqis were happy with the ousting of Saddam, and wouldn't have wished the invasion undone.
Not many New Yorkers were happy with 9/11.
"Mr Corbyn's lumping of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq under the bland rubric of 'tragedy' is disingenuous."
So - upwards of 4 million Iraqis and Afghanis have been killed since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War and its subsequent mayhem. How can you say it's not tragic? Maybe you should turn off Fox News and take a look around. You'll find that not every one of those 4 million is a 'terrorist' or 'medieval bedlamite'.
From @Nucks (great post btw).
"What does this have to do with anything? This isn't the lollipop guild. The world can be a fecked up place and often times you need to look at the consequences of an action. Is the world better off without Saddam? In a vacuum sure. We don't live in a vacuum. The removal of Saddam made the entire region worse. The world is worse off right now due to the removal of Saddam.
The world isn't black and white, it isn't white hats versus black hats. Sometimes the evil asshole running things over there is better than the crazier evil assholes who are queuing up behind him to take over.
The invasion of Iraq was a giant mistake. It's a case study in how to be a dipshit. Ignore analysts. Ignore long term consequences. Don't think things through. Don't weigh pro's and con's. Just decide to act and ignore everything else. Basically, future diplomats should frame every major decision they will make against Iraq, and then do the opposite of what happened in Iraq. In every single instance.
I like the strawman regarding Kuwait and and Iran. Solid reasoning skills."
The Guardian:
Corbyn is the current chairman of the Stop the War Coalition FYI, so yeah, i think you could make the charge that he's a disingenuous person.
I don't understand how that is disingenuous.
No not really.
I'd say it's even more disingenuous going over there under the premise of WMDs. It's a new rhetoric that we went there to remove Saddam. The initial premise was due to WMDs (or oil?). The goalposts are changing to fit the narrative as time goes by. It was a cataclysmic mistake, and it's about time people stop making excuses for the mistake. The West fecked up, and they fecked up bad. You can't go to another country and cause so much discord and chaos and then blame them for fighting back. That's not how it works.
The above is reasonable, but not to the point I was originally making.
To be clear:
Before the tanks rolled, I thought the invasion of Iraq was dodgy. As things transpired, the military operation was effective, but the subsequent occupation of Irag was disastrously bungled. Right from the start, the Americans got almost everything wrong. Rumsfeld, in particular, in his determination that Irag be a proving ground for a pet military theory, bears a heavy responsibility. Nobody (including the anti-war people btw) anticipated the actual outcome - the descent of Iraq into a sectarian bloodbath.
It's clear now that Saddam's removal has had a destabilizing effect on the region. But the Obama administration must accept a large slice of blame for this. Even 30,000 American troops stationed in Iraq would have prevented the IS incursion.
My original criticism referred to Mr. Corbyn's implied moral equation of Iraq, Afghanistan and 9/11. In my opinion, no such moral equivalence exists.
To be clear:
Before the tanks rolled, I thought the invasion of Iraq was dodgy. As things transpired, the military operation was effective, but the subsequent occupation of Irag was disastrously bungled. Right from the start, the Americans got almost everything wrong. Rumsfeld, in particular, in his determination that Irag be a proving ground for a pet military theory, bears a heavy responsibility. Nobody (including the anti-war people btw) anticipated the actual outcome - the descent of Iraq into a sectarian bloodbath.
It's clear now that Saddam's removal has had a destabilizing effect on the region. But the Obama administration must accept a large slice of blame for this. Even 30,000 American troops stationed in Iraq would have prevented the IS incursion.
My original criticism referred to Mr. Corbyn's implied moral equation of Iraq, Afghanistan and 9/11. In my opinion, no such moral equivalence exists.
I don't know if it's disingenuous, but the problem for Corbyn there I think is the phrase "by whatever means they find necessary." By October 2004 it was pretty clear that the nature of the Iraqi 'resistance' was being shaped by the likes of Zarqawi. It's similar to John Pilger writing around the same time that "We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance..."
By all means, it was absolutely correct to criticize the disastrous war and call for the troops to be brought home. Many analysts and even ordinary people could tell before March 2003 that the war was being promoted along dishonest lines and would be a disaster for all concerned. In the same way, however, by late 2004 it was equally clear that the Iraqi 'resistance' was dominated by Al-Qaeda types. Now while that was obviously a function of the invasion and the blame lay primarily with the coalition, for some reason Corbyn and Pilger had to go that step further and proclaim support for a movement which was then getting into the business of beheading aid workers, blowing up the Shi'a, and attacking the UN.
I suppose this rests on the use of the word "legitimacy".
Plenty of people feared something exactly like what happened would happen. Can't be bothered to go rooting for all of them, here's one example - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10749-2002Jul27.html
"Another concern is that Iraq could split up under a U.S. attack, potentially leading to chaos and the creation of new anti-American regimes and terrorist sanctuaries in the region."
Going much further back, here's the hawkish right-winger Daniel Pipes analysing the prospects of success for an American occupation of Iraq in 1991:
"The unhappy truth is that an American military occupation of Iraq lasting for more than some months would probably lead to one of the great disasters in American foreign policy...the Iraqi populace can be counted on to resent a predominantly American occupying force. Occupying troops would find themselves victimized by suicide attackers, car bombers, and other acts of terror; the scene in Iraq would recall, on a much grander scale, the depredations suffered by the multinational forces in Lebanon during 1983-84. The Syrian and Iranian governments would actively sabotage the foreign presence (again, as they did in Lebanon). The populations of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would probably force their governments to turn against their non-Muslim allies. As the ignominy of sniper fire buried the prestige of high-tech military superiority, the famous victory achieved by Tomahawks, Tornadoes, and Patriots would quickly become a dim memory."
http://www.danielpipes.org/213/what-kind-of-peace-to-follow-the-kuwait-war
They didn't though, and your quotations back that up. The Sunni/Shia divide wasn't at the forefront of anybody's mind back then, but that ultimately became the real dynamic driving the chaos in the country.
That's not disingenuous, it's merely a statement backing the right of a people occupied by colonial powers to form their own country.
Yes, but if he is saying that it justifies blowing people up in market squares IE any means, then as a labour voter and socialist for 35 years, I wont vote for him in a general election if labour elect him.
But that's not what he said.
I think it might be what he meant and if it wasn't he is going to have to make clear exactly what he did mean or I can't vote for him and that is going to hurt me very much.
Does anyone know the exact date that Stop the War statement was published? October 2004 was the month of the high-profile murders of Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan in Iraq. I'd be interested to know if the statement was published in that specific context.
"By whatever means necessary" is at the very best an extremely poor choice of words (and I know it wasn't him that said them). Which seems to be happening a lot. He's anti- anything western militaries do, even Kosovo.
The concern that Iraq may split up is an obvious reference to potential sectarian problems - on what other lines could the country split (remember the Kurds already had autonomy since the Gulf War)?
Here's another article on pre-war intelligence assessments:
"They also said that competing Sunni, Shiite and Kurd factions would "encourage terrorist groups to take advantage of a volatile security environment to launch attacks within Iraq." Because of the divided Iraqi society, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052501380.html
And more from a 1999 study on the probable outcomes of regime change in Iraq:
The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional instability by opening the doors to "rival forces bidding for power" which, in turn, could cause societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines" and antagonize "aggressive neighbors."...The Desert Crossing report was similarly pessimistic when discussing the nature of a new Iraqi government. If the U.S. were to establish a transitional government, it would likely encounter difficulty, some groups discussed, from a "period of widespread bloodshed in which various factions seek to eliminate their enemies."
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/
We must all work with Jeremy Corbyn, says Chuka Umunna
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/01/labour-jeremy-corbyn-chuka-umunna
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/01/labour-jeremy-corbyn-chuka-umunna
Did anybody watch this live, how did it go? Any moments people should fast-forward to?
Do pardon me, but i can't but find it a bit off for the STWC to release a statement which could be interpreted as tacit approval for terrorist acts. Corbyn was a key supporter of the organisation prior to the invasion of Iraq, and is now its chairman, so this is not some distant relationship.
Even if the cause is one of naivety, that in itself raises concerns about the future leader of the Opposition, let alone a future PM. I can't deny that he had the right of it as regards the events of 03, however i am concerned that a potential future prime minister might have some animosity toward his own armed services.
If by animosity you mean not sending them under-equipped, to die in pointless wars, I think you might be right.
No, as it happens.
I think Corbyn would engage in further defence cuts and enjoy himself merrily whilst he was doing so, then sit down to tea with Putin irrespective of Russian policies. It's not that i too don't despair at humanity's inability to get along (I'd like to see us send people out to explore this solar system in my lifetime if possible), i just don't see a fawning prime minister as the appropriate option in the present climate.