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> A compelling case to bomb Syria?, Richard Benyon MP for Newbury thinks so.
Andy Capp
post Dec 1 2015, 09:26 PM
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Has anyone heard what the compelling case is to bomb Syria? Our MP will almost certainly vote to bomb Syria, but does anyone know what it was that David Cameron said that makes this a compelling initiative? I can't at the moment think that bombing is anything but a complete folly. I suspect this has the potential to be Cameron's Blair moment.
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je suis Charlie
post Dec 1 2015, 09:55 PM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 1 2015, 09:26 PM) *
Has anyone heard what the compelling case is to bomb Syria? Our MP will almost certainly vote to bomb Syria, but does anyone know what it was that David Cameron said that makes this a compelling initiative? I can't at the moment think that bombing is anything but a complete folly. I suspect this has the potential to be Cameron's Blair moment.

Essential, hit them hard and hit again. 60% polled agree as well.
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x2lls
post Dec 1 2015, 10:18 PM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 1 2015, 09:26 PM) *
Has anyone heard what the compelling case is to bomb Syria? Our MP will almost certainly vote to bomb Syria, but does anyone know what it was that David Cameron said that makes this a compelling initiative? I can't at the moment think that bombing is anything but a complete folly. I suspect this has the potential to be Cameron's Blair moment.



It will be a close run thing either way.

It most certainly won't be anything like Bliars moment, he,
with that idiot in the white house, started it all.
Actually, they didn't start it, it's been going on for decades and decades and decades.


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Simon Kirby
post Dec 1 2015, 10:48 PM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 1 2015, 09:26 PM) *
Has anyone heard what the compelling case is to bomb Syria? Our MP will almost certainly vote to bomb Syria, but does anyone know what it was that David Cameron said that makes this a compelling initiative? I can't at the moment think that bombing is anything but a complete folly. I suspect this has the potential to be Cameron's Blair moment.

It won't be a Blair moment for Cameron as hate is kind of what you expect from Conservatives, but for the fifty or so Labour MPs who look likely to support the bombing I agree that they will have some questions to answer. Bombing the frigg out of the civilian population of Raqqa on the promise of a 70,000-strong alliance of Syrian National Army and assorted warring clans marching in and mopping up the mess is a pish-poor strategy, and the only conceivable result is yet more chaos and a massacre of civilians.

If the object of the exercise is to freeze-out Daesh then what we need to do is put pressure on Turkey to stop buying their oil, and in fairness that probably involves an international effort to install the infrastructure in Turkey so that it can supply itself without having to depend on Daesh. Some international pressure on Saudi Arabia to promote peace wouldn't go amiss either.


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Simon Kirby
post Dec 1 2015, 11:06 PM
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QUOTE (x2lls @ Dec 1 2015, 10:18 PM) *
It will be a close run thing either way.

It most certainly won't be anything like Bliars moment, he,
with that idiot in the white house, started it all.
Actually, they didn't start it, it's been going on for decades and decades and decades.

It's not difficult to trace the roots of this conflict all the way back through two world wars to the European colonialism and the Otterman Empire, and probably back to the Crusades, the Roman Empire and Alexander the Great.

One of the things that I find uncomfortable is that living under an oppressive regime has tended to be relatively peaceful. It's a paradox, and I can only rationalise it by looking at the chaos in the fall of a regime as some kind of latent malice from the regime itself. Assad is a brutal dictator, but things are far worse for Syrians now than they were generally when his regime was stable, and the same for Saddam who was a murdering nut-case, but he kept the factions apart and relatively peaceful. I think perhaps we don't recognise how lucky the world was that the USSR broke up as peacefully as it did (and yes, I know what happened in the Balkans and what is happening now in Ukraine, but I think it could have been a lot worse), and I wonder that we shouldn't bang-on too much about China's short-comings as it takes a certain something to hold together a state of more than 1,000,000,000 souls and 50-odd different ethnicities, and it doesn't do to think about that collapsing.

Anyhoo, what I take from that it that it's better not to oppress people from the start, as once you start you can keep the lid on it for a while but eventually that hate finds its way out.


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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 12:19 AM
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QUOTE (je suis Charlie @ Dec 1 2015, 09:55 PM) *
Essential, hit them hard and hit again. 60% polled agree as well.

We are likely to divert some of our (relatively small of amount of) bombs from Iraq and drop them on Syria. If I were a jihadist, I might just pop over the boarder and wait until it is finished.
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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 12:28 AM
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OK, so we wipe out ISIS (we won't of course; this is just for the sake of argument), but it is not as though we will be shoehorning in a peaceful and fair alternative.

This murdering bombing frenzy is disgusting; shame on our parliament including our obsequious MP if they endorse such a thing.

Of course, should our government release 'compelling' reasons that it is in our interest to kill possibly thousands of innocent people in bombing raids, I will happily take back my words. At the moment the only argument I have heard is something like that it is wrong to expect France and America (and the 'coalition of the willing') to prosecute their folly by doing it on their own.
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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 12:43 AM
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“You should not be walking through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers,” the prime minister reportedly told the committee.


If true, my contempt for our Prime minster and his bunch of Monster Raving Tories has struck new lows.

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je suis Charlie
post Dec 2 2015, 02:02 AM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 2 2015, 12:28 AM) *
OK, so we wipe out ISIS (we won't of course; this is just for the sake of argument), but it is not as though we will be shoehorning in a peaceful and fair alternative.

This murdering bombing frenzy is disgusting; shame on our parliament including our obsequious MP if they endorse such a thing.

Of course, should our government release 'compelling' reasons that it is in our interest to kill possibly thousands of innocent people in bombing raids, I will happily take back my words. At the moment the only argument I have heard is something like that it is wrong to expect France and America (and the 'coalition of the willing') to prosecute their folly by doing it on their own.

The appeasement lobby said something similar about bombing Germany if I remember!
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je suis Charlie
post Dec 2 2015, 02:04 AM
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He won't get the vote anyway, methinks a well laid trap awaits.
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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 03:20 AM
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QUOTE (je suis Charlie @ Dec 2 2015, 02:02 AM) *
The appeasement lobby said something similar about bombing Germany if I remember!

If they did, how is that relevant with this situation?
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newres
post Dec 2 2015, 06:30 AM
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QUOTE (je suis Charlie @ Dec 1 2015, 09:55 PM) *
Essential, hit them hard and hit again. 60% polled agree as well.

If 60% agreed it says more about our education system than it does for the case to bomb Syria.
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Simon Kirby
post Dec 2 2015, 07:37 AM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 2 2015, 03:20 AM) *
If they did, how is that relevant with this situation?

I suppose you could say that, given the carpet bombing of Dresden was a war crime and crime against humanity then Blighty are doing nothing new in murdering innocent foreign civilians in Raqqa.


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On the edge
post Dec 2 2015, 08:37 AM
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QUOTE (je suis Charlie @ Dec 2 2015, 02:02 AM) *
The appeasement lobby said something similar about bombing Germany if I remember!

I don't think so! They actually thought it would work..... 'The bomber will always get through'. I'm know my family weren't willing to throw in the towel during the blitz in 1940, perhaps they were unusual, were yours?

The Dresden stuff was pure retribution, no more, no less. Again, once the full extent was know, in the immediate aftermath, even the Government recognised it. And the war didn't stop a few days after.


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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 08:47 AM
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From what I have read, area bombing created only had one military advantage and that was tying up the German airforce which doesn't seem relevant to the Syrian situation.
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Simon Kirby
post Dec 2 2015, 09:57 AM
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QUOTE (Andy Capp @ Dec 2 2015, 08:47 AM) *
From what I have read, area bombing created only had one military advantage and that was tying up the German airforce which doesn't seem relevant to the Syrian situation.

Attacking civilians can have a military advantage as it tends to sap morale and reduce a country's support for war, and it also degrades the military machine because caring for civilian casualties ties up resources which could otherwise be deployec for military aims. It is though a war crime, and none of the military gains apply in Raqqa against Daesh because Daesh don't need the support of the civilian population that they are oppressing and neither do they give a frigg if civilians die miserably


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Turin Machine
post Dec 2 2015, 10:56 AM
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I suppose the bombing of the oil production facilities, steel production facilities, the tank factories, the industrial Rhure, the Messerschmidt factory, the U boat pens, the V rocket factories, the airfields, the ball bearing factories, the Tirpitz raid, the railheads, the docks, the canals, the munitions factories, the Krupp's steelworks, etc, etc did nothing to help the slow the German war machine? Slow it down? Soften it up? If not then my dad certainly wasted his time in the RAF.


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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 10:57 AM
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QUOTE (Simon Kirby @ Dec 2 2015, 09:57 AM) *
Attacking civilians can have a military advantage as it tends to sap morale and reduce a country's support for war, and it also degrades the military machine because caring for civilian casualties ties up resources which could otherwise be deployec for military aims. It is though a war crime, and none of the military gains apply in Raqqa against Daesh because Daesh don't need the support of the civilian population that they are oppressing and neither do they give a frigg if civilians die miserably

I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I have read, area bombing did little to slow the German war effort, beyond tying the Luftwaffe up. Rather like bombing London made no real difference to the war effort here.

In any case, even if all the above is not true, I believe it doesn't support Britain's involvement in bombing Syria. I'm not an appeaser, nor a pacifist in the truest sense - sometimes one has to make a stand - but I resent my government killing the poor and innocent and creating more terrorists and migrants, UNLESS of course, I hear a reasonable argument for our involvement.

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On the edge
post Dec 2 2015, 11:03 AM
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QUOTE (Turin Machine @ Dec 2 2015, 10:56 AM) *
I suppose the bombing of the oil production facilities, steel production facilities, the tank factories, the industrial Rhure, the Messerschmidt factory, the U boat pens, the V rocket factories, the airfields, the ball bearing factories, the Tirpitz raid, the railheads, the docks, the canals, the munitions factories, the Krupp's steelworks, etc, etc did nothing to help the slow the German war machine? Slow it down? Soften it up? If not then my dad certainly wasted his time in the RAF.

...but we weren't talking about industrial or military targets were we?


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Andy Capp
post Dec 2 2015, 11:14 AM
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QUOTE (Turin Machine @ Dec 2 2015, 10:56 AM) *
I suppose the bombing of the oil production facilities, steel production facilities, the tank factories, the industrial Rhure, the Messerschmidt factory, the U boat pens, the V rocket factories, the airfields, the ball bearing factories, the Tirpitz raid, the railheads, the docks, the canals, the munitions factories, the Krupp's steelworks, etc, etc did nothing to help the slow the German war machine? Slow it down? Soften it up? If not then my dad certainly wasted his time in the RAF.

I'm not sure much of that is relevant to Syria situation, perhaps oil fields and tanks? Why not invest in Turkey and others to stop them buying Syrian oil? And at what point do we say we've finished bombing? What is the end game? Who fills the void left by ISIS?

Going back to the OP, what is the compelling case for bombing Syria to protect the UK?

So far I have: because we shouldn't leave it to the Americans and French, etc, to saddle the 'burden' and because it helped win WWII.
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