please stop bashing France

"tscottme" wrote in message
...
So you have no trouble making excuses for Saddam? How typical, how long
have you been a Liberal?

I made no such excuse. It's obvious he certainly did hold weaponised stocks
of those materials in the past, but he used them almost 20 years ago. My
argument is simply that we went to war on the "evidence" of a clear and
present danger from such weaponised materials today. As I said, I can't
imagine a regime that used them without compunction against it's own people
wouldn't use them in even a last ditch attempt to save itself. That's not
apologist, simply logic. As for being Liberal, well I suspect the term
means slightly different things in our different political systems. To me
it's more a compliment than an insult. The alternative to liberalism is
radicalism.

Saddam used the weapons, he declared vast
amounts of them, intelligence services all over the world documented the
tons and tons of material and machines to produce and maintain the WMDs,
and as the article points out, the thorough inspections have only
cleared about 10 or 20 of the 130 known munitions storage areas. How
many aircraft were buried in the desert of Iraq that we only found out
about because locals brought it to our attention. The anthrax stocks
could fit in a few 55 gallon drums which take up less space than one of
those buried MiGs. In addition people and trucks were streaming out of
Iraq into Syria before, during, and just after the war.

There's no doubt Iraq was attempting to build a substantial NBC capability
some years ago. Whether they exaggerated their own declarations (as I
suggested in the previous msg) to scare neighbouring nations is a view that
is gaining credibility in the US intelligence circles and has been discussed
in the media. Doesn't mean it has to be the only reason as to why nothing's
been found, but until something is found (if it ever will be) it has to be
considered. There's evidence both superpowers during the Cold War also
exaggerated their nuclear arsenals for the same reasons.

Si

"Alan Minyard" wrote in message
...
The vast majority of US citizens believe, correctly, that France
was/is supporting Saddam. France has been an enemy of the US for many
years.

Like the rest of the world knows, correctly, that the US was supporting
Saddam at a time when he was brutally butchering tens of thousands of his
own people? The hippocracy is laughable. Your moral high ground is a sand
castle built upon a swamp!

Si

The vast majority of US citizens believe, correctly, that France
was/is supporting Saddam. France has been an enemy of the US for many
years.

Like the rest of the world knows, correctly, that the US was supporting
Saddam at a time when he was brutally butchering tens of thousands of his
own people? The hippocracy is laughable. Your moral high ground is a sand
castle built upon a swamp!

This is my one input to this thread - I believe that countries do things in
their own interests 90% of the time and if other folks are getting butchered,
well, that's just terrible. Saddam was seen as the lessor of two evils in the
region, then over the years gained in stature among despots, reaching the
pinnacle of brutality. By then, America had been distancing itself from Saddam
for years. But even as we drew away, other countries embraced him, pointing at
our earlier involvement as a sort of extenuating circumstance for their current
colusion. Plus, our government drilled it into everyone's heads that Saddam
was actively working to either nuke or dust us. With that as a background,
France stood up as defender of Iraq's despot, not its people. The differences
between us became a rift and for the foreseeable future, its going to remain.
America didn't do things in Iraq for the right reason, and neither did France.
The main difference is that we stopped supporting Saddam at some point. France
never did. Both countries were "beating their wife", but at least we stopped.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR Aircrew

"Got anything on your radar, SENSO?"
"Nothing but my forehead, sir."

"Chad Irby" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"ArVa" wrote:

"Chad Irby" a écrit dans le message de
m...
Are you seriously denying that there was a French bashing campaign
in
the US?

Yes. There was not, by any stretch, a campaign to bash the French for
their pathetic actions of this year.

Call me paranoid,

Okay, you're paranoid.

Glad that's settled.

Great post. You're really contributing to the debate here, keep it up.

John

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 23:13:20 +0200, Pierre-Henri Baras wrote:

"phil hunt" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 19:47:37 +0200, Pierre-Henri Baras
wrote:

"phil hunt" a écrit dans le message de
news:
...
On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 22:04:14 -0700, Frank Vaughan
wrote:

Yes, and the decision by the mayor of Paris to name a convicted
American cop killer as an honorary citizen was what?

Souind bizarre -- do you have details?

Pff. The gay, socialist mayor of Paris made Mumia Adbu Jamal (spelling?)
an
honorary citizen.

Correct spelling is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Seems to me he was making a point against the death penalty and
against perceived miscarriages of justice in the USA.

Absolutely, but as someone here said previously, we might as well start by
helping the innocent convicts on death-row.

My understanding is that some people think he is innocent.


--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(My real email address would be if you added 275
to it and reversed the last two letters).

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 03:24:57 -0400, John Keeney wrote:

"phil hunt" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 03:54:40 GMT, Tank Fixer
wrote:

In case no one has mentioned it lately.

Your sentence no verb.

"Mentioned."

You're right; I should have said something like:

That sentence no verb that is in its main clause.

I wonder how long it'll take for ****wit to learn elementary
grammar. Perhaps ****wit's as cultureless as it thinks the French
are.

Ah, grammar equates to culture, I hadn't realized that.

Those who are literate are generally more cultured than those who
are not.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(My real email address would be if you added 275
to it and reversed the last two letters).

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 10:35:12 +0200, lekomin inc wrote:

U¿ytkownik "phil hunt" napisa³ w wiadomo¶ci
I agree that Polish armed forces (including the air forces) are
substandard compared to the major NATO members.. Poland is on par with
Spain, I would think. It cannot be compared with DE, US, UK, FR or IT.

Hmm. I'm not sure this is true? What fighter does Poland currently
use? I'm guessing it's the MiG-29, which is better than anything the
RAF has (until Typhoon becomes operational) or the elderly
Starfighters italy uses.

Well.. the Kosovo war had proven that the type of the plane is secondary in
importance as long as it carries the AMRAAM. BVR sets the standard in todays
airtoair. MiG29 (as is su27/30/35) is as everybody knows a very capable
dogfigter but that is exactly why NATO developed BVR weapons and tactics. I
think I can prove a point that it is easier to exploit the technological
advance (avionics, radar, datalinking) in BVR then in dogfight. I may call
BVR the fight of the avionics whereas dogfight is the fight of the airframe.

That's certainly true, to some extent. I would however point out
that modern aircraft such as Typhoon as designed to be good at
dogfighting, so certainly the people who designed them thought it
was important.

Currently both the RAF's F3

Eh? What's this? Do you mean the Tornado?

as well as Luftwaffe's F-4 ICE have the AMRAAM
capability albeit I am not sure about the mid-course guidance. I am pretty
sure F3 got this sort of upgrade before Iraqi Freedom, but the Phantoms have
not. Mid-course guidance is essential in exploiting the capabilities of
AMRAAM to the full (range, precision, "kill zone"). Secondly for instance
the Phantoms have no sqawk IFF. That is they can be identified as friendlies
but they cannot identify others as friendlies. The AWACS/Ground Controler
must do that for them. I don't really need to explain how important that is
in BVR?

Indeed.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(My real email address would be if you added 275
to it and reversed the last two letters).

In message , tscottme
writes
Simon Robbins wrote in message
...
If I had neighbours like theirs I'd be claiming to be pretty
adequately
tooled up too. Still doesn't answer the question about where it all
went
too. You'd think someone who'd have no compunction using such weapons
on his
own people would eventually use them as a last ditch attempt to save
his own
regime, if he had them.

So you have no trouble making excuses for Saddam?

Why is asking pertinent questions "making excuses"?

If Saddam had the alleged stockpiles of ready WMEs, available for prompt
use with crews trained in their use, then where are they?

On the other hand, he certainly had threats wanting to invade him and
cast him down. The US and UK, as proven ('cause we did), plus the
Iranians, and he had long-term squabbles ongoing with the Kurds and the
Turks.

Seems eminently sensible to me that he might try a "Look! No provable
WME!" tactic of wounded innocence to his powerful enemies, while darkly
hinting that just because the US can't _prove_ he's got chem-bio doesn't
mean he can't smack any incursion or rebellion with lots of exotic
nastiness.

Sensible tactic, provided his powerful enemies don't call the bluff and
are either unconvinced by the threat or are deterred by it. The problem
comes when the threat is made credible enough, yet doesn't deter.

Still a very serious intel failure that we misread his actual intent and
capabilities so badly, but I do see where it came from.

How typical, how long
have you been a Liberal?

In my case, quite a while: my second degree is from University College
London, founded by Jeremy Bentham (and who remains resident in a
hallway).

Of course, that assumes you mean "liberal" in the classical sense. I
don't seem to fit the current US definition at all: ex-military, work
for and with the military now, own my house, believe that governments
should ask nicely for tax money rather than expect it as a right, that
sort of thing.

Saddam used the weapons,

Fifteen years ago. *Before* losing a war and having serious efforts made
to eliminate them, and before a second 'operation' (Desert Fox was too
carefully well-planned[1] to be a war).

Lots of weapon programs were turned up, turned over and demolished
between 1991 and 2003. I'm still waiting for anyone to find more than
fragments of the "bury this in your garden until this all blows over"
variety to suggest that he had any effective capability this year.

he declared vast
amounts of them, intelligence services all over the world documented the
tons and tons of material and machines to produce and maintain the WMDs,
and as the article points out, the thorough inspections have only
cleared about 10 or 20 of the 130 known munitions storage areas.

The trained FDC crews who knew how to use the weapons would be a start,
as would the production facilities and the distribution organisation.
These weapons leave a wide trail if they exist and are fieldable.

How
many aircraft were buried in the desert of Iraq that we only found out
about because locals brought it to our attention.

How many of them will ever fly again? (The answer is the roundest of
numbers, unless you're using "The A-Team" as your guide to military
technology)

The anthrax stocks
could fit in a few 55 gallon drums which take up less space than one of
those buried MiGs.

I seem to remember something like nine thousand cubic metres of missing
growth media, which would fill 44,000 fifty-five gallon drums.

I'd have thought that if Iraq has a few dozen buried aircraft and we can
find them, we can find one or two out of forty-four thousand barrels.

Again, Saddam worked hard to mislead, but UK and US intelligence were
very badly mistaken.

In addition people and trucks were streaming out of
Iraq into Syria before, during, and just after the war.

So, a stated aim of the war was to stop proliferation of WMEs, and the
result of the war was to scatter Iraqi WMEs to the four winds beyond any
tracking, control or destruction.

You're saying the war was a failure, then?

"Interestingly, we started to lose this war only after the embedded
reporters pulled out.

When did we start to lose the war? I thought we won it convincingly. The
occupation and restoration is proving difficult, but that's a viewpoint
I get from returning military personnel not the news. Besides, the US
sacked the Army CoS who said the occupation would be harder than the
civilian whiz-kids theorised - was Shineski right after all?




[1] Never give the enemy a fair fight. If you can successfully conduct
your operations without a single loss, that doesn't mean you cheated -
it means you used your advantages correctly
--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

In article ,
"Franck" wrote:

of course france sold missile 20 years ago, but in the same time US
give chimical weapon to your friend Saddam Hussein.

False.

But you knew that.

--
cirby at cfl.rr.com

Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.

In article ,
"Franck" wrote:

could you give me some information about chili genocide made with CIA
and US support ?

No, and neither could you, apparently.

Unless you mean Chile.

Chili genocide refers to killing all of the peppers.

--
cirby at cfl.rr.com

Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.