Naaa everyone has their own opinions.... i just think as a nation we should have stayed out of it.
Well millions get killed when all the bombing starts.... and remember the media show what they think needs to be seen...... im just on about the innocent people..... war isnt a nice thing but i feel the UK getting involved put us at risk... there are alot of saddam supporters out there... excluding the militry parties.
Anyway i just think its swings and round-a-bouts.... yes he has been caught which is good but what now? suppose its back onto the hunt for bin liden... [img]images/graemlins/roflmao.gif[/img]
Like i said im glad im just a small person with little choice in the matter....... glad they got him but i think its cheeky putting it mildly that they said he had weapons of mass destruction... if he did how comes he didnt use them in the past 10 years after the Gulf war? i believe there are no weapons and that the guy who died in england (huttun case or something like that)he knew this and was taken out of the equasion.....
Riz [img]images/graemlins/biggrin3.gif[/img]
Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
I`m just a hardcore petrol head 
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
"weapons of mass destruction" was the justification the UK and USA needed to go into Iraq. They needed to exist in the minds of Government to authorise the invasion. So technically, from a UK government point of view, the House of Commons was right to invade based on the info submitted by the Labour Government. If it turns out the Labour Government deceived the House of Commons then that is a different kettle of fish. Use your vote and get them out of power. I hate the Labour Government with a passion but 100% support our troops.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
PS none of the above is directed at anyone on this site it is just my personnel feelings
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
PS none of the above is directed at anyone on this site it is just my personnel feelings
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
[img]images/graemlins/nodder.gif[/img] [img]images/graemlins/thumbs.gif[/img]I hate the Labour Government with a passion but 100% support our troops.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
Riz [img]images/graemlins/s3addict.gif[/img]
I`m just a hardcore petrol head Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Oh and its funny how no other country really supported what the US and UK did??? wonder why that is?
Riz [img]images/graemlins/bigwave.gif[/img]
Let me know if I'm wrong but weren't the french behind us 100% [img]images/graemlins/3flypigs.gif[/img]
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
yeah well the only soldiers i saw on screen where the US and UK ones..... maybe im wrong [img]images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]Let me know if I'm wrong but weren't the french behind us 100%
Riz [img]images/graemlins/s3addict.gif[/img]
I`m just a hardcore petrol head Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
They are with us 100% now that the rebuilding contracts are up for grabs. Funny that.Let me know if I'm wrong but weren't the french behind us 100% [img]images/graemlins/3flypigs.gif[/img]
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
i dunno.... anyway come on people lets not let our own opinions cause tension between our online community.... group-hug everyone [img]images/graemlins/pftroest.gif[/img] [img]images/graemlins/sloppy.gif[/img] [img]images/graemlins/biggrin3.gif[/img]They are with us 100% now that the rebuilding contracts are up for grabs. Funny that.
Riz [img]images/graemlins/s3addict.gif[/img]
I`m just a hardcore petrol head 
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Guys... you feel like a bit of French bashing, which I understand with the quality of media coverage.
Let me just say this, VERY candidly, about the French position and advice to its long-time allies, with an excerpt from an article of the National Journal, a Washington D.C. publication (www.nationaljournal.com), from Nov 7 2003.
IT'S A LONG READ BUT WITH FIRST-CLASS HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL HINDSIGHTS.
"There is only one Western country with an intimate, bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is France, which granted independence to Algeria in 1963 after failing to subdue an eight-year-long rebellion by cold-blooded assassins who didn't blanch at bombing Algiers nightclubs frequented by French teenagers.
The memory remains etched into the French political consciousness. No event since the Second World War is a heavier or more painful burden for France than is the Algerian uprising. Algeria, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, had a much closer connection to France than Vietnam ever did to the United States. During the 132 years of French rule, starting in the 1830s, Algeria was, in legal, constitutional terms, an annexed section of France, not a colony. The Algerian uprising, with its demand for independence, destroyed the fourth French Republic by precipitating a coup attempt by the French military against civilian political leaders viewed as feckless. It also established itself as the central prism through which the French political elite came to view the Muslim world in general and the forces of Arab nationalism and Islamic militancy in particular.
And even more than that, Algeria forced France to re-examine its political, economic, and cultural relations with the entire non-Western portion of humanity. Algeria contained the lesson of a classic "failure," the British historian Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of Peace, his definitive 1977 account of the conflict; he called it "the failure either to meet, or even comprehend, the aspirations of the Third World."
The Islamic world, as the most immediately problematic for the French, received France's priority attention. In the United States, it was only with 9/11 that beginning a dialogue with the Muslim community came to seem urgent, but the French, because of Algeria, had embarked on this road decades before. "The U.S. is still a bit virginal in its relationship with the Islamic part of the world," notes Simon Serfaty, a Frenchman born 60 years ago in colonial Morocco, who is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The French know this part of the world better."
The Algerian uprising certainly made a powerful impression on a young man destined for France's highest political office: Jacques Chirac.
Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23, to serve as an officer in the French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in an isolated mountainous region of Algeria. The mission was to keep order. But order proved impossible to keep, with the local population protective of the fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in engagements with the guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were killed. In a speech to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called his time there the most important formative experience of his life.
According to an old friend and adviser, Algeria principally taught Chirac that occupation, even under the best of intentions, is impossible when popular sentiments have turned against the occupier: "His experience is that despite all the goodwill, when you are an occupier, when you are seen [by the local people] as an occupier, the people will want you to get out." And if Chirac was convinced of anything, according to this source, it was that the Americans would ultimately be viewed not as liberators in Iraq but as occupiers. He foresaw a kind of re-enactment of the Algerian tragedy, the source adds, a "vicious circle" in which increasingly violent acts against the occupier are met with an increasingly harsh response -- a cycle that inevitably sours local people against the occupation.
As the French side tells it, this perspective was at the heart of a disagreement between Chirac and Bush at a private talk late last November in Prague, where U.S. and European leaders were gathered to discuss enlarging NATO. (Although the pair talked on the telephone, this was their main exchange before the war started six months later.) According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy. According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime -- but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush that history would decide who was right. The White House recently declined to comment on the meeting."
(...)
"Traumatic experiences can be distorting, but the French fixation on Algeria, if that's what it is, seems appropriate. The uprising was not just a defeat for an aging, corrupt imperial power. It was also an awakening experience for such coming-of-age insurgents as Yasir Arafat and a forerunner of Islamic militants' decision to use terror to achieve broad political objectives. The conflict introduced the French to the same kind of deadly enemy that U.S. forces now find themselves battling in the streets of Baghdad. Better late than never, the Pentagon in September arranged for senior Special Forces officers a screening of The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film showing how crack French paratroopers rolled up terrorist cells in the Algerian capital, in one of France's few clear-cut victories in that war. The message is twofold. On the one hand, the paratroopers forced the FLN to abandon the campaign in the capital. But the insurgency itself was not extinguished -- and eventually, it was the unremitting toll of French casualties and a public backlash in France against the army's harsh tactics against the Algerian population that caused the French to cut and run."
(...)
"So the French are not virgins when it comes to occupations. Nor are they virgins when it comes to countering international terrorism. They left Algeria feeling humiliated and somewhat cowed. In their first stab at constructing a policy to deal with the strange new threat of Islamic terrorism, the French adopted a policy of appeasement -- an approach that included tacit permission for globally oriented terrorist groups to use French soil as a base, so long as the groups did not make France itself a target. Not surprisingly, France became a haven for international terrorists. But several decades later, Paris possessed counter-terrorism capabilities, oriented toward preventing attacks, second to none in the Western world in effectiveness. And French Mirages were dropping bombs on Afghanistan.
Behind this turnaround is a story of how the French learned what works in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. Along with Algeria, this learning experience powerfully shaped the French perspective on the post-9/11 world, and it helps explain why the French felt so strongly that Iraq was a secondary priority in the struggle against terrorism.
One of the few in Washington who has done a careful parsing of the French experience in counter-terrorism is an unassuming former Rand analyst, Jeremy Shapiro, who these days hangs his hat at the Brookings Institution as a research associate in the think tank's center on the United States and France. A 1989 Harvard graduate who's fluent in French, Shapiro has cultivated contacts among counter-terrorist experts at law enforcement agencies in both Paris and Washington. For obscure policy journals, he's been writing such pieces as "The U.S. Can Learn From the French in the War Against Terrorism."
In an interview at his cramped Brookings quarters, Shapiro right away warmed to the topic. "The French were among the first to note that terrorism was a global movement," he said. But before they came to this realization, they floundered. In the 1980s, a wave of bombings struck Paris targets, including department stores and subways. Not only were the French unable to prevent these attacks, they were also clueless about the perpetrators and motives. At first they thought that domestic neo-Nazi militants were behind an assault on a synagogue in a wealthy section of Paris. Only belatedly did they realize that responsibility lay with terrorists from the Middle East.
The French had descended to this low point through their adoption of what Shapiro calls the "sanctuary doctrine" -- a morally repugnant effort to isolate France from international terrorism by taking a neutral stance toward global terrorist groups. The idea was to give the terrorists no reason to attack France. (Better they hit someone else.)
It didn't work. Other countries actively battling terrorism, such as Spain and Israel, were understandably outraged that France was sheltering their enemies. Some splinter terrorist bands failed to recognize France as a "sanctuary" and targeted French interests anyway. And amid the Paris attacks, the French public demanded a get-tough approach.
As a result, French counter-terrorism policy evolved to its current emphasis on suppression and prevention. The key to this policy is what Shapiro calls the "Alan Greenspan" choice. In effect, France decided to de-politicize the anti-terrorism battle. "The French treat terrorism like we treat central banking -- as too serious to be left to the politicians," Shapiro says. At the heart of the French system is a group of Paris-based magistrates with sweeping investigative powers of the sort that a John Ashcroft would die for. Through the expertise accumulated over numerous investigations, the magistrates managed to burrow deeply into the roots of global Islamic terrorist networks and thus gain information on attacks even as they were being plotted.
The results are impressive -- and have helped protect not just the French but Americans, too. Shapiro's textbook example is the apprehension of terrorist Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives he planned to use to attack Los Angeles International Airport. Even though he had few connections to France, French anti-terrorism officials had been tracking Ressam for more than three years and had repeatedly warned Canadian authorities of his plans to attack North American targets. The French provided the FBI with a full dossier on Ressam, helped U.S. officials identify his associates, and sent an expert to testify at Ressam's trial, at which he was convicted."
(...)
"In this context, the French response to 9/11 represented a final repudiation of the sanctuary doctrine. The notion that France could somehow hide from terrorism was replaced by a newfound sense of solidarity, all the more startling given the anti-Americanism that had long been a staple of French politics. "We Are All Americans" -- "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" -- the front page of Le Monde declared on September 13, 2001. And with Levitte at the helm of the U.N. Security Council (his assignment before he took up residence in Washington as the French ambassador), that body, for the first time in its history, declared that an act of terrorism was equivalent to an act of war. It was with that legal predicate that France joined the U.S. in the campaign to topple the Taliban."
(...)
"Let's review. The French got it right in Iraq for three basic reasons. First, the French, by virtue of their own experience, had the best of all prisms with which to view the Iraq showdown: Algeria. Second, the French, because of the improvements they had made in their counter-terrorism efforts, were in a position to make their own independent determination of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and related groups versus the threat posed by Saddam's regime. And third, the French possessed good antennae; they had a clear reading of world, and in particular Muslim, public opinion on whether a U.S.-led intervention would be viewed as legitimate. They were better listeners than the Americans were.
In its exasperation with the French, Washington says it is Paris that has become lost in languid abstractions. "It's easy to toss out nice theories about sovereignty, and occupation, and liberation, and all that," Colin Powell complained to reporters on his plane last month after a round of inconclusive talks with the French on an expanded U.N. role in Iraq.
But he's picking on the French for the wrong reason. The Bush camp had run up against Jacques Chirac -- a stubborn 70-year-old man. Not even his friends regard him as a conceptual thinker or grand strategist. He's prone not to airy theorizing but to condescension. On the Iraq matter, he revealed his sense of superiority over Bush, a man 14 years his junior who entered the White House without a track record in foreign affairs. (Chirac has a higher estimation of Bush's father, a multilateralist who fought in World War II and headed the CIA before becoming president.) That final "Be careful!" warning was preceded by a vintage -- which is to say, patronizing -- Chirac pronouncement: "Personally, I have some experience of international political life."
Eric
Let me just say this, VERY candidly, about the French position and advice to its long-time allies, with an excerpt from an article of the National Journal, a Washington D.C. publication (www.nationaljournal.com), from Nov 7 2003.
IT'S A LONG READ BUT WITH FIRST-CLASS HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL HINDSIGHTS.
"There is only one Western country with an intimate, bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is France, which granted independence to Algeria in 1963 after failing to subdue an eight-year-long rebellion by cold-blooded assassins who didn't blanch at bombing Algiers nightclubs frequented by French teenagers.
The memory remains etched into the French political consciousness. No event since the Second World War is a heavier or more painful burden for France than is the Algerian uprising. Algeria, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, had a much closer connection to France than Vietnam ever did to the United States. During the 132 years of French rule, starting in the 1830s, Algeria was, in legal, constitutional terms, an annexed section of France, not a colony. The Algerian uprising, with its demand for independence, destroyed the fourth French Republic by precipitating a coup attempt by the French military against civilian political leaders viewed as feckless. It also established itself as the central prism through which the French political elite came to view the Muslim world in general and the forces of Arab nationalism and Islamic militancy in particular.
And even more than that, Algeria forced France to re-examine its political, economic, and cultural relations with the entire non-Western portion of humanity. Algeria contained the lesson of a classic "failure," the British historian Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of Peace, his definitive 1977 account of the conflict; he called it "the failure either to meet, or even comprehend, the aspirations of the Third World."
The Islamic world, as the most immediately problematic for the French, received France's priority attention. In the United States, it was only with 9/11 that beginning a dialogue with the Muslim community came to seem urgent, but the French, because of Algeria, had embarked on this road decades before. "The U.S. is still a bit virginal in its relationship with the Islamic part of the world," notes Simon Serfaty, a Frenchman born 60 years ago in colonial Morocco, who is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The French know this part of the world better."
The Algerian uprising certainly made a powerful impression on a young man destined for France's highest political office: Jacques Chirac.
Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23, to serve as an officer in the French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in an isolated mountainous region of Algeria. The mission was to keep order. But order proved impossible to keep, with the local population protective of the fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in engagements with the guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were killed. In a speech to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called his time there the most important formative experience of his life.
According to an old friend and adviser, Algeria principally taught Chirac that occupation, even under the best of intentions, is impossible when popular sentiments have turned against the occupier: "His experience is that despite all the goodwill, when you are an occupier, when you are seen [by the local people] as an occupier, the people will want you to get out." And if Chirac was convinced of anything, according to this source, it was that the Americans would ultimately be viewed not as liberators in Iraq but as occupiers. He foresaw a kind of re-enactment of the Algerian tragedy, the source adds, a "vicious circle" in which increasingly violent acts against the occupier are met with an increasingly harsh response -- a cycle that inevitably sours local people against the occupation.
As the French side tells it, this perspective was at the heart of a disagreement between Chirac and Bush at a private talk late last November in Prague, where U.S. and European leaders were gathered to discuss enlarging NATO. (Although the pair talked on the telephone, this was their main exchange before the war started six months later.) According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy. According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime -- but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush that history would decide who was right. The White House recently declined to comment on the meeting."
(...)
"Traumatic experiences can be distorting, but the French fixation on Algeria, if that's what it is, seems appropriate. The uprising was not just a defeat for an aging, corrupt imperial power. It was also an awakening experience for such coming-of-age insurgents as Yasir Arafat and a forerunner of Islamic militants' decision to use terror to achieve broad political objectives. The conflict introduced the French to the same kind of deadly enemy that U.S. forces now find themselves battling in the streets of Baghdad. Better late than never, the Pentagon in September arranged for senior Special Forces officers a screening of The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film showing how crack French paratroopers rolled up terrorist cells in the Algerian capital, in one of France's few clear-cut victories in that war. The message is twofold. On the one hand, the paratroopers forced the FLN to abandon the campaign in the capital. But the insurgency itself was not extinguished -- and eventually, it was the unremitting toll of French casualties and a public backlash in France against the army's harsh tactics against the Algerian population that caused the French to cut and run."
(...)
"So the French are not virgins when it comes to occupations. Nor are they virgins when it comes to countering international terrorism. They left Algeria feeling humiliated and somewhat cowed. In their first stab at constructing a policy to deal with the strange new threat of Islamic terrorism, the French adopted a policy of appeasement -- an approach that included tacit permission for globally oriented terrorist groups to use French soil as a base, so long as the groups did not make France itself a target. Not surprisingly, France became a haven for international terrorists. But several decades later, Paris possessed counter-terrorism capabilities, oriented toward preventing attacks, second to none in the Western world in effectiveness. And French Mirages were dropping bombs on Afghanistan.
Behind this turnaround is a story of how the French learned what works in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. Along with Algeria, this learning experience powerfully shaped the French perspective on the post-9/11 world, and it helps explain why the French felt so strongly that Iraq was a secondary priority in the struggle against terrorism.
One of the few in Washington who has done a careful parsing of the French experience in counter-terrorism is an unassuming former Rand analyst, Jeremy Shapiro, who these days hangs his hat at the Brookings Institution as a research associate in the think tank's center on the United States and France. A 1989 Harvard graduate who's fluent in French, Shapiro has cultivated contacts among counter-terrorist experts at law enforcement agencies in both Paris and Washington. For obscure policy journals, he's been writing such pieces as "The U.S. Can Learn From the French in the War Against Terrorism."
In an interview at his cramped Brookings quarters, Shapiro right away warmed to the topic. "The French were among the first to note that terrorism was a global movement," he said. But before they came to this realization, they floundered. In the 1980s, a wave of bombings struck Paris targets, including department stores and subways. Not only were the French unable to prevent these attacks, they were also clueless about the perpetrators and motives. At first they thought that domestic neo-Nazi militants were behind an assault on a synagogue in a wealthy section of Paris. Only belatedly did they realize that responsibility lay with terrorists from the Middle East.
The French had descended to this low point through their adoption of what Shapiro calls the "sanctuary doctrine" -- a morally repugnant effort to isolate France from international terrorism by taking a neutral stance toward global terrorist groups. The idea was to give the terrorists no reason to attack France. (Better they hit someone else.)
It didn't work. Other countries actively battling terrorism, such as Spain and Israel, were understandably outraged that France was sheltering their enemies. Some splinter terrorist bands failed to recognize France as a "sanctuary" and targeted French interests anyway. And amid the Paris attacks, the French public demanded a get-tough approach.
As a result, French counter-terrorism policy evolved to its current emphasis on suppression and prevention. The key to this policy is what Shapiro calls the "Alan Greenspan" choice. In effect, France decided to de-politicize the anti-terrorism battle. "The French treat terrorism like we treat central banking -- as too serious to be left to the politicians," Shapiro says. At the heart of the French system is a group of Paris-based magistrates with sweeping investigative powers of the sort that a John Ashcroft would die for. Through the expertise accumulated over numerous investigations, the magistrates managed to burrow deeply into the roots of global Islamic terrorist networks and thus gain information on attacks even as they were being plotted.
The results are impressive -- and have helped protect not just the French but Americans, too. Shapiro's textbook example is the apprehension of terrorist Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives he planned to use to attack Los Angeles International Airport. Even though he had few connections to France, French anti-terrorism officials had been tracking Ressam for more than three years and had repeatedly warned Canadian authorities of his plans to attack North American targets. The French provided the FBI with a full dossier on Ressam, helped U.S. officials identify his associates, and sent an expert to testify at Ressam's trial, at which he was convicted."
(...)
"In this context, the French response to 9/11 represented a final repudiation of the sanctuary doctrine. The notion that France could somehow hide from terrorism was replaced by a newfound sense of solidarity, all the more startling given the anti-Americanism that had long been a staple of French politics. "We Are All Americans" -- "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" -- the front page of Le Monde declared on September 13, 2001. And with Levitte at the helm of the U.N. Security Council (his assignment before he took up residence in Washington as the French ambassador), that body, for the first time in its history, declared that an act of terrorism was equivalent to an act of war. It was with that legal predicate that France joined the U.S. in the campaign to topple the Taliban."
(...)
"Let's review. The French got it right in Iraq for three basic reasons. First, the French, by virtue of their own experience, had the best of all prisms with which to view the Iraq showdown: Algeria. Second, the French, because of the improvements they had made in their counter-terrorism efforts, were in a position to make their own independent determination of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and related groups versus the threat posed by Saddam's regime. And third, the French possessed good antennae; they had a clear reading of world, and in particular Muslim, public opinion on whether a U.S.-led intervention would be viewed as legitimate. They were better listeners than the Americans were.
In its exasperation with the French, Washington says it is Paris that has become lost in languid abstractions. "It's easy to toss out nice theories about sovereignty, and occupation, and liberation, and all that," Colin Powell complained to reporters on his plane last month after a round of inconclusive talks with the French on an expanded U.N. role in Iraq.
But he's picking on the French for the wrong reason. The Bush camp had run up against Jacques Chirac -- a stubborn 70-year-old man. Not even his friends regard him as a conceptual thinker or grand strategist. He's prone not to airy theorizing but to condescension. On the Iraq matter, he revealed his sense of superiority over Bush, a man 14 years his junior who entered the White House without a track record in foreign affairs. (Chirac has a higher estimation of Bush's father, a multilateralist who fought in World War II and headed the CIA before becoming president.) That final "Be careful!" warning was preceded by a vintage -- which is to say, patronizing -- Chirac pronouncement: "Personally, I have some experience of international political life."
Eric
- RS4 V6 Biturbo Imola Yellow (2001)
• Custom MTM 460hp manually tuned by Peter Link on MTM dyno at Ingolstadt HQ.
• Custom Full Milltek: Sport-Cats / Mid-Silencer: suppressed / End-Silencer: reduced.
• Full Mov'It upgrade: Front 380mm - 6 pistons / Rear 220mm - 4 pistons / Parking addon.
- Joined the Dark Side (aka. Darth Elon) circa 2013.
• Custom MTM 460hp manually tuned by Peter Link on MTM dyno at Ingolstadt HQ.
• Custom Full Milltek: Sport-Cats / Mid-Silencer: suppressed / End-Silencer: reduced.
• Full Mov'It upgrade: Front 380mm - 6 pistons / Rear 220mm - 4 pistons / Parking addon.
- Joined the Dark Side (aka. Darth Elon) circa 2013.
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Very good information Eric... and i hope i didnt say anything to offend you.... i was just voicing my opinions etc.
Riz [img]images/graemlins/pftroest.gif[/img]
Riz [img]images/graemlins/pftroest.gif[/img]
I`m just a hardcore petrol head Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
The Point that France is the only western country to have 'experience' of Islamic countries is factual wrong...
The UK has a long history of ruling (and trying to rule) such countries including Aden, Iraq, Palestine & Afghanistan. The UK has had to combat terrorism in all of these countries (my Great Uncle is buried in Afghanistan where he died in 1923 while serving in the RAF)....
The UK armed forces would have been loathed to get involved in yet another conflict (Iraq)but sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice lives to enable a people to be freed from a brutual dictator, this conflict is of course 10 years too late.......(I speak as a ex HM Forces member)
The problem of course is that the coalition is in danger of lossing the peace especially with the Americans in charge. Lets hope that common sense will prevail in Iraq and the Iraqis can start to put their country back together...
As for Chirac.....the guy should be in jail for all the dodgy things he's done in his presidence....
The UK has a long history of ruling (and trying to rule) such countries including Aden, Iraq, Palestine & Afghanistan. The UK has had to combat terrorism in all of these countries (my Great Uncle is buried in Afghanistan where he died in 1923 while serving in the RAF)....
The UK armed forces would have been loathed to get involved in yet another conflict (Iraq)but sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice lives to enable a people to be freed from a brutual dictator, this conflict is of course 10 years too late.......(I speak as a ex HM Forces member)
The problem of course is that the coalition is in danger of lossing the peace especially with the Americans in charge. Lets hope that common sense will prevail in Iraq and the Iraqis can start to put their country back together...
As for Chirac.....the guy should be in jail for all the dodgy things he's done in his presidence....
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Eeeeeeek this is a very debatable topic... lets keep its friendly [img]images/graemlins/sloppy.gif[/img]
Riz [img]images/graemlins/s3addict.gif[/img]
Riz [img]images/graemlins/s3addict.gif[/img]
I`m just a hardcore petrol head Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
The Point that France is the only western country to have 'experience' of Islamic countries is factual wrong...
The UK has a long history of ruling (and trying to rule) such countries including Aden, Iraq, Palestine & Afghanistan. The UK has had to combat terrorism in all of these countries (my Great Uncle is buried in Afghanistan where he died in 1923 while serving in the RAF)....
The UK armed forces would have been loathed to get involved in yet another conflict (Iraq)but sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice lives to enable a people to be freed from a brutual dictator, this conflict is of course 10 years too late.......(I speak as a ex HM Forces member)
The problem of course is that the coalition is in danger of lossing the peace especially with the Americans in charge. Lets hope that common sense will prevail in Iraq and the Iraqis can start to put their country back together...
As for Chirac.....the guy should be in jail for all the dodgy things he's done in his presidence....
Jeff, I have no doubt in your HM Forces experience. I also served as an officer in the French Army in 91-93 so I think/hope I do share your belief and values.
But my worst experience of terrorism came way before, when I was 14 : I was myself personally affected by visually witnessing a terrorist car bomb exploding against my school in 1982 in Paris while I was standing in the street talking with fellow schoolmates.
Unfortunately, this is not an exclusive French experience nor is it an experience that no other country, UK to start with, never had to suffer.
On the above extracts : I don't think the US writer meant to be wrong and ignore UK long history when he said "an intimate, bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency".
I also believe one should be careful about supporting the idea that it is the duty/role of the western world to attack all countries run by dictators or unrespectful of human rights to free them.
Because one may find a lot of candidate countries there, by western standards, including heavy weights with current/potential nuclear capabilities or population over 200 million inhabitants and/or muslim population or even candidates to the EU. Enough to start a final World War III that would wreak amoc the Earth or unleashing a truly dreadful hornest nest of terrorists.
If the real goal is to fight terrorism, as opposed to "we don't really know your country, your history, your people, your language, your customs, your allies, your enemies but we know one thing : how to run your country better", then I believe some adjustments can be made.
As for Chirac, I'm fine with your comments (I didn't vote for him).
Allow me not to reply/comment about the other Presidents/Prime Ministers professionalism/competence/honesty because that would get nasty [img]images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]
Eric
- RS4 V6 Biturbo Imola Yellow (2001)
• Custom MTM 460hp manually tuned by Peter Link on MTM dyno at Ingolstadt HQ.
• Custom Full Milltek: Sport-Cats / Mid-Silencer: suppressed / End-Silencer: reduced.
• Full Mov'It upgrade: Front 380mm - 6 pistons / Rear 220mm - 4 pistons / Parking addon.
- Joined the Dark Side (aka. Darth Elon) circa 2013.
• Custom MTM 460hp manually tuned by Peter Link on MTM dyno at Ingolstadt HQ.
• Custom Full Milltek: Sport-Cats / Mid-Silencer: suppressed / End-Silencer: reduced.
• Full Mov'It upgrade: Front 380mm - 6 pistons / Rear 220mm - 4 pistons / Parking addon.
- Joined the Dark Side (aka. Darth Elon) circa 2013.
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
Taipan
Just think of the lives that could have been saved if someone had shot Hitler in 1933 or indeed if the UK and France had not tried to appease him when he annexed the Sudantland (sp) and Austria. Same goes for Milosovic and numerous other Dictators (Mugagbe being the latest)...
If the coalition (one which France was a member) continued into Baghdad in the first Gulf war all of this would never have happend...and a lot people who have been killed by the Ba'thist regime would still be alive....
Just think of the lives that could have been saved if someone had shot Hitler in 1933 or indeed if the UK and France had not tried to appease him when he annexed the Sudantland (sp) and Austria. Same goes for Milosovic and numerous other Dictators (Mugagbe being the latest)...
If the coalition (one which France was a member) continued into Baghdad in the first Gulf war all of this would never have happend...and a lot people who have been killed by the Ba'thist regime would still be alive....
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
I also believe one should be careful about supporting the idea that it is the duty/role of the western world to attack all countries run by dictators or unrespectful of human rights to free them.
Lets not forget the reason for the invasion was WMD's (even though this may prove in hindsight to be an error of judgement)and as such was the right decision at that moment in time.
Lets not forget we live in a society where we can have this debate in freedom.
Has anyone noticed that this thread was started by a German member who has now managed to stir up a hornets nest between the UK and French members[img]images/graemlins/biggrin3.gif[/img] Damn cleaver them Germans[img]images/graemlins/thumbs.gif[/img]
Re: Saddam Hussein arrested!!!!
1967 is fairly recent (Britain withdrew from Aden/Yeman). France left Algeria in 1962 if memory serves....
Not that it actually matters
Not that it actually matters
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