egafd.com

Hopefully this big 'push' will be the final furlong of the war and then our boys and girls can come home. Sadly though there are bound to be casualties and that is very sad, but to know it will likely be over after this is a great thing. To think that this war has lasted longer than either World War 1 or World War 2 is troubling, and also goes to show how ridiculous and badly planned the whole thing was. Let's hope this is the final act and then our soldiers will be back home in Blighty!

It will be a success, militarily, but I doubt it will be the end of the war as a whole.

I don't know what you mean about the war being 'badly planned'. If we still thought it was acceptable to carpet bomb civilians as well as the enemy a la WW2 the war would have been over in weeks. Thankfully we expect more care and precision these days and wars are more about winning hearts and minds rather than land.

With technology being so much more advanced than years ago, and hand-to-hand combat being not as regular in warfare now as it used to be, I am surprised that any war now can last longer than either of the two world wars did.

Carpet bombing civilians was never acceptable in my view, I have always regarded the bombing of Dresden as a war crime. A city the size of Manchester, that was not a military target, and the whole city flattened in one night. More people apparently died in Dresden that evening than died in the entire six years of war in Britain combined! They were still finding bodies in Dresden, killed that night in February 1945, more than 20 years later!

However, at the Nuremberg Trials, none of the senior German Airforce commanders were tried for bombings on civilian areas in Britain because it would have been seen as hypocritical - so at least there was consistency in the thinking.

I don't condone the killing of civilians but like the bombs dropped on Japan it shortened the war.In the long run it may have saved lives but this is debatable.

Max, when people feel they've been fucked over it tends to politicise them and 'radicalise' them in the view of some. Technology doesn't solve that.

People used to say that about the IRA.

Ok, it may never end for some but we can strive for them to be less of a threat.

The differnce with the IRA was that they needed to have the support and money of Irish America, and also not to have extreme condemnation from large chunks of the Irish population.

After those two children were killed in Warrington in 1993 twenty thousand people took to the streets of Dublin to protest against the IRA and Mary Robinson, the Irish President, attended the funerals of the children. The writing was on the wall for the IRA from then on. After the Real IRA bombing of Omagh in 1998 which killed 29 people (not done by the main IRA but a break-away faction) the revulsion and anger that followed meant that anyone planting bombs which killed civilians in pursuit of a political agenda was now looked upon very dis-favourably, be it the main IRA or one of the splinter groups.

When 9/11 happened, and 3,000 people died in New York, Irish America now knew what terrorism felt like first hand. Osama wasnt going after them, just Americans in general, but New York has such a large Irish American population that they now knew what it was like to have terrorism on their doorstep. That, and the Robert McCartney murder and the Northern Bank robbery, and the IRA were finished. Irish America turned against them and demanded they decommissioned. They did.

I dont think The Taliban rely on the support of others quite like the IRA did, so they will continue even after our boys and girls go home, but whatever they do next we should not meddle in it. We are not the world's Policeman. If we were we would have invaded Zimbabwe, and many other countries, by now.

Had we still been the Worlds policeman there would have been no need to have invaded Zimbabwe as we would already have invaded Rhodesia in the 1960's when they declared UDI.

Unfortunately the IRA has grown back considereably In Northern Ireland. There are several dozen ASU's in operation along with a support network numbering well over a thousand.

Add to that a swing towards support of dissident Republicans mainly from 'nationalist' petty criminals which has always been a recruitment base for IRA members.

Attacks of various form on security forces take place every other day.


As for funding they're doing just fine, dozens of armed robberies and extortion still plays a part of everday life, tiger kidnappings 2 at least every month.

So coupled with the fact that arms, explosive and ammunition are as cheap as chips compared to days of old and more easily accesible given the collapse of the eatern bloc and the breakdown of borders across Europe, funding need not rely on the support of the Irish community nor America.

The threat posed by republicans now is as high as it ever was. Its just not being reported as much because of other world issues.

It is like a cancer, unless you utterly destroy it it does inevitably grow back. Certainly its been lessened in the past few years but as with most things it was never truly defeated, poltically or militarily.

However I'm not sure you can utterly destroy something like that, short of imposing a brutal and draconian policy of rule as the Nazi's did and that didn't work in the end either.

I think ultimately the world just has to live with it, every so often wars will have to be fought to temporaily bring a check to radicalism of varying kind, and people will die, but a eutopia of harmony of human existence is something that will forever remain a pipe dream.