88 replies to this topic

[The Lorcan Nagle]

He's got a poetic way or putting things at times, all right

(did I mention I finally finished The Stone Canal and read The Cassini division a couple of months ago? Found Canal really hard going for about 150 pages, but it picked up immensely after that, and thought Division was a hoot)

[Stephen Galvin]

I don't think anyone seriously worries about Europe being invaded by anyone, they have America to watch their backs these days (although I still think we should be presenting a bill for that).

I don't think Americans seriously worry about anyone invading Europe. Europeans do. We still have people alive who can remember it happening to them. With Russia massing troops on the Northern border of Iran, in case the USA decides to hazard an adventure there, Europe might be thinking the USA is spreading it's cloth a bit thin.
Much as I like Americans, I think it's past time Europe took care of it's own defence. The Bosnia -Herzegovina conflict is barely over a wet week. Russia may yet decide to invade Georgia to ensure it's supply of Iranian oil. You just never know what can happen. While it is nice to forge reliable friendships with Americans, Russian and Chinese governments, they have a tendency to autocratic decision making which does not sit well peaceful co-existence.
Mostly they make those decisions based around resources or the lack of them, and last time I looked, Europe seemed to have quite a bit in the way of natural advantages. We may one day have to rally around to defend Germany from the East. You just never know, 'but hope for the best, plan for the worst' works for me.

[The Lorcan Nagle]

Seriously, Europe has nothing to fear in terms of a foreign invasion. Nothing at all.

[Arjan Dirkse]

Seriously, Europe has nothing to fear in terms of a foreign invasion. Nothing at all.

True...However I do think it is important to have a powerful army, as a part of NATO. I feel better knowing we can stop a regime like that of Milosevic or destroy a dictator like Ghadaffi if we have to.

[Mike]

Alien invasion might be a problem though.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

Yeah, I do like that Ken Mcleod quote.

The problem with any kind of European common policy is it invariably takes power away from the nation states and, in some cases, can become quite warped - like the CAP. Defence? Sounds good in theory but would you accept your military being commanded by a foreign general? Would you trust that that person has the interests of your country on par with everyone else? France, for instance, is a NATO member but it retains independent military command of its forces - good luck getting them to accept a common defence policy.

The other problem with Europe is the power structure is skewed. Does anyone here know their MEP or consider them to have any import? Probably not. But then, relative to the Commission and the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament lacks teeth and, for it to gain in power, those other two institutions must lose some. How that is to be engineered is anybody's guess at this point.

Then there's the press portraits, which in the UK, tend to be wholly negative which tends to reflect their owner's interest. Most businesses know most of our trade is with the continent, pulling out to join NAFTA is cloud cuckoo thinking but this'll never feature in the tabloids pushing the simplistic line.

Seperate but linked to this is the UK government's ineptitude over how it understands EU procurement, for instance, the UK government invariably understands this as meaning it must opt for the lowest bidder, but there is scope in the legislation for governments to choose a bidder that costs more but will deliver certain other social and economic benefits, so paying a higher rate to a UK-based company leads to jobs being retained with all the benefits that in turn enables would mean that the bidder was deemed to deliver the greatest overall value, understood as encompassing more than just the monetary, in the competitive tendering process. This approach is regularly used by EU members but not by the UK, cue "Europe takes our jobs!" headlines.

True...However I do think it is important to have a powerful army, as a part of NATO. I feel better knowing we can stop a regime like that of Milosevic or destroy a dictator like Ghadaffi if we have to.

Although, in both cases, it isn't a problem of military force - we could have levelled Serbia twice over but it likely wouldn't have solved the problem, lot of death, corpses and destruction, but the hatred would remain. As it is, it could be argued by being more restrained in its bombing during the Kosovo campaign, the popular removal of Milosevic was encouraged far more effectively.

[The Lorcan Nagle]

That's very true Ben, especially when you consider how many hotspots in the world today were created or exacerbated by US/European military intervention.

[Arjan Dirkse]

Although, in both cases, it isn't a problem of military force - we could have levelled Serbia twice over but it likely wouldn't have solved the problem, lot of death, corpses and destruction, but the hatred would remain. As it is, it could be argued by being more restrained in its bombing during the Kosovo campaign, the popular removal of Milosevic was encouraged far more effectively.

It was very much a problem of military force. In 1995, a bombing campaign was necessary to stop the Bosnian War, in 1999 a bombing campaign was necessary to stop the Kosovo war, and when bombs dropped on Serbia itself, it didn't take for long for the people to rise up against Milosevic.

edit: just to balance those hawkish statements, I of course agree that in most cases violence only increases the problem...but in a rare few cases, it really is necessary to go to war. Sometimes you stop a fight by getting into the fight.

Edited by Arjan Dirkse, 09 June 2012 - 08:26 PM.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

And I think you're simplifying it far too much Arjan.

For Bosnia what was needed was thousands of peace-making troops with ROE that permitted them to actually deal with the military actions of all 3 parties, even though the Serbs had the advantage due to dominating the Yugoslavian military the Croatians were far from innocent.

But, there's a bigger and more important difference - destroying military hardware and civilian infrastructure in Serbia to stop its Kosovo actions worked because the Serbs were comfortable enough to be pissed off by its lack due to their leader's crazy bravado. That wasn't so in Bosnia - the Bosnian Serbs were led by Karadzic and Mladic and, even if, in some other world, Milosevic had been pressured into calling them off, they may not have heeded him!

One of the defining acts of the Bosnian war remains the mortar shelling of a bread queue in an already bombed, shelled and blasted Sarajevo. To have stopped that, yeah, some very accurate bombing could have helped but I'm not sure bombs are yet that precise - at least, not without someone on the ground laser-painting the target and that gets us back to troops empowered to fight a war with everything that that entails. And, it requires a commitment to follow through on it - in Afghanistan, the fighting part has been done and, at times, very effectively but that all-important follow-up commitment? Nowhere in sight.

[Arjan Dirkse]

And I think you're simplifying it far too much Arjan.

For Bosnia what was needed was thousands of peace-making troops with ROE that permitted them to actually deal with the military actions of all 3 parties, even though the Serbs had the advantage due to dominating the Yugoslavian military the Croatians were far from innocent.

But, there's a bigger and more important difference - destroying military hardware and civilian infrastructure in Serbia to stop its Kosovo actions worked because the Serbs were comfortable enough to be pissed off by its lack due to their leader's crazy bravado. That wasn't so in Bosnia - the Bosnian Serbs were led by Karadzic and Mladic and, even if, in some other world, Milosevic had been pressured into calling them off, they may not have heeded him!

One of the defining acts of the Bosnian war remains the mortar shelling of a bread queue in an already bombed, shelled and blasted Sarajevo. To have stopped that, yeah, some very accurate bombing could have helped but I'm not sure bombs are yet that precise - at least, not without someone on the ground laser-painting the target and that gets us back to troops empowered to fight a war with everything that that entails. And, it requires a commitment to follow through on it - in Afghanistan, the fighting part has been done and, at times, very effectively but that all-important follow-up commitment? Nowhere in sight.

The bombing campaign was key in ending the Bosnian war, it drove Karadzic to actually agree with the Dayton agreement. It should have started much earlier, then it could possibly have prevented the genocide in Srebrenica. Those peace keeping troops who were there before the bombing campaign didn't accomplish diddly squat in stopping the massacres.

[Jim Ohara]

"Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons."

Great quote but I'd say Asia could claim the same words.

There's a danger in thinking about Europe from within the Eurozone and getting caught up in the differences and the little spats. When really Europe needs to get over all this nonsense and figure out how to become a much more integrated country. This France vs Germany vs British nonsense hopefully dies at the end of our generation, as cultures and heritage gets all mixed up in a big sweaty breeding freakfest. Asia is coming, like winter, and all the traditional European companies that have had 60 year head starts are being exposed for the bloated whales they are, as nimble younger Asian companies will take over. They already own consumer electronics and automotive, soon they'll conquer industrial supply (as computer integration becomes standard) and then there's not much left.

Anything that Europe does to divide its house is a long term slow death move. Much like South America, the sooner the people get over themselves and realize the world is a very small place the better. I'm hoping by the time I'm a grandpa kids will be European first and Irish second, much the same way kids are Americans first and Californians second (I think that thinking applies to every state but New York and Texas).

[Ben the Obiwomble]

I'm sceptical bombing alone earlier applied would have had the impact you claim Arjan, short of having soldiers on the ground to stop them, the Serbs were free to keep on killing. But we probably should be getting back to Europe, so for that: How practically would a common defence policy be proposed and accepted?

[Arjan Dirkse]

I'm sceptical bombing alone earlier applied would have had the impact you claim Arjan, short of having soldiers on the ground to stop them, the Serbs were free to keep on killing. But we probably should be getting back to Europe, so for that: How practically would a common defence policy be proposed and accepted?

Well,I am skeptical that not bombing would have achieved anything, mostly because there already were 40,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia who were reduced to eating out of their nose while genocide was being committed.

edit: I'm sorry my tone might be a bit too confrontational here. The Yugoslav war has really screwed me up badly, I knew some people who were involved there. I was studying Serbocroatian at the time, and most of the people in that class were either Serbs or Bosnian Muslims, with families back home who were suffering. The discussions in the class weren't pretty. I just think tough military action was unavoidable, and we hurt many people by putting off that decision.

Edited by Arjan Dirkse, 09 June 2012 - 11:09 PM.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

You did see paragraph 2 of my initial post, didn't you Arjan? It addresses this head-on.

Peacekeeping troops with a toothless set of operating rules were useless as there was no peace to keep! No one gave them the power to shift to active operations to really solve the conflict! But to also do that properly, a lot more than 40,000 would be needed.

But, how would bombing have prevented the genocide? It might have killed some of the Serbs, it might have destroyed some heavy weapons but I don't see a policy of bombing Serbs with the aim of killing as many of them as possible being given the go-ahead, despite that likely being required for it to have a real chance of success. But if a load of Serb soldiers take cover, wait until the raid is done then go and do themselves a nice little bit of 'ethnic cleansing', the bombs can't do much then, can they?

What I'm getting at here is that for all the talk and devaluing of the term by casual use, we have no clue what 'war' actually demands and we recoil in horror if anyone should actually tell us. Instead we think we can win by nice, neat, clean solutions like precise bombing and scientific warfare. But to hide behind these notions is to deny what war is - which is to say it is a harsh, cruel and vicious undertaking that is sometimes rendered necessary by the greater evil being inaction.

[Jim Ohara]

What I'm getting at here is that for all the talk and devaluing of the term by casual use, we have no clue what 'war' actually demands and we recoil in horror if anyone should actually tell us. Instead we think we can win by nice, neat, clean solutions like precise bombing and scientific warfare. But to hide behind these notions is to deny what war is - which is to say it is a harsh, cruel and vicious undertaking that is sometimes rendered necessary by the greater evil being inaction.

I think we're coming to an age where wars will be a thing of the past. Wars are already changing - they're economic and technology (as in computer hacking) based now. Your soldiers won't fight when they don't get any food or pay. Tanks stop when there's no oil in them. The integration of business ensures more peace, because despite the Ferengi, peace is better for business than war, and you don't want to start something which could cause mass unemployment. Yes there's still going to be spats in some of the poorer and less integrated countries, but continued prosperity and integration will put that to an end too.

The best way to avoid war with Iran for example would be to put the Google HQ in Tehran.

[The Lorcan Nagle]

I seriously doubt we've seen the end of War, but I don't think we'll see another major conflict like the World Wars. It'll be police actions, brush wars and limited conflicts for the forseeable future.

[Arjan Dirkse]

You did see paragraph 2 of my initial post, didn't you Arjan? It addresses this head-on.

Peacekeeping troops with a toothless set of operating rules were useless as there was no peace to keep! No one gave them the power to shift to active operations to really solve the conflict! But to also do that properly, a lot more than 40,000 would be needed.

But, how would bombing have prevented the genocide? It might have killed some of the Serbs, it might have destroyed some heavy weapons but I don't see a policy of bombing Serbs with the aim of killing as many of them as possible being given the go-ahead, despite that likely being required for it to have a real chance of success. But if a load of Serb soldiers take cover, wait until the raid is done then go and do themselves a nice little bit of 'ethnic cleansing', the bombs can't do much then, can they?

What I'm getting at here is that for all the talk and devaluing of the term by casual use, we have no clue what 'war' actually demands and we recoil in horror if anyone should actually tell us. Instead we think we can win by nice, neat, clean solutions like precise bombing and scientific warfare. But to hide behind these notions is to deny what war is - which is to say it is a harsh, cruel and vicious undertaking that is sometimes rendered necessary by the greater evil being inaction.

I don't get it. What do you think putting more soldiers on the ground would have achieved that a bombing campaign didn't? Karadzic signed the Dayton agreement as a reaction to the bombing campaign, not because of any troops on the ground, so it achieved its purpose. Are you suggesting that a full on ground offensive to defeat the Serb forces would have caused less bloodshed? Because I don't believe that to be the case.

As to how an earlier, serious sustained bombing campaign might have prevented Srebrenica: it would have driven Karadzic to start peace negotiations earlier. The half hearted military efforts before that were laughable if the consequences weren't so tragic. From wikipedia:

On 11 July 1995, NATO aircraft attacked targets in the Srebrenica area of Bosnia-Herzegovina as identified by and under the control of the United Nations.^[16] This was in response to Bosnian Serb forces advancing on the UN-declared Safe Area of Srebrenica.^[9] Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić threatened to kill 50 UN peacekeepers who were seized as hostages and also threatened to shell the Muslim population in Srebrenica if NATO air strikes continued. The UN peacekeepers called off the air strikes and agreed to withdraw from Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serbs promised they would take care of the Muslim population for the peacekeepers to spare their own lives. For two weeks, the forces of General Mladić slaughtered over 8,000 Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, in the Srebrenica massacre in what was the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

An ultimatum was issued calling for the withdrawal of forces besieging Sarajevo on September 5th 1995. The Serbs didn't comply, were bombed, and as a result of the bombing they complied 15 days later. They withdrew their forces. Then in November 1995, the Dayton agreement was signed.

It was only after the signing that more peacekeepers were sent in.

[Jim Ohara]

I seriously doubt we've seen the end of War, but I don't think we'll see another major conflict like the World Wars. It'll be police actions, brush wars and limited conflicts for the forseeable future.

Sure, and those will be is smaller less developed countries. The idea of large financially interlinked countries killing each other isn't realistic. We've had war by proxy for a couple of decades now, but at this point we're down to a handful of rogue nations with ass backward leaders doing a bit of saber rattling. You could probably list 120 countries that are never going to go to war with each other, as their infrastructure is too fragile and couldn't deal with the mess.

To put it another way, if the US got their oil from Iraq instead of Canada and gas went up to $10 a gallon in 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom would have lasted a week. The only reason the US can continue to war is that there's no obvious cost at home. That'd change if they had to ration chocolate, disrupt internet service or cancel football games for example. People in developed nations won't put up with their toys being lost like they did a couple of generations ago (a trend that started with Vietnam I think).

[Ogul]

[quote]
You're more than welcome to fuck off out of Europe. We have our own armies and nukes and it means we can keep all the good food and drink.[/quote]

Yeah, yeah, you lot say that until someone shakes a fist menacingly in your general direction, and then it's all "please come save us!"

[quote]
Much as I like Americans, I think it's past time Europe took care of it's own defence.[/quote]

You're welcome to try, we could certainly use the money elsewhere. Considering how much Europe is whinging about budgets already though, I imagine it'll be hard going to try and build up an adequate military on top of that.

[quote]
True...However I do think it is important to have a powerful army, as a part of NATO. I feel better knowing we can stop a regime like that of Milosevic or destroy a dictator like Ghadaffi if we have to.[/quote]

That would be nice.

[quote]
For Bosnia what was needed was thousands of peace-making troops with ROE that permitted them to actually deal with the military actions of all 3 parties, even though the Serbs had the advantage due to dominating the Yugoslavian military the Croatians were far from innocent.[/quote]

Yeah, but how do peacemaking troops make peace? With violence. Until such time as we have force fields or something, it's the only option.

[quote]Great quote but I'd say Asia could claim the same words.[/quote]


And America, even if our ancestors and castles only go back a couple hundred years. Hell, our revolutions and wars were so terrible that they left monarchs half a world away quaking for centuries to come.

[quote]Sure, and those will be is smaller less developed countries. The idea of large financially interlinked countries killing each other isn't realistic. We've had war by proxy for a couple of decades now, but at this point we're down to a handful of rogue nations with ass backward leaders doing a bit of saber rattling. You could probably list 120 countries that are never going to go to war with each other, as their infrastructure is too fragile and couldn't deal with the mess.[/quote]

I wonder if we'll ever get to the state of "formalized" proxy war seen in various sci-fi projects, where the battles take place in otherwise completely uninhabited and pointless locations, with the sole purpose of seeing who's tougher, like a soccer match with guns.

[quote]
To put it another way, if the US got their oil from Iraq instead of Canada and gas went up to $10 a gallon in 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom would have lasted a week. The only reason the US can continue to war is that there's no obvious cost at home. That'd change if they had to ration chocolate, disrupt internet service or cancel football games for example.[/quote]

Well, the wars did cost us, but Bush put it all on our credit cards, so we didn't really pay attention. If we'd done it like we did WWII, and made a significant effort to pay for the war as it was oingoing (via war taxes and the such), then it would have been far less popular at the time.

[The Lorcan Nagle]

Yeah, yeah, you lot say that until someone shakes a fist menacingly in your general direction, and then it's all "please come save us!"

When you can win a war on your own, then you can look down on us.

Well, the wars did cost us, but Bush put it all on our credit cards, so we didn't really pay attention. If we'd done it like we did WWII, and made a significant effort to pay for the war as it was oingoing (via war taxes and the such), then it would have been far less popular at the time.

Hiding an oean away from the fighting until one side was winning?