Middle East Policy?

[Jayand]

It's about time we seriously had a rethink on Middle Eastern policy.
General Sir Richard Dannet Retd Yesterday spouts that we should start talks with Assad and Syria! The same Syria that last year the Government wanted to overthrow to help the poor oppressed freedom fighters! Who overnight have become our worst enemy and darkest threat. We should be helping and encouraging Saudi Arabia, Quatar, et al to police their own region.
Fast forward two years (I'm being generous) and IS will have control in Afghanistan, all the Trillions of dolllars wasted and sad, sad loss of lives will have been for nothing.
Isn't it about time we left them to it?

[TBM-Legend]

The old cliche, give guns to both sides and negotiate with the survivors!

[Arcanum]

The same Syria that last year the Government wanted to overthrow to help the poor oppressed freedom fighters! Who overnight have become our worst enemy and darkest threat.

A simplistic comment worthy of the Guardian.

Supporting the moderate FSA in Syria as the UK, US and France were doing to different extents did not equate to helping ISIS. Perhaps there was some naivety about where the material would end up, but there was a reasonable aim of supporting and encouraging moderates in the region to beat both ISIS and Assad.

Fast forward two years (I'm being generous) and IS will have control in Afghanistan, all the Trillions of dolllars wasted and sad, sad loss of lives will have been for nothing.

Isn't it about time we left them to it?

What makes you think they'll leave 'us' to it once they're done?

Why would ISIL stop at Syria, why not Turkey and the Balkans too? Where do the resulting refugees go?

Will ISIL stop their social media campaigns encouraging disaffected Muslim's in the UK to attack us?

During the 90's, with far less money, experience and publicity, Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Centre (1993) and US embassies in Africa (1998) while we were leaving them to it. With ISIL generally regarded as being more extreme than Al Qaeda and no friend of the West, if they are allowed to continue their campaign and consolidate power do you think they'll leave the West alone?

What's the economic impact if ISIL increase control over oil fields? Terrorist incidents in the UK increase? Refugees need to be absorbed in Europe?

[Courtney Mil]

Saudi could start by cutting off the arms being supplied to IS. Plenty of others in the region that could get their houses in order.

[sharpend]

Personally we need a total review of defence policy commensurate with what really threatens us and what we can afford. We will always be threatened by individual minor agencies so throwing money at mad-cap schemes will not help. We certainly learnt just that in the 20th Century in Afghanistan over a hundred years ago.

More importantly, history has taught us that our friends can become our enemies, thus we should ensure that we can defend this island of ours no matter what. It was touch and go in the Second World War for us to rearm in time. Easy to build a Spitfire in a week. Now it takes years to build a Typhoon. Longer to train a pilot.

One cannot play politics with people's lives or indeed the safety of our nation. Time for this government to decide on priorities. And also ensure that those who do know what they are doing!

[Jayand]

I don't think it's a simplistic view at all, do you honestly believe that IS wouldn't have taken over in Syria if we had helped get rid of Assad? Our intervention over the last twenty five years has singularly been the main reason for the rise of these groups! First we removed the ultimately abhorrent leaders (Saddam and Gadaffi) that whilst unpalatable to the West kept these groups in check. Leaving these countries with puppet, weak leadership has allowed them to flourish. Not only that but we conveniently left a heap of high tech military hardware behind lol.
So now we have a whole generation of well armed, peed off muslims with nobody keeping them in check.
Turkey are far too strong, Iran, Saudi etc also. These countries should be sorting it out not us.

[Typhoon93]

Fast forward two years

That's a bit optimistic......

I would have said within 6 months. On January 1st, the Taliban will have complete control of the country and everything Bush set out to stop in 2001 will continue as if nothing had happened. The 'small force' the US intends to leave until 2016 will not be enough, they will be heavily out-numbered and they will be heavily out-gunned, and the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police will be powerless to do anything. At best, the 'civil war' will get bigger with the Taliban inevitably winning it. The dam in Kajaki will be destroyed and that will be their first milestone, they have wanted to destroy that thing since the beginning.

We can not win this war on terror with the current rules of engagement. How can anybody expect the armed forces to win against an enemy that can manipulate the rules? As I understand, if they stop firing, you can't shoot them. If they put their weapons down, aircraft can't engage them. It's an unwinnable war.

[Arcanum]

I don't think it's a simplistic view at all, do you honestly believe that IS wouldn't have taken over in Syria if we had helped get rid of Assad?

The comment that was simplistic was the one that said the freedom fighters we were seeking to help turned in to our worst enemy overnight.

ISIL taking over Syria had the FSA been successful in overthrowing Assad? Maybe. We'll never know.

Turkey are far too strong, Iran, Saudi etc also. These countries should be sorting it out not us.

Iran and Saudi, yes. Though Iran are already involved both on the ground and conducting air strikes. I'm not as convinced about Turkey after some of the unrest in the last few years. Jordan and Lebanon are at risk.

Regardless, if ISIL can consolidate their power in the region do you really think we'll be unaffected?

I'm not kidding myself. No one in this region is our friend. I'd favour damaging ISIL just enough to even the odds with everyone else. The more that region are fighting each other, the less time they've got to have a go at us.

Sadly, given the half-arsed way our politicians will go about any engagement, our forces will shoulder a load of risk without being given the opportunity to be really effective.

[Climebear]

We have/had a policy?

[walter kennedy]

To understand what is happening, try thinking with a different paradigm: if the destruction of all those middle-eastern states were an objective, cui bono?

[ShotOne]

"We have/had a policy?" Ha, yes climebear, lots of policies; over the course of a few days our "strictly humanitarian mission" has given way to rumours of special forces deployment, reconnaissance information used to facilitate air strikes and dispatch of loud pointy grey not-especially-humanitarian aircraft.

[Top West 50]

Janet Daley is spot on in today's Sunday Telegraph

[Xenophon]

I can't remember who said/wrote it but...................

"The man who is not afraid to die will always be your master"

What sort of policy covers that, bearing in mind that Islamic fundamentalists/extremists positively welcome death.

[Hangarshuffle]

Train Smash

Our foreign policies have been inconsistent, confused and seem now to be presently very reactive to media attention and media broadcasting.
We seem to have zig-zagged along for years and years. I can remember as if it were yesterday 1998 and 99 when we sent out SHAR and GR7 or 9 from Invincible up in the NAG and over Iraq. Effectively what did that really achieve? Stability of a kind? We seemed to want to contain Iraq as it was then (not my words, one of our seniors onboard who gave an informal brief "don't want Iraq to end up like Afghanistan, boys.Not with the radical Taliban in charge...don't want the place to be a shambles.
But then the zig zag and 2003 invasion, regime change..all a mistake in retrospect, in hindsight.(still no sign of the enquiry/war report being allowed out-why is that)?
Freed Libya very recently-that policy is now an utter shambles. Syrian policy has assisted in the present state there. Its an even bigger disaster.


Israeli/Palestine policy has resulted in what we see this month.


I think the British public truly are very worried about what we may have done, or played a part in.
Seems to be no end to the spreading ripples of violence brought about from September 11 2001. The 2003 Iraq invasion and everything we in the west do seems to make things even worse.
I have no faith in the people in charge anymore, the Government, cabinet, the COBRAs, at all. They just do not know what to do. These people are paid, are elected to have foresight and to think carefully far ahead into the future but I do not see any evidence that they are really earning their pay.

[smujsmith]

Typhoon 93 #7,

"We can not win this war on terror with the current rules of engagement. How can anybody expect the armed forces to win against an enemy that can manipulate the rules? As I understand, if they stop firing, you can't shoot them. If they put their weapons down, aircraft can't engage them. It's an unwinnable war."

What a very apt insight into what is hamstringing the military establishment in the modern era. Political correctness interferes at every level, preventing bold and appropriate responses to the barbarism of these scum who hide behind the badge of religion to justify their heinous crimes. You can not negotiate with these scum, there's no reasoning that will work, their attitude is simply, do as we say. It's time the western world threw off the shackles of PC and HR, told the likes of Mrs Bliar where she can stick it, and went out there and annihilated them. I for one no longer care what some second rate country who will not stand up to these murderers think of us, I don't want to see any more Lee Rigby's on British streets, I don't want to see failure, as in Basra. But by goodness, watching a lardy blob on a surfboard gets my goat when a situation is developing that should have his attention. Anyone who believes that we should play "marquis of Queensbury" rules with these scum should think again, walk away now and the next 200 heads on sticks might surround Leicester. Fight them gloves off, where they are now, and beat them.

Smudge

[Hangarshuffle]

Control only what we can, should be our policy.

I think anyway we lack to military weight or muscle, lack the diplomatic gravitas to really count abroad in any sort of policy. That era for Britain finally collapsed in Iraq around about 2007 or 2008, for me at least.
Middle East policy don't make me laugh- we need to start look much more closely within our own island for a start. You all know as well as I do we now have numerous areas of the UK that no longer look like home anymore. Parts of even Hull, Newcastle upon Tyne, Luton let alone the Midlands or London look to me, totally foreign with large embedded very visible ethnic communities, hundreds of thousands of people with, deep down no real love or allegiance to Great Britain.
There's the future problem for us, its as clear as day But we've probably even blown that now, for our future generations.


I'm not trying to be offensive here, or want to sound like old Alf Garnet, but its true. And its too late. We can all see what's going to come.

[Lima Juliet]

Lambasted ever since, a certain retired Brigadier made this speech in April 1968 - one that I still have problems with, but I'm starting to think that for certain elements is starting to ring true (the Trojan Horse, the murder of an unarmed off-duty soldier in London and the hacking off of a totally innocent photo journalist's head with what looked like a pretty blunt knife by a guy with a. London accent):

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."
Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.
At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.
After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."
I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.
In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.
There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.
The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.
Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.
I stress the words "for settlement." This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.
I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.
Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.
Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.
Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.
The third element of the Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no "first-class citizens" and "second-class citizens." This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.
The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.
This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.
Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.
In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.
I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:
“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.
“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.
“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.
Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.
But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.
Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:
'The Sikh communities' campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.'
All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.
Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

[Typhoon93]

I agree, Smudge.

In my view, the rules of engagement should be dropped for these 'people' as it's clearly not working. Drop the politics, drop the rules of engagement and drop 10,000 ground troops in to Iraq and let them do what the Infantry does best with support from the air. They will have all of these thugs in body bags and will be back home for tea and medals within a month, and the affected areas will have peace and freedom once again.

[Hangarshuffle]

No more involvement or military engagement abroad.

It will be far too risky, politically and for home security reasons to engage abroad within Islamic countries in the future. We have probably several hundred young men from Britain who have now travelled abroad, fought hard and now returned to the UK. Many or most are unknown to the security services and pursuing them is expensive, difficult and time consuming. We can fully expect some of these people to attack UK civilians within our own streets in the future, when it suits them to.
This massive pressure, if and when used correctly (and I mean bloodily and from their point of view) and with the appropriate mass media publicity that will be deliberately generated will stop UK interference or military policy abroad, full stop.
Its a win-win for the UK jihadists whichever way a UK government goes.


The fluffy haired one seems to have picked up on it, always a bad sign. Mind you he cant even get the police to prevent innocent young women being shot dead in drive-by shootings in Central London (which we are already collectively immune to now for shock effect value).


Johnson calls for 'guilty until proven innocent' for suspected terrorists | Politics | theguardian.com


I see nothing but trouble ahead for many if we continue on our current mad path.

[ShotOne]

Let's not get carried away and change the thread subject to 1950's immigration policy. The fact is that 46 years have passed since Enoch promised "rivers of blood" in 15-20 years; the only recent civil disorder has been by mostly-white criminal opportunists

Typhoon, are you having a laugh about sending 10,000 troops? Who would you tell them to shoot, and to what end? Then what?