Sue G

Thanks for the correction.......Miranda Blair, theatrical and feminine! Either way it fits the picture in my opinion!

I know where you are coming from, but there is one thing I disagree with, at least from this side of the pond. You say Nobody joins the armed services thinking they will have a career without conflict, these are dangerous times! And that may be true these past five years, but I know allot of people (my husband was in the USAF) who joined the services to get an education. Joining during peace time, not expecting to get back into any serious conflict, and now that they are, they want out.

Of course times are different, when you sign up now, you pretty much know the chances of serving in the war zone are high. God's blessing to those who continue to serve, and who choose to sign up in this time of war..

My youngest son, who graduates next year, intends to join the Marines. I can't say I want him to, but it's his life.

Just my two pennies worth.

Andy

As you say we are entitled to our opinions. I wouldn't dream of trying to persuade you to accept my opinion. The thread, 'my opinion' was/is always going to be controversial and in fact I am surprised that it didn't get more of a response. But the truth is that the POE forum is for the members to have 'their say', true, false, fun, enjoy or not its there for us, and I would be really disappointed if everybody agreed with everything that I had to say. Thinks....thats opened the floodgate I bet!

The other thing is of course, some of us work away from the PC and some of us 'fat controllers' enjoy perks! Peter said you had a perk on your lap or something, did I read that right? 

Ah, Sue, you've hit the nail on the head. Who do we think we are? I'll answer that one first if I may. We're the same old bullies that we have always been throughout history...taking what we want from anyone weak enough to get it from. We've always been picky though....even very recently, ie 1982, we invaded one of 'our' islands thousands of miles away to protect the poor old sheep herders (whom may I add didn't want us to!!) from those nasty Argentinians with their badly trained, very young army and air force. Absolutely no 'British' citizen was killed or even injured during the Argentinian invasion of their own land....but we soon changed that with our imperial task force. When asked if they'd all like to return to the safety of England, every one, yes, every one of the inhabitants said no. Soveriegnity, pah! The super etendards and exocets shook us up though with a lot of British casualties, so we were lucky there weren't more. ( This would have been my answer to Sues' point in another discussion about our lads and lasses signing up by the way, our history speaks for itself) So what did we do about Gibraltar? Task force to Spain? No. What a surprise! Hong Kong? How odd that we didn't invade China. It's the same old same old. Second point Sue. You say Saddam had no truck with terrorism. Sorry Sue, he most certainly did. Gassing and torturing the Kurds was terrorism, and I think it's fair to say he had some dodgy bedfellows, to put it mildly if you ask me. In the first Gulf war, the Iraqis were less than pleased when we pulled out after failing to topple Saddam, now we are there, putting our own lives at risk, to try and complete the 'job', but that isn't working either. So we can't win, whatever we do, the insurgients will always have the upper hand because they are invisible. In my very humble and often incorrect opinion, Great Britain is seen as a world leader in diplomacy, intelligence gathering, has arguably the best trained military and all the right connections in all the wrong places, if you catch my drift, so we are almost automatically dragged into the mire with most conflicts. Our expertise in terrorism makes us No.1 on Americas' shopping list of allies,(along with Israel of course) we've had to deal with the I.R.A. for long enough, so we know a bit about counter-terrorism. There have almost certainly been many terrorism attempts thwarted on our mainland recently,I can't prove it but I reckon I'm right there. And one of the important things to remember is that we have British subjects living all over the world, whether in embassies, oil workers, IT personnel or just tourists (think of Egypt) that we have a duty to protect. We're in Iraq because our big brother needs us, there never was a choice.....the WMS issue was just the way to get over the U.N. argument I think. In time, the terrorists would have come to Britain anyway, our debauched way of life has never been acceptable to the Arab world, religion (or lack of it), power and money have made us infidels for a very long time. Andy.