I was however being contrary for the sake of it

Oh no you weren’t.

A fair point. I wasn’t being contrary. Its always good to start the week with a bit of sparring with Uncle Jezzer though 😀

indeed, although he does seem to be on a bit of a hair trigger at the moment.

Don’t wind him up then. You don’t know, he might be having a difficult time right now or something; don’t be nasty to people, have a bit of empathy and compassion ffs.

Elfin – but maybe coming on here and having a bit of a ding dong helps him get through the day – if we deprive him of that he might go postal at the old peoples home?

Yeah but don’t be nasty that’s all.

Who? Gadaffi or TJ?

wwaswas is right. He loves it! And Id never be nasty to Uncle Jezzer anyway. I just don’t agree with his assertions about Libya mate

Well I do, so shut up Binners.

FWIW – I think the decision to ‘help out’ the rebels was pretty much a defensive move
I’m not entirely convinced that the motive was purely to get our hands on the oil – which we won’t
When the Libyan rebels kicked off they were fancying their chances as part of the whole ‘kicking off’ that was sweeping around that part of the world.
It must of been fairly clear straight away to us that they didn’t quite have the support of – say – the Egyptians and the chances of a prolonged uprising were very high indeed
The chances of radical Muslim group gaining influence as a long uprising played out would be high
The proximity of the Suez canal and the uncomfortable scenarios of a radical state with massive resources even closer to the West than they are already was probably a massive factor in us deciding we needed to get this over before other things could come into play.
We could handle Gaddafi OK because he would stop any dissent but what happened was just too much for us to be comfortable that he’d sort it out quickly, so we had to push it on a bit.