[Closed] So, is that the next Middle East War now in progress

This world is totally bollocksed isn't it?

I'm gonna get pissed.

This world is totally bollocksed isn't it?

I'm gonna get pissed.

Sounds like a plan, Whisky or Rum that is the real issue..

The French (who'd have thought it!)

Really ?

[url= http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-20/sarkozy-s-approval-rating-slumps-to-record-low-survey-shows.html ]Sarkozy’s Approval Rating Slumps to Record Low, Survey Shows[/url]

Seeing your glorious military score easy victories always does wonders for one's approval ratings.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" was true over 200 years ago and it is still true today.

Of course it's a different story if things goes tits up. But with Libya having a population of less than 7 million and very little in the way of advanced weapons, it pretty much guarantees that won't happen.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys the lot of them.

[img] [/img]

Some day we'll all stop killing each other.

flip - Member
This world is totally bollocksed isn't it?
I'm gonna get pissed.

Sounds like a plan, Whisky or Rum that is the real issue..

POSTED 13 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

Ravenswood zinfandel for me x 2 bottles.

What's the problem? All recent previous wars have gone so well!

Cabernet Sauvignon at our house BTW.

[i]This world is totally bollocksed isn't it?

I'm gonna get pissed.[/i]

me too. 😕

I went for Rum, but am having second thoughts..

Bought my wife a nice Chilean red.

It was £5!!!!!!!!!

Never say i don't spoil her 😉

What's the problem? All recent previous wars have gone so well!

Ah, they've thought about that......absolutely no ground troops this time - just air attacks. Should be fine......don't worry.

and the usa are not there yet so no friendly fire deaths - well not to the westerners who l,ets face it, are the only lifes we are counting.

This world is totally bollocksed isn't it?

the world will be fine, especially once the recently evolved plague of fast breeding, pointlessly aggressive hominids kills itself off. Then it can go and do something exciting have giant insects all over the planet for a few million years until the entire solar system gets wiped out when the sun finally dies.

we are merely a pointless little evolutionary hiccup in the grand scheme of things and won't be around long enough to even leave decent fossils in the geological record

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?

Middle eastern despotism is dying. Helping it along to the graveyard looks good to me.

Kentucky Bourbon here to the French and their guts. Long may the Yanks stay away from the area, no need for accidental friendly killings.

US Sub launched Tomahawks are in, on air defences around Tripoli, if I got it right.

Middle eastern despotism is dying. Helping it along to the graveyard looks good to me.

Only the ones that are not in our interests to keep around.

So, is that the next Middle East War now in progress

YAY! CHEAP OIL!

Well, it's certainly gone noisy now

BBC:
2031: A US military chief says a total of 110 Tomahawk missiles have been launched against Libyan sites. He said the Coalition operation has been named Odyssey Dawn.

UK Sub has also fired Tommahawks.

Who needs ground troops when you can just level the place from afar?

Operation 'Odysset Dawn' Kinda has bad Hollywood film written all over it.

I stuck with the Rum, it's going well 😉

110 cruise missiles fired. They're £600k a pop aren't they?
I don't recall this Lind of response in Uganda .....

Unrest in the middle-east, involving the UN, = Job security for me

Bring it on.

x-post from the other thread:

am i allowed to say told "told you so yet"?

I'm sure the Navy's Tomahawks already have their targets picked

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/how-long-until-we-start-bombing-libya-then

oh ****!

Just what we needed...another war somewhere with oil.

Interested to see how it all pans out, hopefully won't be too bad for the people of Libya, mind you, can't be much worse than how it is for them at the moment.

We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Stand by and watch thousands be slaughtered by Gaddaffi or step in and try to protect and possibly result in more deaths over a longer period of time.

Anyone got a crystal ball handy, would even settle for some tarot cards.

Let the game begins ...

people are either computer generated or get up after the camera is switched off = game

dead real people = not a game

hth

110 cruise missiles fired. They're £600k a pop aren't they?

The missiles hit more than 20 air defence sites along the Mediterranean coast,

That's about getting air superiority do that air strikes on military convoys are without much risk.

The French (who'd have thought it!)

Never quite worked that one out - given the 1000s of years of history of us fighting the French, why do we so pathetically follow the US lead of "cheese eating [b]surrender[/b] monkeys"? I mean, the cheese I can understand, but "surrender"?

why do we so pathetically follow the US lead of "cheese eating surrender monkeys"? I mean, the cheese I can understand, but "surrender"?

It comes from peope forming their historical interpretation from episodes of the Simpsons rather than any actual historical record.

Libya is in Africa, not the middle east.

Libya is in Africa, not the middle east.

Where Libya is, is of absolutely no importance.......we're talking about war here - not a geography lesson.

In 1982, on the eve of the Falklands War, the overwhelming majority of people in Britain had absolutely no clue whatsoever where the Falkland Islands where - despite the fact that they wanted to go to war over them.

The same was true in 1962 when the majority of Americans had no idea where Vietnam was. There was a famous case of a mother who had just lost her son in Vietnam, thinking that Vietnam was in South America.

When wealthy western countries go to war, their people only need to know that it will be somewhere "foreign", and that they will be killing foreign people ......... hopefully a very long way away.

Where Libya is, is of absolutely no importance.......we're talking about war here

Glad you're not inputting the GPS co-ordinates into the missiles 😉

Where Libya is, is of absolutely no importance.......we're talking about war here - not a geography lesson.

That's potentially the most naive thing you've ever posted. War is geography; and the reasons for going to war are dependant on and determined by economic geographies, political geographies, cultural geographies all acting at different scales with different impacts in different places. Geography matters.

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the reasons for going to war are dependant on and determined by economics, politics, and cultural difference all acting at different scales with different impacts in different places. Adding the word geography to all of these reasons seems a bit odd and adds nothing to the sentence unless of course you think politics, culture and econimics are subsets of geography which seem prima facie to be wrong.

Where Libya is, is of absolutely no importance

I think that if you review what the abstact concept of the Lybian state is physically sat on top of in terms of resources then [i]where Lybia is[/i] geographically, is probably the most important factor of the whole thing.

But I take your point about the pedantics. I think that the definition of the middle east has entered into the mindset of people as being any country with an arab population and oil resources.

unless of course you think politics, culture and econimics are subsets of geography which seem prima facie to be wrong.

Unless of course you insert the word global/regional/other geographical term in front of those concepts which is what you would have to do in the case of all wars except civil ones and even then I would imagine some geographical connection as being inevitable.

Junkyard - Member
the reasons for going to war are dependant on and determined by economics, politics, and cultural difference all acting at different scales with different impacts in different places. Adding the word geography to all of these reasons seems a bit odd and adds nothing to the sentence unless of course you think politics, culture and econimics are subsets of geography which seem prima facie to be wrong.

Economies, political systems and cultures - amongst other things - operate differently in different places, across different spaces and at various scales. They create and are determined by geographies. I'm not talking about where a place is on a map, although that is important, but about the way place, space, scale and the interplay between these things construct (and are constructed by) relationships between individuals, groups, institutions etc. These relationships are different in different countries, regions, cities etc.

I can give you an extensive reading list to demonstrate this if you want, but it is a debate which has raged in the social sciences for over a century. Google 'geography matters doreen massey' for a good start.

These relationships are different in different countries, regions, cities etc

You're misunderstanding what I mean by geography. That's not your fault, it is the way geography is taught at school, and geographers don't do a particularly good job of selling the discipline. I'll try and have a go.

Geography is more than where things (the material world) are, it is more than where mountains are, where river flow, where cities are located, where borders are drawn, or what resources are buried where. It is also about where, and most importantly, why the different parts of the economy are located, or why particular political systems are successftul (or otherwise) in some places than others, or why do Geordies see themselves differently to Makams, amongst many other things.

Now, while other disciplines could explain these things they would do so in a different way to geographers. But even economists and sociologists understanding that geography matters in explaining these things (for example, the World Bank's [i]World Development Report 2009[/i] had a subtitle of [i]'Reshaping economic geography'[/i]. Central to the way geographers understand they world are concepts such as space and place, proximity and distance, scale and connection, and relationships. You can have a read about them [url= http://www2.johnabbott.qc.ca/~geoscience/intro/Bryce/Jackson2006ThinkingGeographically.pdf ]here[/url] with some neat examples if i've not bored you already.

Importantly, these concepts explain how geographies (the where, why and how of everything) are socially constructed through the relationships between individuals, groups, institutions, government, firms etc, and the environment (and of course the latter is shaped materially and emotionally/psychologically/imaginatively by the formers).

Using these concepts to understand the impact of a government policy on the North East of England vs the South East, or why US foreign policy means they are reluctant to be seen leading the enforcement of the no combat zone over Libya, and very reticent to get involved in the uprising in Bahain, provides a geographical understanding of phenomena/events. Using concepts central to economics would give you a different perspective, as would using political science concepts. I, as a geographer (I'm a lecturer btw), would argue that just taking a economistic perspective would provide an impoverished view because it concentrates on mainly one thing: the economy. Geography is a broad church and examines the economic alongside the social, political and cultural factors at play in a situation. Moreover, they do this while examining the specificities of place - i.e. how these factors operate in the case in question, and why they operate in that way. Let's not forget than many leading economists believe the world is now flat, despite huge amounts of evidence it isn't. So, these factors are not real. They are socially constructed by the way to interact and understand them - economics does this, history does this, and so does geography - i.e. they are subsets of geography because they can be understood through an appreciation of geography.

Hopefully that makes some sort of sense, apologies if it doesn't i'm quite tired after my ride.

The Massey book is available via google books.

I don't want to worry anyone, but I just looked up a couple of things.

The distance from Tripoli to London is 2331.04 kilometers.

The SU 24 bomber currently in service with the good Colonel has a range of 3,000 kilometers...

One way only, I know, but if the pilots are fanatical enough? 🙁

you're onto something there woppit - maybe he could fly at night when everyone involved in EU early warning systems are asleep. Now i'm really worried 🙄

Yeah, fair enough.

having last sudied geography in 1984 i am happy to conceed the ground to your knowledge base unless you want me to discuss the Archamedes screw or follow the time honoured STW tradition of not letting ignorance be a bar to an entrenched opinion.
You have shined a bright light into an area of which I am [was] completely ignorant in fact I am happy to class it is an unknown unknown.
To compound my ignorance I bought a goat as well 😯
Intersting article and clearly I am not well informed enough to pass comment but I understand now that the term is much broader than I[and most people] would have used it - as the article notes
Cheers

You have shined a bright light into an area of which I am [was] completely ignorant

I'm glad. I'm also relieved as I had to retype my previous post after I was logged out.