Let’s think before acting in War : Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

Words can't say what I mean. Chantelle (Source: Colemanballs, Private Eye)

Let’s think before acting in War

10th February 2003 by Simon

I think that people aren’t taking the threat of war seriously. Sure they talk about it, how awful, how silly it all is, but these days we live such a cosseted existence that people think that it might go on, they’ll watch some of it on TV, maybe a few troops from their country die, but it won’t really will affect them. It will be like the Gulf war - it won’t personally touch them - they can pretty much carry on their lives as normal.

I wonder what the attitude of the general public was in the build up to either of the World wars? Now history isn’t my strongest subject, but I don’t think there had been any major, far-reaching conflicts before WWI, so people probably didn’t imagine that something like that could happen.

Before WWII people had experienced a World war relatively fresh in their minds and you would have thought they should have learnt lessons - but as we now all know, it started anyway.

How many countries did Hitler pre-announce the invasion of? I don’t know, perhaps he just did his one at a time. So the Bush “Axis of Evil” certainly sounds ambitious, a road map of the countries that he wants to idiotically tune - it almost has a dotcom land-grab feel about it.

Korea looks like it’s hotting up. What happens if they persist with their intention to build of a nuclear weapons? Does the US invade there as well and start fighting on two fronts?

If the US thinks Saddam must be made an example of, even without showing any tangible, solid evidence - what if US action sets off a chain of events that leads somewhere horrible? If this is going to be a nuke-war, the numbers of people who died in the World wars is going to looks silly.

I thought everyone was now more globally aware, cheap flights mean that we travel on all over the world and we have more information available to more people than at any time, ever.

If the mass of public opinion is that “something must be done” with Saddam, which personally I’m far from convinced of, what’s the rush to get into a war?

I imagine that Iraq is about the most watched country in the World at the moment with all sorts of devices looking down and around it. If the fear is that he has WMD, let the inspectors continue their work until they either find something, or nothing. In the meantime we watch Iraq like hawks, monitor its boarders making sure nothing lethal escapes to people. “The powers that be” really don’t like this year (aka terrorists).

[Don’t think that I’ve thought through all of the ramification of the above - if someone suggested it to me, I might think it was an enormous infringement on Iraq’s liberty (a definite one without evidence of their wrong doing)]

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