British troop iraqi redeployment

[Zedmeister]

Thoughts on our boys going to prop up bush's Junta? How come the americans can't spare 650 troops?



As an aside, anyone seen the daily mirror today? I hate tabloids, but they seem to have hit the nail on the head on this occassion...

Linky

Perfect

[MAS]

I think we all know it's a political, rather than a logistical, move.

I'm not happy about it. However, I'd like to make a point that may not be very popular, but I feel needs to be said anyway. The government agreed to support the war on Iraq; and last time I checked it was our government, not Bush, who controlled out armed forces. I'm not defending Bush, but constantly demonising him and the Americans is only serving to do one thing, and that's deflect criticism from the government. Why, all of a sudden, is this 'Bush's war', when we were quite happy to support it? We went in with them, and maybe now we'll have to make some of the sacrifices. I don't want that to happen, but really, who's at fault?

[RVF500]

The most worrying thing for me is that our troops will be under direct US military command. Their doctrine is more old soviet then modern western. Take a very large hammer and crack a small nut. Our forces on the other hand have had a long history of hearts and mind campaigns, peacekeeping and low key warfare. Example such as the Malayan crisis and Borneo, Oman, in Bosnia and Rwanda etc. The US mission to Somalia was a signal disaster. They have little in the way of peacekeeping history.

I've seen comments that the British forces should stop holding back and get stuck in instead of skulking in Basra. Basra is more stable than Bagdad because it has been handled better. There are plenty of problems in and around Basra but these have been kept low key. The PWRR was attacked something like 680 times during their tour. They lost 2 fatalities. Not a bad record when you think of it. I am concerned at how the US will deploy and utilise our troops and what excess casualties they may incur as a result.

This is another example of how Blair uses British soldiers as throwaway items to boost his foriegn standing. His fatuous remark about him telling his family he 'could lose his job' over the Iraq war sums him up. 8 young marines lost their jobs on the first night when their chinook helicopter crashed. An armoured regiment Sergeant lost his job because there wasn't enough body armour to go around. So on and so forth. We all know about the Tank Regiment Trooper who is about to be hung out to dry in what smells decidedly like a political gesture to appease the 'anti' lobby.

I support our troops wholeheartedly. They are stuck in a war and have no choice in the matter. Now, it seems, instead of coming home on October 25th the Black Watch are to be redeployed as a political bargaining chip by Blair and Co. But I don't support this war, we should have done the job right first time around when we had the backing of the UN and to a large extent the Arab nations. Instead of sitting on our hands and letting the marsh Arabs do our dirty work for us. Which they failed, unsurprisingly. They revolted relying on our support. Which never came. That was the failure of another Bush and now we are paying for that failure.

The last such gesture was when Margaret Thatcher was persuaded to allow Reagan to send troops to Grenada (a British protectorate) as he needed to political kudos of of a conflict to help his election campaign (ironic huh?). They blew the crap out of the place - see: large hammer, small nut. Can you imagine what would have been left of Port Stanley if a US Marine division had retaken it?

[Pete]

my friends dad is now an admiral or commodore or something like that in the navy but used to be an army sergeant in bosnia (may have been the marines thats why hes now in the navy) but he said that american troops are trained terribly they just dont have a clue what to do ever, mabye he went a little over the top.
but i no i dont want people like that controlling our force as said above our armed forces have done a great job in basra and i think it would be easily possible for them to clean up the mess in baghdad and fallujah if they were aloud to command themselves
but there not aloud to so instead our lions are gonna get sent into stupid situations by commanding donkeys (no offence to any american reading this)
also blair claims that theyl be back before xmas if i were him i wouldnt be saying that, it just makes me think that iraq is gonna end up a full blown out revamp of ww1.
i might be wrong but this is my opinion on the subject
tanks (no pun)