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“Yay” or “nay”? British jihadis are killed by drone strike ordered by the PM
The revelation that Khan, 21, from Cardiff, had been assassinated in the first RAF drone strike against a Briton triggered claims of extra-judicial killing. But Mr Cameron insisted the attacks were an act of self-defence
How say you?
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Can’t say I’m particularly bothered whether the deadun’s a Brit or not. But I’m looking for a difference between a drone strike in Syria & a bombing on the London streets & not finding the slightest sign of one. So what exactly is the difference between the Conservative Party & Al Q & the RAF & ISIS?
ISIL? IZAL? (shrugs)
If a British citizen wants to get a fair trial in a British court, then let him come back to Britain to stand trial. As an American, I feel the same way about American citizens who are committing treason by fighting with ISIS; come home to stand trial for treason, or don’t expect us to cry too much when we toast your butt on the battlefield.
By joining ISIS he deliberately took up arms against all of wertern civilization. That is an act or war, thus he got what he deserved.
bloke “So what exactly is the difference between the Conservative Party & Al Q & the RAF & ISIS?”
The difference is the RAF used an explosive weapon on combatants who had declared war on them, ISIS plans to use an explosive weapon against noncombatants whose only “hostile action” was breathing while not moslem.
Gonna play, gotta pay.
A rare commendable use of taxpayer money.
Then there’s this. “An 18 year old woman has appeared at the Old Bailey charged with terrorism after she tried to join the fight against ISIS.”
I mean, had she succeeded in joining the fight, would she be a legitimate drone target.
I agree that bombing the fuck out of ISIS guys in Syria and Iraq is fine, but targeting British terrorists? Much as I’d like to see the likes of McGuiness or Gerry Adams get their come-uppance I’m not sure a drone strike in Belfast is the way.
Remember it’s the bureaucrats picking the targets for the [oliticians.
@ bloke in spain
“what exactly is the difference between”:
a) “the Conservative Party & Al Q”
b) “the RAF & ISIS?”
You cannot perceive a difference?
I am astounded.
Good result.
Ina answer to “Yay” or “Nay” – Yay.
It’s a tricky one. I can appreciate the arguments on both sides. The trouble is that we have ISIS, an organization we can’t officially recognize for fear of legitimizing it and antagonizing the states whose territory it occupies, which we therefore can’t be at war with, but which quite clearly is at war with us. How do we deal with that?
What I find interesting is that the strike was made public. Khan could easily have been killed in “fighting”, and nobody would have been any the wiser. Obviously the reason is to deter others thinking of following him, but it does suggest that the government must be pretty confident in the legal advice it’s been given.
But overall, I agree with Ken, Eric, and Veryretired. Could this be reframed to suggest that the government now thinks it has carte blanche to assassinate anyone it pleases? Possibly. But so could events during the Cold War. As far as this killing of this member of this organization goes, I’m not losing any sleep.
I’d submit that Mr. Cameron’s agreement to house and feed in perpetuity “22,000” Syrians- each of whom is an ISIS administrative problem and/or agent- and their descendants is a significant ISIS victory. One which they would gleefully trade several hundred Khans for.
I think the answer to Natalie’s question depends on whether the UK (or the West in general) should be fighting ISIS in the first place. If it should*, then the fact that the killed happen to be UK citizens is irrelevant, because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
*I think we (the West) should do that, but I have no well-informed opinion as to whether what we are doing there and the way we are doing it is what should be done and how it should be done.
Sam, those states no longer exist other than on paper – ISIS very much does, and I have no problem with legitimizing it by killing off as many of its members as possible, with the aforementioned reservation.
Whack all the jihadis you want. I won’t cry.
There’s a rumor going around that Eric Tavenner has been secretly working for ISIS. Nobody’s ever proven this in court, but if he doesn’t care why should I?
More seriously:
There’s probably a good practical case to be made for constructing rules of evidence that aren’t so vulnerable to fourth-generation warfare, but for that to happen we need to actually construct some rules; “executives get to write kill lists” is not a good substitute. Our ideals typically say that trials-in-absentia are human rights violations, for example; perhaps we should consider how and whether to weaken that ideal before skipping straight to executions-in-absentia?
I think this should be cleared up by reusing the term of ‘outlaw” with its full removal of civil protections from those declared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw
In historical legal systems, an outlaw is declared as outside the protection of the law. In pre-modern societies, the criminal is withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone is legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. In early Germanic law, the death penalty is conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice. The concept is known from Roman law, as the status of homo sacer, and persisted throughout the Middle Ages.
In the common law of England, a “Writ of Outlawry” made the pronouncement Caput gerat lupinum (“Let his be a wolf’s head”, literally “May he bear a wolfish head”) with respect to its subject, using “head” to refer to the entire person (cf. “per capita”) and equating that person with a wolf in the eyes of the law: Not only was the subject deprived of all legal rights of the law being outside of the “law”, but others could kill him on sight as if he were a wolf or other wild animal.[citation needed] Women were declared “waived” rather than outlawed but it was effectively the same punishment.
But on the other hand I hate the stste having that power.
Interesting historical fact, during the American revolution the revolutionaries property wasnt seized by the crown because the law protected it. (I cant find the exact links now, if someone has the time that would be great)
Mr Quigly
I don’t think going killing people in foreign lands is a particularly good idea. Because it tends to make people in foreign lands think it’s a good idea come over & do the same to you. And bearing in mind the UK is a very soft target, you can’t win this one.
Now, I’m not in the slightest sense a pacifist. If you think these guys are a threat to the UK, I’d have absolutely no objection to Cameron using a couple of Tridents & nuking whichever piece of ground they’re infesting down to the bedrock. But neither he nor the Britpub have the stomach for that sort of thing. Arbitrary drone strikes on the odd raghead is not likely to deter them. A lot less, in fact, than a bombing in a British city would put the wind up Brits. They don’t really care about loss of lives. They just see it as a good recruiter to the cause. So if you start a game of tit-for-tat, you aren’t going to come out on top.
Now, since the Blair Imperium, the UK’s been doing rather a lot of this sort of thing. Imposing hallowed British values at gun & bomb point. Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya…. I haven’t noticed there’s been much uptake. But did anyone seriously think their would be? It doesn’t work.
I’d be happier if they didn’t have to use expensive Hellfire missiles to do the job. Otherwise, no issue with it at all – he got what he was asking for.
Who cares what they care about once they are dead?
Well, maybe not – but it sure beats having to kill them when they are already in your land.
2 thoughts
1. kill them all and let god sort them out. By which I mean, my son before my brother, my brother before my nephew, my nephew before my cousin, my cousin before any fucking foreigner or potential foe, ever, I don’t give a rat’s ass about them except in a generalized way and if they create the slightest risk to me and mine, kill every fucking one of them.
2. Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not. And we better goddam well preserve that superiority.
Alisa, the Romans believed that the best defence was to offend, by continually expanding your borders! It could end up being a slippery slope into perpetual occupation. And the advise to go to other countries or they’ll come to yours was Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption.
Since ISIS has declared a desire to recreate the Caliphate, and expand into the whole world, then this could be called long-term self-defence, and if we otherwise stay out of the region, and don’t establish protectorates on the ground, we might be able to stay out of the quagmire called The Middle East.
It’s just that self-defence usually implies something personal in the attack, as though the jihadi had gone out looking to destroy innocent drones, who were just sitting there not offending anyone!
I don’t think going killing people in foreign lands is a particularly good idea. Because it tends to make people in foreign lands think it’s a good idea come over & do the same to you.
But they already think that! At least the radical Muslims do. Good for the UK on this one.
If he was actively involved in a plot to kill people on British soil, what was Cameron supposed to do? Write a harshly worded letter?
Mr. Hitler bombed London. Mr. Churchill bombed Germany, not just one German city! Bloke, by your logic, no difference there, eh? Except maybe that Mr. Churchill was the more excessive?
Natalie, I vote “yay” and, FWIW, I’d next target Khan’s siblings and parents, his cousins and Imam, and his god! (sorry I’m lexdyxic, I meant dog; ok, not really)
Well done that man!
Fuck ’em and the camels they sodomize. I’m bored of this game already. If they want piss-off to the arse-end of Bedlam then like whatever.
But I will add one thing… There seems to be an issue with drone strikes like they are somehow unsporting. Well bugger that! Just because no British personnel were directly in the line of fire shouldn’t matter a tinker’s cuss.
The government should neither confirm or deny that nanoscale tracking technology has been planted on all jihadis departing for Syria.
And one way tickets to Syria should be offered at all mosques.
Imploring them to stay just makes them feel important. Beg them to leave. Laugh openly at their Stone Age ideas.
This war is best fought in the mind.
ISIS are outlaws; by general agreement, the common enemies of mankind, like pirates. And like pirates, they are subject to violent suppression by any legitimate state. As they are armed, they are legitimate targets for arms.
The man in question may not have had a gun in his hands at that moment. But he was part of an “armed band”, an organized group some of whom always have weapons in hand, and all of whom either bear arms or support those who do.
Were they enemy combatants?
Were they in a war zone?
Were they killed by the usual processes of waging war?
If yes to all three, then “targeted” sounds so much more accurate than does “assassinated”.
Best regards
Not everyone born in Britain is British.
The information given out by Mr Cameron about this incident appears to have been timed to mollify possible adverse reaction to admitting 20,000 or so Syrian refugees to the UK. However, the incident as an act of self-defence is obviously wrong, but perhaps he meant ‘defence of others’, which under English law, is a defence to a charge of murder, unless you are acting under duress. (i.e. If A points a gun at B and says ‘Stab C to death or I will shoot you dead‘, B is liable for C’s murder regardless of B being under duress.
It does seem rather difficult to accept that the missile strike and killing was necessary for imminent self-defence in terms of the criminal law, so the issue must be whether or not the criminal law applies to military operations of the UK Armed Forces overseas in a situation outside of a declaration of war or hostilities (e.g. the Falklands War). If this is an armed conflict that the UK is engaged in, (which it appears to be by virtue of the drone strike) then the killing of any jihadi would seem to be legitimate. The issue of the House of Commons voting or not voting to authorise the use of force is merely a political convention, it has no force in law AFAIK.
So if the Royal Prerogative is invoked to justify the strike as the initiation of participation in an armed conflict, it is simply an action against enemy combatants. No wonder the Labour Party got so het up about it.
I still think that we should do what Sir Arthur Harris probably would have done had he been tasked with winning, not simply fighting, this battle, or nothing at all.
We have laws and we have laws of war. As I understand it these laws have been around for a long time and they are capable of dealing with most security threats. So, all we have to do (in theory) is to apply them.
I do not know what our laws would say about this case but it sounds distinctly dodgy.
No one said anything about border expansion. Israel has been occasionally bombing selected targets beyond its borders, and yet somehow that has never been used as pretext for the expansion of those particular borders (not that there have not been border expansions, but they came about under rather different circumstances).
Yay.
And what Eric Tavenner said.
And what Alisa said.
And what TimR said.
Yay – kill the terrorist bleeps.
Although a lot more of the young, male, Islamist warriors, chanting “God is Great”, are coming into Europe – including Britain.
The BBC calls them “refugees”. Even though they were in Turkey – not Syria.
Oh well – at least future drone strikes will be closer to home.
The borders of Israeli control have been SHRINKING for decades.
Most of the land that Israel controlled when I was young has gone.
Either handed over to Egypt – an area bigger than Israel itself
Or handed over to the various gangs in Gaza.
Even last Jew removed from both the great desert land – and from Gaza also.
The whole area made “Jew free”.
But not a word of thanks from the word.
Just demands that the Jews get out of more areas – and more, and more……
The Irish know well where this sort of thinking leads.
Shall we say it together boys and girls…….
“When the Celts came to Ireland they found the people of the Goddess Dana already there. The Celts got all of Ireland above the ground, and the people of the Goddess Dana got all of Ireland below the ground – hence the fairy rings and fairy mounds”.
How sweet – no one could object to that.
When all the Jews have been sent to the land “below the ground” perhaps fairy mounds will be built for them.
To the applause of the “international community”.
Killing the enemy is not “dodgy” at all Patrick.
Although I know you prefer British Generals who specialise in getting their own men killed.
Without the slightest sign of personal shame – even if they get twenty thousand British soldiers killed in a single day.
And if you doubt that these young Islamists were enemies – then listen to them.
They make no secret of the fact – in their own videos where they wave their rifles about and boast about how they are going to raise the Black Flag over the ruins of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.
One kills the enemy by whatever means are necessary – and at a time and place of one’s own choosing. The enemy does not get to decide where and when the violence occurs – unless they are dealing with an idiot.
God Save The Queen.
I think that Patrick is right to say that it sounds ‘dodgy’, at least from the perspective of English law. The purported basis was self-defence, but an RAF Pilot Officer (or whatever) on an RAF base in Lincolnshire would be at no risk from a Jihadi in Syria. Defence of another? This was not purported as the reason, although it might have been stated using deliberately sloppy wording. Who was at risk? What was the imminent threat that would justify the killing in terms of English criminal law? Was in a real-time threat, after all, if it was based on, say, an intercepted phone call and knowledge of movements, how could a drone pilot know of the threat to the UK?
The nature of the threat has not been explained except in a manner that raised more questions than it answered. That it was, in my mind, perfectly right to kill those engaged in their prospective genocidal mission does not mean that it was lawful under English law. I fully expect some lawyers will argue for a judicial review, and criminal charges against whoever ordered this and carried it out. I am inclined to think that they may well succeed at least part of the way.
One day, Mr Corbyn as Prime Minister might be asked to order drone strikes on libertarians, an imminent threat…
As long as it is done following proper procedure and law then I have no problem with it. That said, we have not as far as I am aware declared war against ISIS, nor could these persons be said to be resisting arrest (and even if they were I don’t think you can just kill people who are resisting arrest – has to be accidental in the course of trying to bring them home).
So in this particular case I suspect it is ‘nay’. It should not be hard to do to this properly. Declare war on ISIS (or whatever equivalent is required for non-state actors) and get parliamentary approval for these types of actions in advance.
There are enemies and there are enemies. There are enemies who are engaged in violent acts against people in your country (who you have every right to kill) and there are enemies who would merely like to. In the case of the latter I would wait until they become a direct and immediate threat.
ISIS appear to be de facto at war with the UK (they’ve certainly murdered subjects of the UK).
So the UK would therefore have a right to attack ISIS. This would mean all adhearants of ISIS, but targetting those who are threats to the UK seems sound.
You may want to question the right of states to conduct wars (although I think that is one of their fundamental functions personally – it saves us having to do it personally) but I cannot see any problem with the assasination of ISIS combatants by the government if they cannot be reached by the criminal justice system. Note there are two clear hurdles that the government clearly respected here – were the targets attacking the UK and could they be dealt with by judicial means. Anyone who objects to this might want to suggest how the government is meant to deal with threats who are in jurisdictions which they cannot reach?
I take the legal point raised by Patrick and Ed – personally, I have no idea, as IANAL.
Nigel, that’s the problem, really:
Not officially, no, although they almost certainly considered themselves to be.
Yes, although officially it’s two civil wars, not one that we’re involved in.
Errrm… kind of, if we assume that remote drones are now usual. As Mr Ed points out, that makes the “self defence” argument rather tricky.
So it isn’t clear-cut. I tend to agree with some other commenters that the present rules of war are inadequate for the sort of threats we now face. Nobody with any common sense can doubt that these people joined a self-proclaimed state that considers itself at war with most of the rest of the world, that they considered themselves “soldiers”, and that they would have attacked our troops – and quite probably civilians – given half a chance. There are few people, even here, answering a definite “nay” to Natalie’s question. But there is no declared war, they’re not in uniform, and so the Geneva Conventions etc. don’t apply; it’s a matter for English law, and it says you can’t kill people.
I can’t help thinking that if the point had been made more vocally that the Gitmo prisoners weren’t entitled to any protection at all since they were un-uniformed combatants, there might be greater public support for something new.
Mr Ed said…
“I think that Patrick is right to say that it sounds ‘dodgy’, at least from the perspective of English law. The purported basis was self-defence, but an RAF Pilot Officer (or whatever) on an RAF base in Lincolnshire would be at no risk from a Jihadi in Syria.”
Right, Mr Ed. You going to tell that to the family and friends of Lee Rigby?
Moreover if it is possible to kill the bad guys from a nice office at little personal risk why not? You get very close to arguing that there is something abhorrent about war unless you go out of your way to take the risk of being killed, maimed, raped or tortured horribly. I have spent 42 years trying to avoid this. So we use Reaper drones made by General Atomics rather than having the Light Brigade charge on horses. It is called progress. And if the ragheads don’t like it then fuck ’em. We can build and operate drones. The entire Arab world is struggling with flying a kite. And yes I am conflating tech with virtue. And I make no apologies to the barbarians.
A cursory reading of the comments suggests that some people are arguing at cross purposes: some are saying YAY in this particular case, and others are saying NAY to the general principle.
A problem for the YAY camp is that, in saying that the targets were enemy combatants, we are taking Cameron at his word. Not being conspiratorially minded, i am perfectly willing to take him at his word in this particular case until i have evidence to the contrary; but as Mr Ed suggested, what if Prime Minister Corbyn authorizes a drone strike on political dissidents who left the country for their own safety?
I don’t think there anything wrong in the government recognising any organised threat to the people of the UK and getting rid of it.
Well I wasn’t planning to, I don’t know them and have no reason to contact them. What is your point, apart perhaps from illustrating that you cannot understand the words ‘self-defence’ in the context of my comment?
Or is it that you did not read the entire paragraph? but perhaps he meant ‘defence of others’,
Inaccurate, I presume that you have heard of a certain Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewali, he rather outshines us lot on Samizdata.
[Side comment to Mr Ed: I don’t think Ahmed Zewali was a very good exemplar. He has, after all, spent nearly all his adult life in the United States, where all his undeniable accomplishments occurred, and only recently moved back to Cairo. He even served as a “science envoy” on behalf of the United States. He’s Egyptian by birth, but to my mind hardly qualifies as an “Egyptian scientist”.]
There are a lot of thoughtful comments here, on both sides of the question. Obviously Cameron’s reliance on the justification of “self-defense” is misplaced, but I suspect that he was using that term not in its literal sense, but rather as a crude shorthand way of describing a rather complex issue. If one accepts the proposition that ISIS is an existential threat to Britain than “self-defense” isn’t all that far-fetched.
My take on this is that it falls into a distinctly gray area: ISIS is not a recognized state so the laws of war (including the Geneva Convention) don’t apply, but its personnel are outside of British jurisdiction so the criminal law doesn’t apply, either. To my mind thefrollickingmole has it about right: they are “outlaws” in the historic sense of that term and have forfeited any right to the protection of any state’s laws. (I have long argued for a restoration of that ancient principle.) Thus they can be killed with impunity by anyone, whether a state or private actor.
Um…at the risk of being corrected [which would actually be good], in a discussion with other British cynics today we reached the following conclusions:
1) Mad to say that he (Khan) represented an imminent risk (too bloody far away);
2) This was, nevertheless, the justification advanced by the Defense Minister;
3) Clearly this was because Parliament has (very specifically) voted against war in Syria and so the “enemy combatant” line could not be used;
4) so what we have is an entirely justified drone strike on an enemy combatant which has instead been “explained” by deeply worrying rhetoric and has become a terrifying precedent in a way which is becoming sickeningly common amongst British politicians.
Oh and by the way, YAY.
Well, yes. Zewail might be brilliant but he is the only Egyptian ever to win a Nobel in science.
Indeed “Yay”.
Kill ’em twice I say, thrice if it can be managed.
Kill their blood until the 9th degree of separation, kill the mothers, kill the sons to destroy the evil ones. Then when there are none left, destroy every record they ever existed from the works of Mo the Pedo through line of the Caliphate to the modern day proselytisation of Obama.
Make it as though Islam never existed and in so doing restore peace to the West.
Mad to say that he (Khan) represented an imminent risk (too bloody far away)
“Far away” means little in an age with the internet and easy intercontinental travel.
@PapayaSF
Far away means little
I just knew someone was going to say that and it’s an entirely fair point. However, in this case, I think Khan could only deliver orders at that distance and that doesn’t count (I suspect).
Re the intercontinental travel bit: no, that’s not “imminent”.
I will reiterate: “YAY”, but wrong justification given for political reasons and this justification sets very dangerous and worrying precedent.
Well he might not have been ‘far away’ if he had been planning to detonate a bomb in the UK by text message or phone call from Syria. I have read that a certain country in that region had an occasional practice of breaking into the homes of PLO types in Europe, planting a grenade by the phone, ringing up and radio detonating the device when the ‘right’ person answered. So much more humane and accurate than a letter bomb.
Would it be too much to hope that a jihadi in the UK, having set up a text-activated bomb and primed it, carries it to his target, but at a point safely away from others, a spam text arrives asking ‘Have you been in an accident or injured in the past 3 years and it wasn’t your fault?‘.
News flash: They already think it’s a good idea, or have you forgotten 7/7 already? (And don’t give me the guff that 7/7 was Al Qa’eda and not ISIS; they all think it’s a good idea, regardless of the label on their package.)
Step outside the bounds of Western society to join a savage ideology which wants to destroy Western society? Don’t whine and complain when Western society exacts punishment.
Also, this:
I’m sure the 1940s inhabitants of Liverpool, Coventry, Hull and other British cities would have been gratified to learn that Hitler only bombed London.
And for both the Nazis and ISIS, my response is the same: fuck ’em; they started it.
@Mr Ed
What you say is theoretically relevant but, I suspect, not what the argument meant (which was “nothing to see here Parliament, of course we’re not waging war against your resolution, move along”).
a spam text arrives…
A very happy thought, and one which puts a new spin on the term “ambulance chaser”!
As far as American citizens and the American government goes, the matter was settled in the Civil War: The federal government always considered Confederate forces to be American rather than ‘Confederate’ citizens, and happily bombarded them with artillery fire anyway. Drones are just artillery with longer range.
Laird, they are a self-proclaimed state. This does not mean that other countries must recognize it, but OTOH it possible for other countries to make them live (or rather die) with the consequences of said proclamation. That said, the outlaw route sounds at least just as satisfactory. Either way, what matters is to neutralize the threat – which is very real, distances notwithstanding.
‘…it makes it possible…’
In WWII, the British SS consisted of 29 British PoWs. 5 were genuine Nazis and/or nutters, the rest simply had no shame, realised it was a comfy way to get out of the PoW camp, and thought the SS would never dare actually try to use them in combat; boy were they surprised in January 1945 when they were deployed on the eastern front.
AFAIK, the legal situation was always very simple: the British military could legal kill them exactly as for German soldiers, and would have been entitled to do so in an alternative history where they appeared on British soil in an invasion attempt. They key difference was that a German soldier who was captured would not then be killed whereas all those Brits whom we captured were tried as traitors and hung. (One of the 29 was Australian; he was shipped to Australia to be hung by his own government but through bureaucratic mixup – unless it was something more sinister – somehow survived.)
AFAICS, the status of someone who is _known_ to have joined an ISIS military unit, however irregular, is the same. He can be killed in any lawful military action. If captured, he can be tried for treason. There would be a difference only if the fact of his having joined a foreign military was not sufficiently verified.
My 0.02p FWIW.
Question 1) Do you think killing small numbers of ISIL members with limited air strikes will reduce ISIL’s capability to do what ISIL’s doing.
Q 2) Do you think killing small numbers of ISIL members with limited air strikes will deter ISIL from doing what it does?
Q3 Do you think this policy will encourage/discourage/be neutral for ISIL recruitment.
Q4 If you answered yes to Q’s 1 & 2 & encourage or neutral to Q3, why is it being done?
Q5 Would “Something must be done!” “This is something” encapsulate UK policy on ISIL?
Bloke, is your point that the number of ISIS members being killed is too small? 😀
Why does it have to be existential? Threats, even relatively small threats, should be dealt with appropriately. In this case, given the threat was likely a few dozen dead British commuters or shoppers, a drone strike seems just about right.
Look, the drone was flying by on a spying mission, and happened to run out of fuel! Bad luck all round, next case.
I’m generally pro-war-on-terror, and I say nay. A country should not be in the business of killing its own countrymen without fairly extraordinary reasons. If they’re in an enemy army and they get killed in the ordinary course of battle, sucks to be them, but intentional execution should happen after a conviction for high treason, not before. (Incidentally, while I’m not a big fan of capital punishment for murder, due to the difficulties of ensuring sufficient evidence, I’m all for it in cases of treason, and I find the idea that executing people for it is somehow wrong to be bizarre.)
When the killings start, go on and some of your compatriots leave you to go join the killings (which often include killing others of your compatriots) the response is to kill the killers.
Alisa, I take your comment in the spirit it’s given: but just to emphasize how limited the current air effort is, during the six months of the Battle of Khe Sanh, B-52s flew 2,548 sorties in support, each one dropping 60,000 pounds of bombs; and the B-52 raids accounted for only 60% of the bombs dropped.
And we lost that war.
Clovis Sangrail said:
Parliament voted against going to war with Syria – as in the Syrian government and military. The vote had nothing to do with ISIS in or outside of Syria but somehow still restrained the Government from taking action. As a result of this the September 2014 vote to tackle ISIS in Iraq specifically prohibited British airstrikes in Syria.
However, during the debate Cameron appeared to outline a case that operations to defend Iraq could include strikes in Syria (about a quarter of the way down the page):
“And we lost that war.”
Well, no. You didn’t actually. The rationale for Nam was the Domino Theory. The reds had to be stopped in VietNam because otherwise, the whole of SE Asia would succumb to communist domination. In which case Nam was a “win” because it didn’t happen. The US had no other war aims in the theater did it? No dreams of an Asian Empire, As far as I’m aware 🙂
And I can’t see the ISIL situation’s that different from Nam, is it? And we know where the military advisor/ not officially a war thing went, there.
So my answer to Ailsa is; definitely not enough killed. Roll out the B52 strikes. If the intention’s to stop ISIL.
Personally, I think the intention’s to keep the bleeding hearts, shroud wavers & newspapers eager to sell advertising space on the back of tear jerking, off their backs. Don’t think they think any further.
Indeed.
This BBC report indicates defence of Iraq as the UK government’s additional basis for justifying the drone strike, as ‘collective self-defence’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34215799
Sounds a bit thin.
@Gareth
Parliament voted against going to war with Syria – as in the Syrian government and military. The vote had nothing to do with ISIS…
Thank you very much!
I don’t think this changes my conclusions but it amplifies and corrects the argument!
Ditto to Mr Ed…
Oh, and YAY!
A minor pedantic quibble: In parliamentary procedure, the opposite of “nay” is “yea”, not “yay”. (Although it would appear that some here really did mean “yay”, intended as an expression of excitement synonymous with “hooray”!)
Laird, you might benefit from getting out more. 🙂
Mr Ed, if I got any better you couldn’t stand me.
Unless our goal was to see Vietnam unified under a Communist government in 1975, we lost. Communist expansion was probably frustrated more by Communism’s inherent inefficiency than by any triumph of the Domino Theory.
And while I agree with you about “roll out the B-52 strikes,” the sad fact is that we don’t have that many B-52s any more, and the ones we do have don’t have the payload capacity of the ones we scrapped.
Simple. Yay!
And now the Green Party is launching a legal challenge to the drone strike, odd really as surely fewer people makes Gaia happier, but there you go. Perhaps the deceased were a better sort of person to them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34339925
With JDAMS screwed onto the bombs, really large bomb loads are superfluous: one bomb on target is worth fifty in the general vicinity, and if you really do just want indiscriminate area effects, a thermobaric bomb is the way to go. A B1B does the job just fine and proved extremely effective over Kobani.
Yes, but why not have 60 1,000 lb bombs landing ‘on a sixpence’ at 0.5 second intervals, just for show? Heck, start a crowdfunding scheme for it 🙂