If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
Well... they weren't defending Britain against attack; they weren't defending Britain's interests (unless you think helping a private company's fingers onto a piece of the Iraqi pie constitutes looking after Britain's interests); they weren't on a humanitarian mission; they did not improve the lives of anybody; they did not make the world a safer place.
Last I looked people signed up to the army to defend Britain, not to further the geopolitical ambitions of foreign powers and bank balances of private corporations.
Even if they technically broke the law the bigger picture needs to be looked at here.
I would have even called a suspended sentence harsh. To send them to prison is nothing short of a disgrace. Specially considering that the far, far greater crimes they were almost certainly trying to uncover continue to go unpunished.
As wheresmyplacebo pointed out earlier soldiers are also being let off for killing Iraqi civilians and policemen acquited of any wrongdoing for blowing the brains out of an innocent man going about his business. But these two fellas have commited the great crime of trying to expose some unsavoury actions by our Great Leader.
What does that say about our values, laws and general health of our institutions?
Debateable. I don't agree with the 45 minutes argument by any means but I don think that Saddam was assisting people who were prepared to attack us at home.
It isn't? Jobs not important then?
Removing a torturing, murdering dictator not humanitarian?
Give me a timeframe here. To date, within the next five years, ten, twenty?
Then you are looking n the wrong place. They may not have intended to sign up for such things but that is the reality of the oath they took. NB Why just "geopolitical ambitions of foreign powers"? What about our own? What about the building of our former empire, wasn;t that done by our soldier?
No it doesn't. You try the case in front of you, not any wider picture. They broke the law. Simple as.
It's says that we don't aplpy laws equally. that is wrong. If people are guilty, in law, of the offences you mention then they to should go down. That would be justice, not letting these guys off just because someone else "got away" witha crime. If that is your basis then no-one should be convicted of anything these days...
you honestly believe saddam was a severe enoughthreat to the uk to warrant attacking them?
by that argument, im suprised north korea or iran havent been destroyed beyond belief yet?
We've covered the causes of the Iraq war about a thousand times haven't we? I remain ambivalent about going in, but I don't believe there was no 'good' reason, just I also think there were 'good' reasons not too.
They did and that's why they were found guilty...
Nope, I don't hence my comment about 45-minutes. Was it a factor? Dfferent question.
Give the UN (hah!) and chance first...
Saddam had zero connection with terrorism and was as much threat to the UK as Andorra.
No. And even if they were, common sense tells you that wars and near universal hatred and and revulsion towards Britain, as Blair's actions provoked, are going to lose more jobs on the whole than whichever jobs might have been "saved" on BP.
Not when he has been replaced by 1000 different factions and groups that make him look like Ghandi by comparison.
Who's to know? The facts we know are that the plans the Allies had did not include the absolute chaos, lawlessness and civil war that are taking place in Iraq a full four years after the invasion, and that are set to continue and almost certainly get worse.
And no, post WWII in Germany wasn't anything like this.
Iraq doesn't quite compare with the British Empire does it? With the latter we called the shots. With Iraq we're obediently following the orders of the the only Empire there is today because some inexplicable infatuation our good Tony has with the US President.
No matter how much you want to twist it there are absolutely no benefits or good reasons for Britain to have gone to war in Iraq.
Yes, and a man who kicked the shit out of another man who had just raped and killed the first man's wife would have also broken the law. But would you advocate sending him to jail for GBH? Or do you recognise that the bigger picture can and should to be taken into account when sentencing?
I wasn't as much demanding they got away with it as reflecting on the parody parody our justice system has become.
If that doesn't constitute treason, then leaking a document that might embarass the Great Leader certainly doesn't either.
No - I'd do him for assault. If we're all allowed to do vigilante killings and assaults we'd be in a perpetual state of blood feuds...
Betrayal is betrayal. I'm less worked up about the man he passed it to, but the first man betrayed the trust he was put in.
At the end of the day I joined up knowing that I could be put in a position of danger on the behest of the Government. It's a soldier's lot.
People who then decide to leak secret information and risk increasing that risk are the amongst the lowest of the low...
Aladdin,
As much as I sympathise with your emotional state, I have got to side with the other posters on this thread from a logical point of view.
They appear, after all, only to be defending their beliefs consistently.
The institution is indeed the "GOD".
It comes first and nothing else matters.
IF (and as you can see it`s a big "if"
( Even when you are aware that it isn`t "real"
I guess technically they might have broken the law. But a suspended jail sentence, at the very most, would have been sufficient.
Meanwhile our leader supports capturing and sending to trial various heads of government (Milosevic, Saddam) for war crimes while happily sitting in office and looking forward to retiring with full honours to a life of after dinner speeches and handsome payouts. Despite having a not unconsiderable amount of blood in his hands himself.
It's a fucking joke and a fucking disgrace.
Zero? I think that some might disagree there.
Currently. That's a very short-term viewpoint there.
Who's the know is the point I was making. We don't. You right in that the US and UK didn't plan very well for this eventuality (if at all) and things weren't this bad in post-WW2 Germany (although it wasn't all rosy either) and WW1 would be a little closer.
My actualy point was that we cannot determine whether the invasion was a success until the end game of stability is achieved or until a decade or so has passed. We are still deep in the mire there and our presence could be a contibutory factor to the violence. It's certainly not the whole factor but it's part of it.
You only have to look through history to see how many stable forms of Govt have come out of bloodshed... not great for those who died or suffered at the time, but how much would we change about democracy, low numbers of facists, consitutional monarch rather than ruling monarch etc...?
Again, differnt issue to the one which was raised. Soldiers don't sing up to defend borders, they sign up to act at the forceful will of the incumbent Govt. Nothing more.
In the past it was our will to enslave the world in Empire. Now it's to support the US while they do it...
What is the maximum tariff for OSA breaches? I don't know. Compare that to how long they have been sent down for.
In any event you wouldn't let the man, in your example, off scot free and he would have to do time IMHO.
It's always been an arse. Hell conviction rates for whites vs. ethnic minorities shows that. Problem here is that your emotional connection with the possible motives for the crime - even though they are not really mitigating.
Would you argue the same if there was a leak which went against your views on Iraq, but could be argued to be "in the public interest"?
Seeing as 4 years after the invasion things are worse than ever I don't think it's short term at all.
I suspect that if in 5, 8 or even 10 years time things stabilse in Iraq some people will actually will try to pass it off as the era of peace and prosperity the 2003 invasion allowed. The truth is that if any peace ever breaks out in that ravaged country it will be in spite of the war, not because of it.
And yet independent and casual observers alike had all warned repeteadly that the war on Iraq would result in precisely what has happened.
In all probability the US and Britain suspected that too... but that didn't stop them because the actual welfare of the Iraqis was not for a millisecond a consideration for going aheas with the invasion.
That is most certainly not the way the government and MoD puts it when it invites people to join the army is it?
You could be a cynic of course and question the naivety of the soldiers who sign up... but the fact remains that joining the army is promoted as your chance to do your patriotic duty for your country, help those in need abroad, visit the world etc... not helping political ambitions of individuals and profit forecasts for oil companies.
Sending them to jail still seems extremely harsh. A medal for services to the country seems far better appropriate.
Yes. If it involves senseless loss of lives under a cover of lies and illegal actions, yes without a doubt.
To be honest it was made quite clear to me, as it is to most soldiers, that we're there to do the will of the democratically elected Government, whatever our personal views on the matter. People join for lots of reasons, but its made clear what the ultimate purpose is - which to put it bluntly is to kill and be killed in the nation's interest...
Now given that there is not a guide book which says what the national interest is its defined by the politically elected representatives. Not by some junior civil servant... (and quite how it helped Blair's political ambitions escapes me unless his ambition was to be reviled by much of the country)
No connection with terrorism? Do you have any idea what terrorism is?
I enjoy the moral 'values' implicit in the rebuttal "It had zero connection to terrorism as far as UK national security is concerned." So it's cool to be a terrorist as long as it's far away, not attacking the UK and you can put your fingers in your ears and say "la la la it's not happening"? The moral arbiter has spoken!
I raise my glass to you for telling it like it is.
(However nauseous that feels to some)
You could argue that Saddam was an instigator of state terrorism. Internal state terrorism.
That doesn't make it any more acceptable, but it is not the kind of terrorism the chimp had been warning us all about- namely international terrorism which saw to target Western interests.
Let me put it as clear as I can, for all who still (and rather pathetically IMVHO) cling to the many lies told by the chimp and his poodle:
SADDAM HUSSEIN HAD NO WMDs, NO LINKS TO 9/11, AL QAEDA AND ANY OTHER TERRORIST ORGANISATION AND WAS NO THREAT WHATSOEVER TO THE WEST.
And if anyone has evidence to the contrary it's high time they presented it because so far nobody has been able to do so- not even the mighty US government and its intelligence services.
See above pal.
I`ll suggest that everyone has an idea what terrorism is.
What`s yours ?
I find the mentality of Iraq war supporters a morbidly fascinating phenomenon. You have a war in which the ostensible reasons for entering were egregious lies and deception; a country in the grip of civil war; innocents dying day-in day-out; Saddam’s show trial and bungled execution after being trussed up on charges from the 80s; seemingly no end to the blood-shed; and yet still people still try justify it – you couldn’t make it up.
It seems now the pro-war argument has been reduced to “well, Saddam was a nasty man”, which would be laughable if the death toll of innocents hadn’t exceeded the 100,000 mark. It really must take a serious cessation of rational thought to side-step all the glaring evidence pointing to fact the war was a ill-conceived pack of lies, executed poorly and with no end in sight, and to then convince oneself that because Saddam was a nasty piece of work the whole thing was justifiable and right. I’m utterly convinced that the government could spin the public any line conceivable and there’d be enough lobotomised non-thinkers to suck it up and support it.