Should we be a major military power?

[Churchill]

As war is such a hugely expensive business, I would propose that we do not conduct warfare against any country that upon beating, we could not then loot it's natural resources and assets & steal it's child bearing aged women away as slaves.
To go to war on for some spurious principle or when not directly under threat of attack seems absurd

Oil?

Gas Pipeline?

[Troll]

Oil?

Gas Pipeline?

Think the Americans got those

[AlfredJPruffock]

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

That is easy.

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”


— Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials. .


They need to be prepared for the long as well as the short campaign, to see our participation alongside allies in such conflict not as an atavistic, misguided attempt to recapture past glories, but as a necessary engagement in order for us to protect our security and advance our interests and values in the modern world"


Tony Blair

[n5gooner]

well done Alf, where did you find them ?

[el duder]

Tony Blair is giving a speech on should Britain continue to be a major military power in the world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6254253.stm

Interesting thought, should the UK continue to be involved in global conflicts or should we concentrate on defense of the UK (and that would probably involve defence of the EU as well)?

YES

[AlfredJPruffock]

well done Alf, where did you find them ?

The Goreing quotation is a well known chestnut and chilling everytime I read it, the Blair(All Praise to our great leader) is from todays MSN - I could have selected a better quote - but I think you get the picture.

The ideal set up by the Party was something very huge, terrible and glittering—a world of steel and concrete of monstrous marching and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts, wearing the same clothes and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.

The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.

He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with a lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.

Orwell 1984

[expat]

Tony Blair is giving a speech on should Britain continue to be a major military power in the world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6254253.stm

Interesting thought, should the UK continue to be involved in global conflicts or should we concentrate on defense of the UK (and that would probably involve defence of the EU as well)?

The question is simpler for Scotland: only ever had one enemy, but that one very violent and expansionist.

[John Galt]

Also from his speach - "those who do war fighting" - very eloquent