Here we go again . The government is determined to take this country into yet another idiotic war and this will be the granddaddy of them all. It has all the ingredients of a huge disaster waiting to happen, and mark my words , if the vote on Wednesday in the Westminster parliament is for the bombing within Syria to go ahead then every one of us will henceforth carry the vicarious responsibility for the deaths of innocent civilians.
I was listening to a government Minister on the Andrew Mar show today telling every one that this bombing will be precision bombing and implying that only the bad guys will be killed. Well he was lying through his teeth and he knew it. Bombs are area armaments and a standard bomb destroys everything and everyone within 500 metres as in the photo attached.
ISIS control an area of Syria and Iraq with is larger than great Britain. Their main headquarters seems to be in the Syrian City of Raqqa, a city which has a population of not far short of one million people. ISIS have spread their forces around the City for obvious reasons, therefore it will be virtually impossible to bomb ISIS in Raqqa without killing many thousands of innocent civilians.
So on Wednesday this is what your local MP will be voting ,either for or against. It looks now very much like the SNP will be voting against this motion, after a bit of a waver two weeks ago. Jeremy Corbyn has his work cut out trying to get his red Tories to vote against it in a free vote and I only hope he had the balls to put a whip on his party to ensure the maximum amount of pressure against the government motion. If he does then we have to hope for a few Tories with the sense to vote against their own party .
If the SNP had acted in the manner they should have, since the referendum and put in motion the means to address the mistakes made in the referendum and also , place a basic requirement of wresting the power to hold a referendum from Westminster in their GE manifesto and then after taking 56 out of the possible 59 MP’s down to Westminster had the sense to immediately demand that very basic right, then the government would have had to have treaded very carefully with this Bill in case it triggered another referendum. But unfortunately the SNP did not do any of these things so that is not an option.
Bombing is on its own never going to defeat ISIS, that is a fact . All bombing will do is kill a few ISIS members and build up resentment for the many civilian casualties that the bombing will produce and that will produce more terrorists and will make the likelihood of terrorist attacks in this country a very real possibility.
The British government seem to be willing to make us believe that there is an army of about 70,000″ good” rebels who are at present fighting the Syrian government and some of the time some of them are fighting ISIS. Firstly the figure of 70,000 is nonsense and here is the reason I have for saying this . Firstly the “good “rebels ( apart from the Kurdish fighters) are Al Qaida ! remember them ? and guess where ISIS came from ? yes you got it Al Qaida . Now recently an American general who was tasked by his country to train the “good” rebels ( Al Qaida) to fight the government of Syria was questioned by a Senate committee regarding where the half a billion dollars that he had been allocated for this training had gone and how this training and arming of the “good” rebels was going. He had to admit that it was not really going that well and when pressed on the subject he had to admit that after training had been completed ,most of the “good” rebels had simply joined their buddies in ISIS and at present there was only four , yes I will say that again only FOUR on the training program. So in effect the half a billion dollars spent on training had been spent on training ISIS. So as far as the British Governments 70,000 “good “rebels waiting with bated breath to throw them selves at ISIS is concerned , this is fantasy pure and simple.
There are many ,many other factors in this questionable equation such as the multitude of countries who are already bombing in Syria, a government in Turkey, a member of NATO who have just tried to start World War three by shooting down a Russian Jet for having the audacity to bomb ISIS convoys of oil heading for Turkey. There is Israel’s shady hand in this because of their illegal oil wells in the Golan heights belonging to Syria and there is Saudi Arabia whose Wahhabi government are supporting ISIS who are also Wahhabi Sunni .
So all in all quite a minefield to be going in to. We must not once again make this mistake and we must learn by history., We have invaded and intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq , Libya and these countries are now back to the stone age and as a result we have a terrorist problem and an acute refugee problem.
The people of the UK and indeed more especially the people of Scotland must once again say ” NOT IN MY NAME ” and the government must listen. It is just a pity that we are not in a position to walk away.
Bob
Bob Costello 