Syria vs. Israel. Spicy. - Page 4 - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

Txjake · #46 09-17-2007, 01:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jlomon

The nature of terrorism is that it does not require a full scale, head on assault against their target. The goal is for a group to be living in terror of what might happen to them, based on past experience of what has happened to others. A terrorist who straps a bomb onto themselves isn't a coward, regardless of who they seek to target. They're prepared to die for their cause. A terrorist who plants a bomb and leaves it behind for it to detonate on its own is a coward, regardless of who they seek to target.

I guess that depends on your definition of cowardice.....

Hatterasguy · #47 09-17-2007, 01:33 PM

Picking up an AK47 and standing and fighting=War.

Blowing your self up in a Cafe=Coward.

At least in my book. It takes guts to shoot at people who will shoot back, pushing a button is the easy way out.

Txjake · #48 09-17-2007, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hatterasguy

Picking up an AK47 and standing and fighting=War.

Blowing your self up in a Cafe=Coward.

At least in my book. It takes guts to shoot at people who will shoot back, pushing a button is the easy way out.

x2..........

Botnst · #49 09-17-2007, 03:01 PM

Saudis buy Eurofighters from UK
Eurofighter
Maintenance and munitions contracts are also expected
Saudi Arabia is to buy 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets BAE Systems, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has confirmed.

The deal is worth about £4.4bn - excluding charges for maintainance of the aircraft and training.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) dropped a probe last year into a sale of jets to the Saudis in the 1980s.

The UK government said this was on national security grounds, but reports said the Saudis had threatened to pull out if the probe went ahead.

Blackmail claim

The official Saudi news agency SPA says that the price paid per aircraft is the same that Britain's Royal Air Force pays for the aircraft.

UK-based BAE Systems said it welcomed "this important milestone in its strategy to continue to develop Saudi Arabia as a key home market with substantial employment and investment in future in-Kingdom industrial capability".

Critics attacked the decision to drop the SFO investigation, saying the government had put commercial interest before ethics and had given in to Saudi blackmail.

In addition to the price paid for the planes, there is also expected to be a lucrative deal for the munitions that go with them.

The negotiations had been overshadowed by a UK inquiry into allegations Saudi Arabia took bribes from BAE under a military-plane deal struck between the two nations two decades ago.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office last year investigated BAE Systems' £43bn Al-Yamamah deal in 1985, which provided Hawk and Tornado jets plus other military equipment to Saudi Arabia.

However the investigation was pulled by the British government in December 2006 in a move supported by then-prime minister Tony Blair amid statements about the UK's national interests.

dannym · #50 09-17-2007, 03:27 PM

I think your right about Iraqi jets landing in Saudi Arabia (whoever wrote that).

Quote:

Picking up an AK47 and standing and fighting=War.

Blowing your self up in a Cafe=Coward.

At least in my book. It takes guts to shoot at people who will shoot back, pushing a button is the easy way out.

How are a small number of "combatants", living just a step above the stone age, supposed to stand up to the state of the art American military?
Do you really expect them to stand up and take us on? It doesn't take much to see how stupid that would be.
They resorted to terrorism because that was all they had left. Still I don't believe they are cowards. Misguided for sure. But cowards....no.

Danny

Txjake · #51 09-17-2007, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dannym

I think your right about Iraqi jets landing in Saudi Arabia (whoever wrote that).

How are a small number of "combatants", living just a step above the stone age, supposed to stand up to the state of the art American military?
Do you really expect them to stand up and take us on? It doesn't take much to see how stupid that would be.
They resorted to terrorism because that was all they had left. Still I don't believe they are cowards. Misguided for sure. But cowards....no.

Danny

if you can't field a force sufficient to discourage your opponent, your cause is not popular enough to be sucessful. by blowing up the people they want support from in Iraq, Al-Quaida has destroyed the chance for a popular uprising with them at the wheel. cowards are cowards: they chose the easy target. If they were hardcore as they thought, they would be over here, blowing up malls..... the truth is, they know that they are weak, and suffer from lack of support from within Islam.....

dannym · #52 09-18-2007, 11:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Txjake

if you can't field a force sufficient to discourage your opponent, your cause is not popular enough to be sucessful.

Not necessarily so. Armies need to be paid and equipped. Just because you don't have the necessary resources to wage conventional warfare on an opponent doesn't mean your cause isn't popular. Again, it doesn't take much to see how stupid it would be for say Hezbollah to wage war on the US. We would obliterate them and they know it.

Hatterasguy · #53 09-18-2007, 01:48 PM

Guerrilla warfare against heigh profile and value military and politcal targets. This has been proven to work in a number of cases. Cuba, for example.

They cannot even get enough support for that.

peragro · #54 10-14-2007, 03:43 AM

Ok, it must be official if even the NYT is writing about it. Although they're a month or so behind everyone else who came to their conclusion...

October 14, 2007
Analysts Find Israel Struck a Nuclear Project Inside Syria

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.
The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policy makers still regard the attack as premature.
The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military’s finest moments. In the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that the attack set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by many years.
By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.

the rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/washington/14weapons.html?ei=5065&en=259c02cddbf6503f&ex=1192939200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print