Opinion Macron wants his cake and eat it over defense
These were the thoughts that got me out of bed this morning but realised that there would be more flesh to be added to the bone:
Macron wants his cake and eat it over defense.
The fact is that economy is intertwined with defense for it is economy which enables it. If economy is to be put at a disadvantage by design, then if France expects to use our military then they will also have to pay for that privilege.
(then France must also bear the burden and pay for the privilege of using it. We are not here to enable French adventurism in its (former) colonies, defense means defense and not aggression.)
Why are three Chinooks being sent to support French adventurism.
This is not defense, this is encroaching on the sovereignty of a distant country which is no threat to us. The French may be just protecting their own interests in a former Colony which usually means exploitation without giving anything back to the well being of the local population which should be part of their own economy.
Don’t talk about a special relationship with France in the same way that we are supposed to have it with America, if that is really a true relationship anyway.
When we were finally allowed to joint the EEC it was the French who unashamedly pre planned the decimation of our fishing industry by design on entry and this is comprehensively reported in the UKIP pdf called Stolen Seas. This is backed up by fishing societies around the country as well as the testimony of those who were responsible for maintaining ”rules” and quota’s.
Macron says that Britain cannot expect a special deal regarding Brexit but it looks like the military union aspect is a special deal for France which they want to maintain and which was signed sealed and delivered by Cameron without proper discussion in Parliament.
As the only two nuclear powers in Europe, the French want the UK to be the command centre for operations, how cynical is that? The UK would therefore be a prime target to receive a nuclear attack in response.
The UK is an obvious place being separate from the mainland of Europe and also the south westerly trade winds would blow any contamination away from Mainland Europe, skirting in a North Easterly direction.
Of course we had the Tri Scott Prime Ministership of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron (who is of pedigree Scottish descent) who oversaw the erosion of our independent UK military capability. These are facts that cannot be ignored and the cherry on the top is that historically the Scott’s had always supported the French in battles against the English. So as an extrapolation of that there is a possibility that they all have a clear conscience regarding their actions. ( We are talking on a political level here) Populations just get roped in to the desire of their rulers, as in Nazi Germany as a prime example.
From Nairaland Forum
[Quote] The Sahel includes some of the world’s
poorest countries but has rich natural
resources in the form of minerals and gas.
France sent troops to Mali in January 2013
after Islamist militants threatened to overrun
the capital, Bamako.[Unquote]
Weapons to this region began flooding out of Libya immediately after the death of Gadhafi in October 2011, part of the seven countries in five years strategy following the false flag of 911 and murder 3000 international citizens, resulting in ” The War On Terror”, the arrest without charge, special rendition, sometimes of innocents as well as incarceration at Guantanamo, all actions which acted as a natural recruiting sargent to activate conscientious resistance on one hand as well as criminal minds and mercenaries on the other to stir up conflict in order to enable ”justified” military response.)
From Open Democracy:
[Quote]: Conflicts are at the sharp end of contemporary crises. Refugees, extremist ideologies, criminality and predation are all produced in conflict. Contemporary conflicts are sometimes known as ‘hybrid wars’ or ‘new wars’ in which classic distinctions between public and private, government/regular and rebel/irregular, and internal and external break down. They are best understood not as legitimate contests of wills (the twentieth century idea of war) but as a degenerate social condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich.Identifying ways to address violent conflict could open up strategies for dealing with broader issues. [Unquote].
Quote: “The world is not only Europe”
Prior to the conflict the EU had rather extensive relations with Syria, and through the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the European Neighbourhood Policy was applying a range of instruments, with some limited effect, aimed at bringing about political and economic reform. These efforts were abandoned shortly after the conflict began, and instead the EU focused on the application of sanctions, scaling down its mission in Damascus, and taking extreme political measures that led to the loss of political leverage.
The Syrian foreign minister responded in June 2011 by announcing in a statement to the media, “We will forget that there is Europe on the map,” and promised to look “eastward and southward and in every direction that extends its hands to Syria. The world is not only Europe.” Indeed, shortly afterwards, Syria did suspend its membership in the Union for the Mediterranean, and it did look in other directions for support, mainly from Iran, Russia and China. This served only to increase the leverage of these countries over the Syrian government and increase polarisation at all levels. The theory of change that assumes that the regime is going to change its behaviour should such measures be imposed has not only proved to be wrong, but to the contrary, these measures produced the opposite outcome. [Unquote]
Although this is an academic paper, it must also be remembered that Syria had self suspended itself from the Union of the Mediterraean which is a French construct and just as it has been speculated that the real reason to remove Gadhafi was his intention to switch over to the gold standard as a replacement for US dollars. We can only speculate how much of an influence Assad’s new position really had in the move to depose him for regime change.
There had been an anecdotal story from a person familiar with the oil industry on a business level who told that it was Assad’s refusal to allow a pipeline to pass through Syria from Israel and on to Turkey and Europe. In his opinion,this was the real reason for the invasion of Syria and Regime change. This pipeline was to originate from Qatar.
During this conflict Syria’s industrial manufacturing capability had been looted and taken to Turkey as well as everything else destroyed by the so called friendly terrorists who receive cash support from EU, UK and USA, as well as ISIS who seemed to have free reign until Russia stepped in to make a serious attempt at eradicating them. Now the Kurds who had always made the effort to deal with ISIS in its North Eastern regions of Syria, all alone and unaided is now being portrayed as a threat to Turkey.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/rim-turkmani/role-of-eu-in-syrian-conflict
The efficacy of cease fires as expressed in the Open Democracy article is not cut and dried:
https://shadowproof.com/2016/09/16/next-cold-war-roundup-91616/
[Quote]
_ French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Sep. 15 that it’s a problem that France doesn’t know all the details of the deal and the US must make more of agreement on targeting available to them because of the risk of “moderate opposition” being hit.
_ Reuters also says that France “is a key backer of rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and allied militias.” When rebel sponsor countries are mentioned, France is not usually among those mentioned. Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are usually cited.
_ On Friday, Sergey Lavrov said the US is “stalling on its promise to separate moderate rebel groups in Syria from terrorists. Lavrov went even further by saying he hopes “this delay is not caused by someone in Washington trying to shield terrorists from being targeted.”[Unquote]
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[Quote] May said U.K.-French summit “will underline that we remain committed to defending our people and upholding our values as liberal democracies in the face of any threat, whether at home or abroad.”
One topic not high on the agenda is Brexit. Britain wants the meeting to underscore how the close relationship between the two neighbors won’t suffer when Britain leaves the EU in 2019.
In the crisply martial surroundings of Sandhurst, where army officers have been trained since the days of the British Empire, senior ministers from the two countries will sign agreements on everything from space exploration to tackling online extremism.
In a boost to Macron, Britain is throwing its backing behind the European Intervention Initiative, a multinational European military force that the French president has proposed. He also wants a common European defense budget and security doctrine.
The plan is in its early stages, but British officials don’t see it as an “EU army,” an idea on which the U.K. has long been cool. [unquote]
So here we can see that just like the nature of the EU from the beginning, matters military are now in the process of being morphed into something else again because of public reaction against the concept of an EU Army but all of the organisational structure for this is already in place, illustrated by the Command centres based in the UK now set up and ready to be put into operation.
When the final result of the Brexit vote came in, the most obvious to me was the separation of our own military from that of Europe.
It is no wonder that the French want to hook into our technical expertise for free via this so called pact, and I say this from my own observations of somebody trying to sort out the electrical problems in his French car in the centre of London and the owners comments on the matter and in that same car design they thought it a good idea to store the spare wheel in the engine compartment. I was parked next to him at Holland Park 1996.
Even on a more simple level concerning a Peugeot bicycle they thought it common sense to make a seat pillar that had a smaller diameter than standard and which was unique to their own design as well as designing the clamp so that the full weight of the rider bore upon the very bolt that is meant to clamp the saddle in place. With this design the bolt acted as the fulcrum or pivot. The first time the bolt sheared off, what was left was fortunately able to be removed and replaced with a much stronger bolt, so the mechanic told me, but it wasn’t long before that one also sheared off.
There was a time when Britain was ahead of the Americans in space technology and we willingly shared it, which resulted in nothing in return. Although we are supposed to have a special relationship with America, it came to light that when Obama visited France he told them that they were America’s greatest Ally.
France wants to impose a financial burden upon us so let them also be a recipient of that burden.