On another note, I heard on one news-report yesterday that a section of Belgian Doctersis going to sue the American commander of their forces in Iraq for War crimes because american forces refused to protect certain hospitals which resulted in the deaths of some pregnant women who were in need of a C-section but due to looting the required equipment was gone and their Uteri (sp?) bursted which as I can imagine is a pretty painfull way to go but when I checked the other two news-reports from different domestic stations, they never mentioned such an item in their news'... Does anyone else know anything about this? Is this just a piece of Fiction propagated by VT4 (not the most reliable source of news in my eyes but I haven't known them to blatently lie so...) or is this actually true?

There we are - exactly what I said. There was a huge peaceful demonstration and later, presumably after most people had already arrived back home, a (relatively) small group gets into a fight. That's exactly how I've experienced it on almost every demonstration I took part in.

That's my experience, too. There was this student demonstration against the war for example in which the police used their 'waterthrowers' and other weapons against teenagers. Later, they claimed there had been groups of (adult) Kurds amongst the protesters who had started the violence. Strangely enough, there wasn't a single photo of those and the arrested people were all Germans between 13 and 18. I can assure everyone it's quite simple to tell an adult from Turkey or the middle east apart from some typical German teenager... (just one extreme example of course)

Based on my personal experience, the vast majority of those 8000 came to cause trouble. I've been in Prague during the IMF meeting a few years ago, and I'm still mad at the police refusing to use sharp ammo. Those protesters are the masters of urban warfare, and all they want to is to destroy everything in sight. In addition, 8,000 is not such a high number for the whole demonstration. There were tens of thousands protesting against war, so I would assume that these 8,000 were just a fraction of all prortesters. Still the number is rather high to dismiss it as a bunch of lunatics.

Well, my view on all this: there might be some 'hooligans' who travel across their country, or even across the world, to cause havoc and get into fights with the police, like Mr Creosote said it's the only goal of the 'protesting' for some people. An EU summit is bound to attract a lot of media attention, so a lot of people could have traveled down there just to start a riot.

From my experience with protests, which is not that much I admit, it's fairly easy to pick these people out... but the police apparently prefer to arrest some random protesters and then make an estimate afterwards; so that number of 8,000 probably includes a lot of people that weren't actually doing anything wrong, but happened to be around there protesting when the fights took place.

Your argument would hold if there weren't the (unknown) numbers of how many people there were on the protest before violence started and the percentage of those '8000' which came there to protest peacefully and then suddenly found themselves being beaten up with truncheons...

You argument would hold, if there were indeed a few people wreaking havoc. However, there were 8,000 of so-called "peace protesters" who clashed with the police. That doesn't look to peaceful to me...

And what's new about that? On each such occasion, there are always people who will misuse it to wreak havoc. Just like there are always some dumb people amongst the policemen who can't wait to beat up some defenseless people and act accordingly (as for example many pupils from Hamburg between 12 and 16 had to learn the painful way...). All that doesn't make the protests less valid though, because all these people aren't there to protest against insert-whatever-the-demo-is-about, but to fight with the respective 'enemy'.

H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E-S

Here's something new:


How do you properly spell "hypocrits"?

We're using the same spelling in German, but according to the BBC, Taleban is a perfectly correct spelling in English

I agree, just like we've been in Korea for around 50 years.



That's a definite. I'm not sure in which way though, but right away Iraq and Turkey are going to be not to happy with them (the Iraqi people, not the puppet government that is going to be installed). There is going to be considerably more amount of strife there than before. I think we just ripped open a whole bag of war that was precariously contained before.

And we spell it Taliban in Imperialistic

Yes they will become a problem, but they wont be a problem to the US, they will be a problem to Iraq and Turkey.

Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia all over again. Turkey will lose 50% of their population and land, so will Iraq.

In 2 or 3 years time the borders will be redrawn like they were redrawn by The League Of Nations after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the British took over Messopatamia in around 1917.

Turkey and Iraq will become Turkey, Kurdistan and Iraq.

Is anyone else thinking the Kurds will turn into a 'problem' later by the way? Now, they've been armed by the USA because they were 'useful' to them in some way - just like it happened with the Taleban, with the Baath party and this 'Northern Alliance' in Afghanistan. Wasn't one of the points pro-war fanatics always used "the USA might have made mistakes in the past (concerning giving arms to bad people), but they've learned from that"? It doesn't look like it to me...

Actually, the US does not always stay in the latest country they attacked. Take Afghanistan: Go in, throw bombs, go out. And nothing has changed there. The "warlords" who are in power in Afghanistan can be glad they don't live on some billion tons of oil.

I guess the USA should prepare for a few decades of being forced to station military in that region... one of the least stable regions of the world, and they drop some bombs right into it. Smart.

Back to the old war subject, who thinks so far its all been a walk in the park and only now is the shit really going to start hitting the fan

Iraq - a country so free from tyranny its people just kill one another for the fun of it, because there is no-one around to act like a tyrant.

They need some law and order and damn fast.

But even then, you're just asking for conflict with Eastasia.

I agree. Or else we should rename the European Union to the Eurasian Union...

About Turkey: I think they shouldn't be accepted into the EU for a simple reason: only a tiny part of their country is in Europe

Thats a clear reason why Germany, Britain and France are going to get shafted.

I wonder if there will be an explosion of - perfectly legal - economic migrants?