>Ukmitch,
>
>"...but at least one particular member of the international
>community could well bring that to an end - if the
>terrorists don't strike first..."
>
>I guess you gotta ask yourself why Thatcher didn't feel that
>way, when in the 1990's Saddam was the great friend and ally
>of both Bush and Thatcher who gave him biological weapons
>and the means to create nuclear weapons.

I think we, the UK, the USA, inter alia, have got the Sadaam whom we so richly deserve But now he's a timebomb waiting to explode, on his own people, on the whole of the Middle West and on the Western world generally.
>
>And if you were to ask the families of the 200,000 East
>Timorese your country contributed to slaughtering in the
>middle 1970's, I'd say they wouldn't be too concerned for
>your welfare and if your so concerned for your welfare, why
>don't you ask your government why it's the second largest
>arms distributor to foreign countries in the world to
>recipients with ghastly Human Rights records.

There's not much point in me asking my government anything, because here we enjoy life under a sham deomocracy, where public opinion is simply made up by the government as it it goes along - whichever party is in power. (read 1984!)

As for our record in the international arms trade, it is of course an open market, but I am personally ashamed of what our, supposedly regulated, arms exporters so often do.

I wouldn't have thought, however, that our Human Rights record during the last 50 or 60 years was too bad, by world standards. Hundreds of thousands of economic migrants and foreign asylum seekers seem to like it here. In fact they're fighting daily to get in through the Channel Tunnel which links France to England!!