I’d join the US Navy just to do the cool aircraft carrier deck crew things they do when launching the aircraft (hand signals, kneeling, high fives etc). It’s also mandatory to turn out en masse to cheer and greet the aircrew after any successful mission, apparently.
Iran, the backers for the Houthi, have Tomcats, the last time I looked. They also have a range of high coastal mountains called the Zagros Range and a nuclear weapons programme… when this conflict inevitably spreads to the Persian Gulf all the pieces will fall into place!
I’ve always maintained that the unnamed nation in Top Gun: Maverick was Iran (to the extent that on first watching I heard every mention of ‘uranium’ as ‘Iranian’).
If (and it’s a big if) one of the Houthis’ attacks actually managed to hit a US or UK military vessel, rather than being intercepted, would that be Article 4/Article 5 territory?
Also wondering whether this thread should be renamed to something like “Middle East 2023/24”
Eventually the topic title will change to ‘WWIII - 2025 onwards.’
The Russo-Ukranian War is similar to the Spanish Civil War, in that it is leading up to a World War. Both wars have had the effect of dividing the world into three competing ideological power blocs: in the late 1930s they were the Western Democracies, Soviet Russia and the Axis nations. Now it is the Western Democracies, China with its authoritarian state capitalism, and the Awkward Squad (Russia, Iran, N Korea, Syria etc).
We’re all getting tooled up for the final deathmatch: this must be what living in the 1930s was like.
The danger of WWIII starting is if we get drawn into an expanding Middle East conflict, which draws away resources and support for Ukraine and Taiwan.
Nah. That was grainy black and white. We live in HD colour.
BUT your analogy definitely does carry some weight in terms of the circumstances. Not forgetting, the 1930s also had poor economic conditions, the death of a monarch and a push for independence from Scotland and Wales (admittedly, this bit happens every decade!).
I grew up living in slightly blurry washed out colour, with white borders around it… a fellow I served with at Ali As-Salīm airbase in Kuwait during Operation Bolton in 1998 got some photos developed in the on-base shop, and they came out in that format, making us look like the RAF Regt of the 1970s.
But then that operation of air policing the southern No-fly Zone of Iraq is now over a quarter of a century ago, when we in the West were still living in our pre - 9/11 Fool’s Paradise.
It was the last of the Old-Skool ‘sunshine tours,’ where you’d go to the local beach or hotel gym & pool complex or scuba diving or shopping for duty-free goods and cheap gold as soon as you knocked off shift.
I am curious who the 1-2 judges are who are consistently voting against things which seem pretty morally correct. Eg. Don’t destroy evidence of any suspected genocides, and stop further deaths and suffering of Palestinians.
They did cover this on BBC News afterwards; one of them is a Holocaust survivor representing Israel, the other (who voted against the measures even more so) represents Rwanda.
The Israeli judge voting that way is semi-understandable, but I’ve no idea why the Rwandan judge voted that way though.
When your enemy uses Palestinians as human shields, the only way to achieve this would be to stop fighting: which makes it coded language for removing Israel’s inherent right to self-defence.
Israel will not intentionally kill its own civilians who are being used as human shields, therefore to wilfully do it to someone else’s civilians is not right.
Rather like medical staff having to treat on need and not allegiance.
We compromised on the performance of our 5th gen. combat aircraft to accommodate the carriers: should we have gotten F-35As and used them from land bases like AKI instead?
The RAF would’ve been better off with F-35A then. No compromise on range, performance, load out, and an internal cannon to accommodate carriers we can’t / won’t use.
