Geforce,

I’d just like to point out that not only is John Simpson an excellent journalist he’s also one who has a long history of disagreeing with the establishment.

In 99 he had a row with the UK government about his reports from Belgrade which showed how hard life was during the air campaign – stuff the Government didn’t really want people hearing at the time. After that he was nearly fired by the BBC for not towing the line.

During the US’ war in Afghanistan he trotted around with the Northern Alliance troops and went into Kabul before any other journalist, risking possible arrest torture and possibly death at the hands of the Taliban (it wasn’t known at the time whether they had relinquished control of the city yet).

Currently John Simpson is in Northern Iraq going on patrols with Kurdish front line troops and with US special forces. He was injured when US planes bombed a Kurdish patrol which had ventured into Iraqi territory.

He is hardly a Hilton kinda guy.

You’re right about journalists in general but you’re wrong about John Simpson – I won’t hear a word against him.

Orders boys:

Keep the jokes coming

Stop attacking peoples nationalities – whatever their opinions

Keep the jokes coming

Refer back to my first post where I stated that anti-war jokes are as welcome as pro-war jokes

Keep the jokes coming.

Apologies – I often forget that not everyone understands my sarcastic sense of humour… obviously I wasn’t seriously suggesting that you’d just threatened to have my father dragged out into the street and shot.

I vote that we stop responding to Adonis and start posting lots of war related jokes… Anyone got any good ones?

Lenin had a beard…. Besides, my dad has a moustache… Hitler wasn’t a socialist and neither was Stalin… Learn a little about politics before you start making historical parallels… All the Iraqi atrocities you just mentioned occured when Iraq was a western wonder state…

In my experience the NHS is really really good if you’re going to die in the next 24 hours… they generally stop that and patch you up pretty well for free!

However, I’ve had to receive treatment for a couple of other things that weren’t urgent – in that case I’d have to say the NHS is a massive waste of time and it’d be quicker to save up and have the treatment done privately. The fact is, in Yugoslavia I was able to receive better, more specialised care much quicker than in the UK (and it was free out there too). Yugoslavia has had many more economic and political problems than the UK – the fact that its health system is better is a scandal.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Key Publishing a British firm? This is essentially ‘our’ forum so actually we could be justified in saying “too many bl**dy foreigners on our forum!”

Its quite a difficult thing tot ake a city that opposes you. Even Basra is still a problem and its population was supposed to be the one which would resist the least. If 5,000,000 Baghdadians are determined to fight the invaders then it’s going to be one tough nut to crack. Forget Stalingrad, remember Leningrad.