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Posted on 11/09/2025 4:52:03 AM PST by C19fan
Although he has a chestful of medals and a proud record as the country’s oldest poppy seller, Alec Penstone insists he is not a hero.
‘The heroes are all the dead ones. The heroes are the ones we left in the Arctic and on the Normandy beaches,’ the 100-year-old says from his home on the Isle of Wight.
But, in the eyes of the millions of proud Britons who saw him give a damning assessment of the state of the nation on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Friday, the D-Day veteran – who fittingly was born on St George’s Day – absolutely deserves the label.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Damn imagine your hometown getting taken over by Paks and Bengalis, ethnic cleansing the real Cockneys.
The insipid response of the hostess, and the cloying smiles of the “representatives” of the armed forces there, all of which he was too polite to criticize, confirmed everything he said.
Sad,
Fight for something which later generations throw away.
Things we get given to us, that are free, we don’t value.
Imagine reflecting on an entire lifetime where your youth was taken from you in war. You believed in the cause greater than yourself. Now, 80 years later you see the society you fought for is all but gone. He is not the first WWII veteran to bemoan this epoch in history.
I wonder of returning veterans from WWI felt the same way by 1960 in the UK...
Yes, he is a hero. Telling the truth is an act of heroism these days!
“ Things we get given to us, that are free”
Pretending freedom is free is the problem.
Period
Well, some DO value the things that were given to them. Sometimes it may take awhile to truly realize the value of those things. Nowadays it seems to be getting harder & harder to value them though as they seem to be drifting away and/or replaced by things that have little or no value. Supposing that right after WW2 a soldier from NYC had come home to a mayor such as Mamdani. I bet he would describe the man in the kind of language that most of us won’t use. By the time Vietnam had ended,many soldiers were already coming home to little or no respect. To me it now seems that our president is trying to build back some of that respect for our soldiers & our nation as a whole, but I can see that it’s a tough battle.
Freedom, wealth, security/safety, our privacy.
Example: It’s funny how some of the most vehimently pro privacy rights folks I know came from the former East block when you had the iron curtain. Most the people I see that don’t care or see no threat, were born and raised in the West.
Take a Coptic Christian and they don’t take the idea of religious freedom for granted. They see a risk of being persecuted or oppressed, especially by Muslims as very real. But take an average American (or German/UK citizen born and raised there) and they don’t see that.
Take a woman that fled Iran or Afghanistan for her freedom, and she takes that very serious. But for most western women, born and raised, the idea of “freedom” has been degenerated to mean no more than abortion rights.
The danger is, when you have weak “people” (sorry, had to throw that pun in) today, it creates hard times.
“Free” is evil.
Confirmed every day, everywhere.
That would be "wrack and ruin," Mr. Howard.
That is a man who’s worked, all his life.
You fight for what you believe in at the time of the war, not 60 years in the future. No one knows what the future will bring.
The soldiers of 1776 had no idea of the Civil War in the future and the Civil War soldiers had no idea of two future wars with Germany or one with Japan.
Indeed.
And the men who fought in both world wars had no idea of the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Just like the men who fought in those wars had no ideas of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old
But there’s no England now
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore
Think about how the Vietnam war people feel? How about veterans of the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war veterans? What did they sacrifice for? Dick Cheney and Halliburton?
America is culturally and in values, very fast changing and flexible.
Today they might deny someone a job with a clearance, claim they are mentally ill, make fun of them in the arts and media, give them no job working with kids as a homo. 20 years later they will go to homo venues to recruit them.
Abortion, climate change, inner-racial marriages, the Iraq war 2003 and Vietnam... Things can change 180 degrees in a matter of just a few years. Today you can’t watch a commercial without seeing an inner racial couple, and nothing is off limits, see hormone blockers and sex changes for kids or abortion as examples. Long term plans, strategic plans, are nearly impossible, see our policies towards Iran or energy as examples (changes with every administration). We break promises, lie and cheat or withdraw from treaties because the promises of the predecessor mean little.
We will exceed your wildest dreams of how much and fast we can pivot on any issue.
I have learned to take the bad with the good. Our political system and society reinvents itself, changes course often, but this can also be a good thing.
We are able to adapt to new technology, fast. We cut our losses when things aren’t going so well. As the international world changes, we can change course and aren’t entrenched in old dogmas. Even though it’s technically lying or breaking a promise, we don’t abide to rules or agreements when they make no sense for us anymore (missile defense - and that has proven to be a real threat and worthwhile investment).
So while we aren’t people that necessarily stay the course and are consistent, things you would normally see as being virtues, our rapid ability to change course and flexibility morally allows us to adjust to the times / situation.
I think 9-11 changed a lot and Saddam didn’t get the memo.
Post 9-11 we were FAFO.
Saddam should have let the UN WMD inspectors do their job. He should have followed the 91 armistice no fly and no wheel zone agreement. He should have backed off from trying to build long range missiles which exceeded the 150 km armistice range limits and which he used in the 2003 war.
He was screwing with us when he really should have behaved.
The WMD issue was the main argument for the public, but I tend to believe it was Saddam’s constant playing of games where he’s shooting at our jets enforcing the no fly zones, his constant violating of the no wheel zones etc. that painted a bullseye on his head.
Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_bombing_of_Iraq
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-10-mn-21331-story.html
Was the WMD argument BS, yes (about 98% certain). I do not think it was an intentional lie. Lying about that and knowing we are going to war most likely is setting yourself up for public humiliation as indeed was the case for Powell and others.
I think the IC simply did what people tend to do, look for those facts and give credence to those facts which validate what we want to believe. We took sources which our allies (Germany) handed over to us with the caveat that they think he’s a flake, and we gave them a huge degree of importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
Saddam knew if we find WMD it legitimizes our action and he’s toast. Even nations opposing the war would have joined in.
His dream, his plan, was to wage a massive guerilla war against us and after outlasting and bleeding us, we leave and he returns to power. Why he created the Saddam Faydayeen. If we find WMD, 100% for sure Saddam would not return to power again.
Saddam knew he can’t fight us conventionally and in open terrain, so his strategy was to fight us in urban battles for the big fight, and then wear us down with a guerilla type war following. That’s what the Saddam Faydayeen was really meant for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen_Saddam. They had cached weapons and ammo, trained in unconventional warfare, and we’re structured so that you don’t know who is a member as in a normal military.
The idea was after the big war ends and his military is defeated, but hopefully inflicts some damage on us, the guerilla war starts. (1) You had the regime loyalists like the Faydayeen and others. (2) To add to that, Saddam opened all the prisons and let literally every criminal out. Why? That would become our mess to deal with. Puts us under more stress and frankly it did. (3) Once the “infidel” sets foot in Iraq, you got an influx of foreign jihadist types from almost everywhere. We had Chechens, Sudanese, you name it come into Iraq to fight us. (4) Then you had the militias, people like Muqtadr al Sadr used the chance to carve a part of Iraq out for themselves. You had numerous militias pop up and many of them stood in opposition to us, some of the Shia ones were getting support from Iran (NVGs, mortar rounds, GPS, Intel and advisors, IED components to make them more effective, sniper rifles...).
But we were our own worst enemy! Why?
On the political front, Paul Bremmer wanted De-Bathification, so he made the horrible decision to disband the Iraqi military and Intel service. With the stroke of the pen, he took what could have been our biggest asset, a buffer between us and the threat, which knows the threat better than us (dealt with it for decades), and made them into on watchers or worse yet, part of the problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority_Order_2 (This decision guaranteed, cost many American lives)
Knowing the mess we created, we decided to pay many people (former Iraqi military and Intel) a “stipend” in Iraq. This was to keep them from becoming a problem. But, instead of them working for us, we were paying for them to stay home and laugh as they watch TV and see us get blown up. Our political leadership in Iraq and DC was idiological (democracy, no Ba’ath influence), not pragmatic.
Saddam possibly got rid of his WMD shortly before the war, that’s one theory. Syria and Iraq are both Ba’ath regimes at the time, many of Saddam’s family fled to Syria, the insurgency against us used Syria as their base of operations in part. This theory states that the WMD used by Syria in 2012-2014 are originally from Iraq. Plausible theory.
In either case, when we invaded, Iraq didn’t use them against us, and we didn’t find any appreciable amount of chemical weapons.
Iraq had no WMD, and was not meddling with terrorism (at least not in the way which should make them our target). No AQ based terrorists since these posed a threat to the more secular Ba’ath regime as well.
If anything, even though not out of kindness, Saddam was more or less an ally in fighting this form of Islamic based terrorism out of mutual interest. Sort of ironic that we removed him from power given the fact that he’s a sworn enemy of Iran and more or less has mutual interests regards Islamic based terrorism.
That doesn’t mean Iraq wasn’t meddling with terrorism, many nations do, even we do. We just call them “freedom fighters” when they’re our terrorists. Iraq was paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel and attempted to take the life of George H. Bush in Kuwait (they got caught red handed trying to do this): https://www.hnn.us/article/how-do-we-know-that-iraq-tried-to-assassinate-pres
Usually people already know what side of an issue they want to choose and merely look for the facts to validate that position. Most people do NOT formulate their position based on where the overwhelming evidence suggests the truth rests. That is true with Iraq 2003 or Ukraine today... Iraq provoked us a lot, for many years, in many ways. But did they have WMD and were they meddling with AQ type terrorists? No.
Whether the war in Iraq was justified depends on what variables you want to include, where you want to draw the line.
What is for sure, is that we paid a high price: 4,500 US KIA and 32,000 US WIA, uniformed casualties: https://www.war.gov/casualty.pdf
Of course our allies also paid a price, the UK, Kurds, Poles, Australia and of course firms like Black Water and Triple Canopy also took losses. The largest casualties of anyone were absorbed by the Iraqis themselves.
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