‘Troubled waters’.

Does anyone remember the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ ?

Well I don’t suppose that many people in this country do, as it happened in 1964 and took place on the other side of the world off the shores of a little known country called Vietnam.

Yes, it was the ‘incident’ that gave the US government the excuse to bomb Vietnam and set in motion events that would eventually lead to the loss of 58,000 American lives.

The so called ‘Battle of Tonkin Gulf’ was the sole basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which was the entire justification for the United States’ war against North Vietnam.

The ‘incident’ involved an attack by North Vietnamese gunboats on US warships. Except that the ‘attack’ almost certainly never happened !

Sound familiar ? Well it should, because a similar ‘incident’ has recently happened in the Persian Gulf between some small Iranian craft and US warships.

I’ve just watched conflicting videos on the BBC news and quite frankly it is hard to say which side is telling the truth on this one, but the difference this time is that the world can see, at least to some degree, what actually happened.

Anyway, let’s hope that old George, who is keen on starting wars for non existant reasons, remembers that he is on a peace mission to the Middle East at present and resists the urge …

…  to “accomplish” another kind of “mission” ! 

Military minors.

During World War II my uncle Charlie ‘borrowed’ his older brother’s birth certificate and joined the army. His mother (my grandmother) tracked him down and dragged him back home, but he later ran away again and joined the navy (left). 

Charlie followed in the footsteps of around 250,000 underage boys who joined the army during World War I.  It is estimated that half of them were killed or wounded. These were impressionable young lads who were, in many cases, motivated to ‘join up’ by the ‘misleading’ tales of the recruiting sergeant and the ‘glamour’ of the uniform.

Now it seems that a report by The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has accused the Ministry of Defence of once again giving young children a ‘misleading’ and ‘glamourised’ picture of life in today’s armed forces.

It has always been so ! … for as long as there have been wars the British Army has recruited young men to fight in them. Sometimes very young men !

The days of the recruiting sergeant’s devious ways of getting, usually poor, young men to ‘take the King’s shilling’ are long gone, as are the eleven year old drummer boys, but it is still possible to join the army at the age of sixteen, so recruiters target schools and have expensive advertising campaigns aimed at youngsters. They even have a web site where kids can play computer games and watch videos of such military activities as skate boarding.

If we have to have an army, surely our soldiers should be fit young men and women who are old enough and experienced enough to make informed decisions about putting their lives on the line in defence of their country, or taking the lives of others in some bloody mess of a war like the one in Afghanistan.

So let us hope that when these kids swop their trainers (sneakers) for heavy boots and are shouted at by a big man with stripes on his arm, they use their mobile phones to call their mothers and are ‘dragged home’ …

…   just like my uncle Charlie.

Anyone seen (Sir) Rudy ?

I’m afraid that I don’t know too much about American politics, but like many people in this country I always find the run up to the American Presidential elections fascinating, even if I do get confused by the caucuses, perplexed by the primaries and roar with laughter at all that ridiculous ‘razzamatazz’.

Now that Barack Obama is ahead in the race for the Democratic party nomination it looks like America could be almost ready for it’s first black president, although I’m sure that a few ‘good ole’ boys’ down in Alabama are cutting eyeholes in the white sheets and oiling their hunting rifles right now.

Whilst I would like to put my money on Mr. Obama (he has always opposed the invasion of Iraq), I feel that Hillary Clinton (or should I say the Clintons) is going to take some beating, for although the USA has a pretty good democratic system for electing it’s presidents, it always helps to have a bottomless bag of bucks and an army of advisers and ad-men on hand.

Now old bull-nosed Bill used to be Governor of Arkansas as did the leading contender for the Republican Party nomination, Mike Huckerbee, or should I say the Reverend Mike Huckerbee ? For I believe that this Republican is a fundamentalist Christian minister, and unlike here in the UK (as Tony Blair stated recently), being a religious nutter in America, seems to be a positive advantage when it comes to getting votes.

Blimey ! Look at ‘born again’ George, he said that God told him to invade Iraq and … 

…  he still got re-elected.  😦

Junk-food ‘junkies’.

Sometime in the early 70’s I was on a business trip to Amsterdam and was walking along a street with an American colleague when we passed a restaurant with, what to me was, a big yellow ‘M’ sign displayed over the door.“Hey !” cried my American friend … “Where I come from those places are everywhere”.

It was a couple of years later that I saw the first one to open in Britain. It was in Woolwich, South London and I learned that the big ‘yellow M’ was in fact the golden arches of the McDonald’s chain of hamburger restaurants.

Now, more than thirty years later ‘those places are everywhere’ here, along with all the other purveyors of the various varieties of ‘grease with lumps in’.

Having visited the United States a number of times and seen how our American cousins devour their fried chicken by the bucketful and their pizzas by the pile I was shocked this week to learn that Britain has overtaken the USA as the leading nation of fast food gluttons: for in a recent survey some 45% in the UK agreed with the statement “I like the taste of fast food too much to give it up”, while 44% of Americans said they would be unable to give up their burgers, pizzas and southern fried chicken.

The World Health Organization predicts there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world by 2015 and more than 700 million of them will be obese.

I wonder how long it will be before every burger box …

…   carries a health warning ?