Dear Tam:
You bring up a few points above...
I was in Belfast in the seventies, and I did indeed see a war. I saw armor - not perhaps the kind of tank one thinks of rolling into Bagdad, but certainly armored troop transports, armored jeeps with large calaber weapons in the roof door, I saw an air war, helicopters used to move troops, used to torture prisoners, used for a variety of tactical reasons, and the navy was on Lough Erin. As to the second point, unfortunately nations don't often declair war any more. Our two countries have killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq lately, and you may note they did not declare war... It's own people... well that is what it is all about, isn't it. When do you start counting, the 1911 vote? the out come of the Anglo Irish war ten years after that when Britain agreed to leave the six counties of the north of Ireland in two years? Do you count the majority nationalist community pushed out of their homes by unequal law and unequal employment when you speak of "it's own people?"
The sad fact is Tam, your government and mine, seldom act as our government. When the US govenrment's conintell program made war on some of it's own here,(no declaration of war) Fred Hampton and the Black Panther leadership in Chicago where murdered in their beds for certain, and Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered by the government most likely. Certainly scores of children were out right murdered by British soldiers and no charges where brought, a message was sent about who were the British people and who were occupied by the British government.
I don't claim to know who is right and wrong at the end of the day, but I would say, be very cautious of EVERYTHING our governments whould have us believe. After all, the US government armed and empowered most of the people it eventualy brought down, from the president of Panama to Sadam Husain to Ben Lauden.
CHeers
Larry