The head of the British army, of all people, has been peddling the outmoded, trendy-lefty, virtually foreign idea that before embarking on a course of action it is usually best to have some idea what you are doing. If that were true, of course, there would be some reparations to be made over a number of Government decisions, notably the careers of Chris Graybeing, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove, and the almost equally glamorous military adventures in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. The head of the army seems to think our mission might have been accomplished a bit more comfortably if the Reverend Tony and his acolytes had bothered to do a bit more research about such piddling matters of detail as "the politics, economics, tribes and culture of Afghanistan, and the consequences of sending thousands of troops there", as though the Reverend Tony and his acolytes didn't have enough to do counting their money.
The head of the British army also suggested that the army's composition should better reflect those varieties of ethnicity and gender which are now gaining token recognition even in the Church of England and the British Conservative Party. A sufficient number of white Caucasian recruits can no longer be relied upon, so the Government may have to overcome whatever inhibitions it has about giving weapons to those wogs with the bad manners not to be foreign dictators.
I read somewhere that the British Army top brass assumed in 2003 that they would be in and out of Iraq in a few weeks. Apparently no-one ever told them that changing a regime might mean a year or two of occupying a country, and apparently they forgot to ask.
ReplyDeletePeople who criticise them for making this assumption are apparently being unfair because it's only with hindsight can we now see that regime change, nation-building, creating new institutions etc etc might mean a few years of military occupation.
And it's only with hindsight that we can see that dropping arms to unknown Libyan rebels without putting boots on the ground might lead to a failed state.
Guano
But when the régime you change is Bad, so Bad that you can reasonably expect to be pelted with flowers by the mothers of the collateral damage, and when there are lots of people waiting to form a new, Good régime, and when you've done all their hard work for them by blowing nice, roomy holes in the infrastructure and purging everyone who might know anything about putting the pieces back together... well, really, what can be the problem? Some cultural thing to do with Islam, no doubt.
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