It’ll be hard to characterize this guy’s words as coming from someone who wants to “cut and run”:
The head of the Army is calling for British troops to withdraw from Iraq “soon” or risk catastrophic consequences for both Iraq and British society.
In a devastating broadside at Tony Blair’s foreign policy, General Sir Richard Dannatt stated explicitly that the continuing presence of British troops “exacerbates the security problems” in Iraq.
If there is a sense of deja vu when you read these words, there should be: they seem akin to some of the worlds of Rep. Jack Murtha, who was later branded as a “coward” by one GOPer. MORE:
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Sir Richard also warns that a “moral and spiritual vacuum” has opened up in British society, which is allowing Muslim extremists to undermine “our accepted way of life.”
The Chief of the General Staff believes that Christian values are under threat in Britain and that continuing to fight in Iraq will only make the situation worse.
In other words: he’s arguing that the war is giving ammunition to extremists. AND:
[His words] are a total repudiation of the Prime Minister, who has repeatedly insisted that British presence in Iraq is morally right and has had no effect on our domestic security.
Sir Richard, who took up his post earlier this year, warned that “our presence in Iraq exacerbates” the “difficulties we are facing around the world.”
That sounds a bit like the recent U.S. intelligence report on Iraq. MORE:
He lambastes Tony Blair’s desire to forge a “liberal democracy” in Iraq as a “naive” failure and he warns that “whatever consent we may have had in the first place” from the Iraqi people “has largely turned to intolerance.”
The importance of these comments are due to the context. He’s the equivalent of the head of America’s Joint Chief of Staff. He’s not a talk show host, party militant, columnist or blogger. And his sentiments echo to a certain degree the comments of Murtha, who Bob Woodward in his new book State of Denial calls the conscience of the American military. Indeed, a motif running through Woodward’s book is the tension between the professional military leaders who look at things in more realistic terms, and their civilian bosses who view things through a prism of ideology and pursue policy based on faith.
Sir Richard’s comments seem to be one more chapter in the ongoing saga of a growing battle between military leaders’ suggested policy and the prevailing policy of civilian leader positive affirmations.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.