Skip to main content

Context is everything

The comments of General Sir Richard Dannatt calling for the early withdrawal of British Forces from Iraq are probably right. I too tend to think that British troops would be better used in Afghanistan and, as I have written recently, I believe that the British mission in Iraq needs to be given an exit timetable as soon as practical.

However it is one thing for me, as a private citizen, to call for these courses of action. It is quite another for the most senior General in the British Army to enter the political arena.

The General does not have that liberty to speak out. He should retract his remarks and not repeat them.

Generals work for politicians and if they disagree with them they should do so privately.

Sir Richard may well be right, but in our democratic system, Generals should be seen and not heard.

UPDATE: Tony Blair has said that he agrees with every word the General said.

Hmm... Two-nil to the General - who I suppose will be in office after the PM has left it. Not the first time this has happened, trouble is it usually happens in Turkey.

Comments

Etzel Pangloss said…
I'm sure you will not agree, but maybe our democracy could do with a slight constitutional crisis.
1:51 pm
Cicero said…
:-) That depends on the crisis. I think it certainly needs a big shake up- arguably we are in a slight constitutional crisis already.
2:19 pm
Anonymous said…
The UK military leadership needs a shake-up anyway, and this breach of civil-military relations should be an opportunity for changes. Ranging from General Jackson's failure to follow orders in Kosovo to now, a situation where a military commander is essentially dictating major policy changes, the UK military leadership has shown nothing that commands their troops' loyalty -- especially in their failures to secure their own troops' equipment and well-being.
7:35 pm
Anonymous said…
I have to agree actually, the armed forces becoming involved in politics is a bad idea.
7:35 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more