William Hague has just given a non-committal response to the “mixed results” of the American troop surge. I’d rather have liked him to say something like this (adapted from the Giuliani article I mentioned earlier)
There are some great lines on Iraq that HM Opposition could take, it could be a real debate in the House of Commons. But unless the Tories pledge to fund the military better than Labour has done, there is not much they can say.In Vietnam, just as in Iraq today, America fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, they corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 the South Vietnamese had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency… But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.
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