Letters to the Editor | 6 January 2007

Blair, brave?

From Correlli Barnett

Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross (‘The West must be the strong horse’, 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime Minister and his ministerial stooges still to refuse to accept that the intervention in Iraq has resulted in a disaster. Moreover, Shawcross’s prescriptions for redeeming the disaster are sheer fantasy. For example, he writes, ‘There should be thousands more US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army. The same goes, on a smaller scale, for the British.’ But where are these soldiers to come from? Already the commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching American and British manpower to the very limit, if not beyond. Shawcross also tells us that it is ‘shocking that we have only trained a handful of Iraqi officers in Britain. There should be hundreds training here all the time.’ But where does he think the training centres and the training teams are to be found, without impinging on the training of Britain’s own forces?

Shawcross reckons that we should not withdraw from Iraq until after the national elections due in January 2009. How many British servicemen and women is he prepared to see die or be maimed in the next two years?

But perhaps the strongest proof of Shawcross’s derangement is his statement that Tony Blair ‘has been phenomenally brave over Iraq’. For ‘phenomenally brave’ read ‘guilty of catastrophic misjudgment’, for that is the overwhelming consensus of informed opinion (including retired and serving senior officers and diplomats). And in regard to Blair’s dealings with George W. Bush from early 2002 onwards, it would be more accurate to describe him as a moral coward.

Correlli Barnett
Norwich