Mosul... a stunning victory for hypocrisy

THE only mercy xytin war is a swift victory. We delude ourselves if we think you can capture a defended modern city with bombs and guns without doing dreadful things.

Fanatical jihadis are expert at terrorising the population of such cities, preventing them from fleeing and then using them as human shields. The shields die, in unknown thousands.

So I am very glad to see the end of the battle of Mosul.

Last December, I was just as relieved when the Syrian state, backed by Russian air power, crushed equally ruthless Islamist fanatics in Aleppo. But at that time I was surrounded by a media chorus accusing the Russians of terrible war crimes.

I pointed out that this was a double standard. If we did the same, we would excuse it.

I then asked those damning the Russians and Syrians: ‘When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.’

As it happens, one rather courageous voice, Amnesty International, last week produced a careful and thoughtful report, pointing out that the West and its allies had taken less care than they might have done to avoid killing innocents in Mosul.

My view of this is that’s what war is like. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars.

What was interesting was that a British general then let fly at Amnesty. Major General Rupert Jones, the deputy commander of the international coalition against IS, said Amnesty were naive to think a huge city such as Mosul could be captured without any civilian casualties, while fighting a merciless enemy. I rather agree with him, though Amnesty’s point was that some of those deaths might have been avoided.

But if a Russian general had said exactly the same about Aleppo last December, as he would have been completely entitled to do, he would have been torn to shreds as a barbaric war criminal by Western media and politicians.

The old rule applies. You can’t have it both ways. Either you accept that war against such enemies is bound to have bloody results, or you don’t. But don’t justify your own unintended but cruel actions, while condemning those of others. There’s a word for that which I can’t quite think of just now.