A GENERAL WHO WAS TOO GUNG-HO
THE former chief of the defence staff, General Sir David Richards, is quoted in a new book on David Cameron as savagely critical of the Prime Minister’s decision in 2012 not to back his plan to put ‘boots on the ground’ in Syria.
According to the author, Anthony Seldon, Richards says: ‘If they had the balls they would have gone through with it . . . if they’d done what I argued, they wouldn’t be where they are with ISIS.’
I know the General slightly: he’s a powerful advocate. But in this instance, my sympathies are with Cameron. Both in the Iraq and the Afghanistan campaigns, the British military’s can-do attitude was admirable, but in both cases they greatly underestimated the difficulties they would face.
In the Iraqi city of Basra — which they had thought would be a cake-walk to keep under control, given its inhabitants’ longstanding opposition to the previous rule of Saddam Hussein — the British military ended up besieged in their barracks. While in the Afghan province of Helmand, it is clear that our generals completely failed to anticipate the ferocious nature of the Taliban resistance.
With those debacles fresh in the memory, is it any wonder the Prime Minister refused to give the green light to gung-ho General Richards? I don’t know if there’s a theory of national differences based on supermarkets, but if not, there should be. We’ve just spent a few days in the Gers region of SouthWest France. despite being in a very rural location — la France
profonde — we were only five minutes’ drive from a hypermarché. though vast in its range of food products, there were hardly any prepared meals on sale. Unlike Britain, this is largely a country in which people still create their lunches and dinners from scratch. the consequence, however, was that this enormous store was invariably closed at lunchtime — something of a surprise to any visiting British who believe that meals can be consumed while on the move and who don’t think that lunch is sacred.