Running Away with Style

It has been said that the history of the British Army is one of glorious defensiveness. Let them loose and they lose their heads AND the war (see Hastings, Battle of), but keep them on a tight rein and in one place and there's no better fighting force in the world.

There's something in this. Wellington, for instance, was scathing about the ill discipline of pretty much everyone else, but particularly his cavalry and his brother officers, who seemed to regard his orders as a form of advice. From the day he surveyed the carnage of his first battlefield in India, he resolved to ensure that caution, patience, and a good defence would win the day; and so it proved. His campaign in Iberia was a classic of offensive defence. As was Waterloo.

Mons, 1914, of course, is another outstanding example of the Brits running away with style. Who else could have extracted an army from such a disastrous situation as this? It was done extremely (actually, make that astoundingly) well, and under the aegis of some long-besmirched generals - Haig, Dorrien-Smith and French.

I doubt whether Monty could have achieved so much. The enormously over-rated little eccentric was hugely popular with his troops, but so were many bad generals. Monty was ingrained with caution, build-up, and concentration of force. His great failing was that he didn't really know what then to do other than make a frontal assault. Somehow he contrived only to have great leaps of imagination when it seemed likely he would gain public kudos by doing so (e.g. Arnhem). The rest of the time, he was a terrible killer. His breakout operations in Normandy in 1944 were utter failures, but Monty managed to make out that this was intended attrition, and to the annoyance of many, he got away with the canard.

But I digress.

The question now is, should we run away from Iraq, and, if so, can we hope to do it with style? I fear the answer is 'no' all round.

It is an impossible situation, of course. We shouldn't really be in Afghanistan and definitely not in Iraq, but there we are, so no point going on about it. There does, however, seem to be an acceptance in the British media (and perhaps in Westminster) that the troops are coming home, and I wonder if that is not a very stupid thing to garner.

Once in Iraq, for instance, we HAD to try and do the peace and democracy thing. The options for leaving would always have been:

• The Iraqis ask us to go (and that means their government)

OR

• The operation is seen to fail beyond repair

It looks like the latter is now the case, but are we exaggerating that simply to get out of an uncomfortable situation?

And what happens to Iraq when we all leave? Are we just going to say: "Gee, we messed that up - sorry guys" and leave them to their own devices? Or are we going to try and prop up a 'puppet' from afar? Or what exactly?

It's all very well admitting our faults, but running away might be the biggest mistake yet. Even though there might not be a winnable situation.

When Dubya talked about this being 'a different kind of conflict' in order to justify undeclared war, he was stating the blindingly obvious (as usual). It is, therefore, bizarre that the 'allies' have failed to fight a different kind of war. What they've actually done is try and crowbar their old-fashioned kind of war-making into the 'new', extra-territorial framework. It doesn't work. It never has.

We've seen this time and again since Korea, from Algeria to Vietnam to Bosnia to Iraq to Afghanistan. Very occasionally, there are 'successes' (e.g. Malaya, where the Brits played very very dirty), or at least a stalemate (Northern Ireland - Brits ditto), but, by and large, when faced with 'popular', guerrilla, or terrorist forces, the big countries tend to throw in military might, and add a bit more if that doesn't work, and so on.

Meanwhile, much of the current strategical and tactical analyses suggest a 19th Century imperial colonial combination of gunboat diplomacy, blackmail and unilateral force.

And in the capitalistic nature of that century, the most common reaction to the going getting difficult is to cut your losses and bug out.

I can't help but feel that we need to take a very different and very hard look at ourselves. I don't pretend to know the solution, but, really guys, we can't go on like this.