Verdicts
Having looked over a Telegraph article that repeats the Butler Report’s damning assessment of the manipulation of pre-war intelligence and includes the public remarks of the former deputy chief of MI6, who said that Britain was “dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against out better judgment,” David Frum concludes that the only noteworthy thing to take away from the story is that Mr. Inkster made one passing negative comment on the current administration. The Telegraph article also included this item, which has significance for the U.S. response to the war in Georgia:
When it came to the conflict between Russia and Georgia last summer, he added, Britain was caught “completely flat footed” and used a strategy that “amounted to little more than moral indignation, which is not a strategy.”
Of course they were caught completely flat-footed, just as Washington was, and it was obvious that none of the Western governments that railed against the Russians’ moves had a strategy worth mentioning. I should think this would be one area where most everyone could agree regardless of views about the conflict. Meanwhile, instead of reflecting on or even pushing back against any of the important parts of the article that harm the pro-war case, Frum is reduced to Glenn Reynolds-like linkage without any comment.
Inkster’s remarks will hardly come as news to those of us on the antiwar side who have followed British commentary and public opinion since 2002. It was clear enough that Britain was being dragged into the war against its interests and against the resistance of a significant part of the governing party and the foreign policy establishment and a huge part of the electorate. Like most of the states in so-called “New Europe,” the government threw its support behind the war in defiance of what the British people wanted, which serves as a reminder of how thin and weak overseas support for the invasion really was.
Nigel Inkster, now that’s an English name! I notice that there is little congressional interest in a truth commission to investigate just who lied us into a war of choice and for whom they did it. Surely if torture and eavesdropping are worth investigating, actually fomenting a war under false pretenses should be fascinating.
It’s hard to take seriously claims that the British government “didn’t want to go along with it”. Really, the same guys who went along with Kosovo? THAT group of guys is non-interventionist? No doubt they have procedural differences, but its hard to assess credibly that any major EU power is “non-interventionist” (merely intervening for what you do, or do not want, does not make one ‘non-interventionist’).
No one’s claiming that the British government is non-interventionist as such. It seems quite reasonable to assume that Blair’s hyper-active foreign policy can be blamed directly for many British interventions over the last decade, and it seems plausible that there would have been significant grumbling in the intelligence services and the military about several of them. Iraq probably caused the loudest grumbling because of the risks involved.
Daniel, a lot of the grumbleing was public or at least semi-public. The desire for his government to engage in foreign adventures while cutting defense spending is one of the odder bits of recent British History.
At the current rate of draw-down, the UK will soon lack the capacity to intervene anywhere outside the European theater. They will have no aircraft carriers and only antiquated air lift assets.