Embrace returning troops, pleads army chief

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, has made an unprecedented call for Britain to start appreciating the work being done by it's army in what he has called the "bloodstained earth of Iraq and Afghanistan".

He has asked that the army be given homecoming parades and free tickets to football games.

Gen Dannatt said: "We must move from being a society that uses the military as a political and media football, and more towards seeing the military for what it is - the instrument of foreign policy conducted by a democratically elected government acting in the name of the people."

He was becoming increasingly concerned about the "growing gulf between the army and the nation", he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was not talking about the government, he said, but the public.

"When a young soldier has been fighting in Basra or Helmand," he said, "he wants to know that the people in their local pub know and understand what he has been doing, and why," he said.

I understand the sentiment which Dannatt is expressing. The problem is that this "instrument of foreign policy" has not been acting "in the name of the people", it has been acting almost precisely against the will of the people.

The war in Iraq has never enjoyed popular support among the populace and the troops have the publics sympathy for the way that they have been employed in a dangerous situation when the nations national interests were not actually under threat.

This fact was one that Dannatt himself appeared to acknowledge:

He made it clear a factor in growing antipathy towards the army was the extent of public opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the unpopularity of Britain's continuing military presence there. Asked after his speech whose fault it was that Iraq was an unpopular war, he responded that it was a question he would "significantly duck". It was one for "someone else", said Gen Dannatt, who caused a storm a year ago when he said the presence of British troops in Iraq exacerbated Britain's security problems.

The reality of one's army placed in an illegal, immoral and unpopular war puts all of us in a very awkward position.

It is very easy for the war supporters to say that they "support the troops", after all they are paying no price at all for insisting that these young men and women fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are no food rations as in the days of the second world war, there are no excessive taxes to pay for the war, there is almost no price to pay for this war at all; indeed, a perfunctory walk down any of Britain's streets will quickly confirm that - as far as most citizens are concerned - this nation is not at war at all.

No, the price for Blair and Bush's stupidity is being paid for exclusively by the nation's armed services.

So I would be all for homecoming parades, after all my deepest wish is that we bring them all home as soon as possible.

I fear though that, genuine as Dannatt's plea surely is, he underestimates the extent to which the British government are served by the fact that serving soldiers - and the dead - are slipped back into this country almost under a cover of darkness.

I agree that more should be made of the return of brave young men and women who have been sent into danger on a lie. For the more we focus on that, the more likely it is that we will one day demand that the people responsible be brought to justice.

Click title for full article.