Boots off the ground

Oh boy. The right wing zealots are going to howling for British blood on this news.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army, has said that "Britain's presence" is exacerbating the violence in Iraq and has called for a full withdrawal of British forces as soon as possible. He further extends the recent US NIE report that the Iraq war has fueled an increase in global terrorism.

I don't say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.

The rest of his brief statement delivers a hard scrabble clarity that has long been missing from much of the Blair and Bush rhetoric we've all grown so tired of:

[we should] get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.

We are in a Muslim country and Muslims' views of foreigners in their country are quite clear.

As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren't invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time.

The military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in.

Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance.

I doubt he thinks this is only a problem of "British forces" but, being the proper Englishman, he appears too polite to state the obvious.

Some while ago, a certain Winston Churchill, quite a cut throat in his own right, found himself mired in the Middle East and wondering why those damnable Arabs were so inhospitable. Well, you know what they say about history ....