Saturday - November 07, 2009

A PRO WAR EDITORIAL COMMENT FROM CHARLES MOORE, IN THE FACE OF CALLS TO END IT NOW.

Funny how plans to do one thing get put off by something someone else does.  In this case, our friend Christopher has posted a great cartoon, and one I wish I’d found first. And like most illustrations of that nature, it says a heck of a lot.

Well, I had intended to post my Weekend Women before doing anything else, and they’re all ready to go.  But first there was that cartoon and then what is obviously a negative war cartoon in our morning paper, followed by this pro editorial from Charles Moore.  With all that, I felt I HAD to share this first. In fact, my next will be one from Simon Heffer on defeating Obama.  So a busier Sat. morning then I expected. 

This is a very worthwhile read and I encourage all to do so.  It has been edited for space here so please catch the link for the entire piece. It’s worth it.

If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely. Politicians such as Nick Clegg, who congratulate themselves on asking the necessary, awkward questions, need to be interrogated about what they actually want. Do they want the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs? Do they have any conception of what such a defeat would mean for the world order, for the stability of countries in the region, or for civil peace in every European city? Do they not understand that this fight will be seen all over the world not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that, if our values do not win, they will lose? (Charles Moore)

FOR MOORE, CLICK HERE

The war in Afghanistan is necessary, so why aren’t we trying harder to win?
The campaign in Afghanistan is being let down by weak leadership, on both sides of the Atlantic, says Charles Moore

By Charles Moore
The Saturday Telegraph
Editorial

Forgive me for starting with a harsh point, but it needs to be said that the fact that 229 British servicemen have been killed in Afghanistan is not an argument for ending the war. There is a tendency at present to exploit people’s admiration for the soldiers’ courage as a means not of advancing the Allied campaign, but of trying to stop it.

Such arguments have much more force with a conscript army, but ours is a professional one. Men volunteer to fight and they know that when you fight, you may die. The death of 229 such professionals over the course of eight years is not, by the standard of most wars, a high number. Tomorrow, the nation remembers wars where that number of dead per day was commonplace. The recent losses are extremely sad, but not shocking or even surprising. In themselves, they tell you nothing about whether the war is right or wrong.

It is, therefore, a bad idea for Gordon Brown’s public interventions on the subject of Afghanistan to be responses to particular deaths. Yesterday, he spoke in the wake of the murder of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman. One feels that his timing, though not his content, was tacitly rebuked by General Nick Parker, the new British commander in theatre, who said: “I hope we don’t make strategic decisions on the basis of this low-level, terrible action.”

The actual words which Mr Brown used supported the Afghan campaign, but their psychological undertow was less encouraging: “Oh dear, oh dear. Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”
Mr Brown is well known for being an intensely political politician, forever calculating electoral advantage, but he does not understand the political effect of wars. His original hope in Afghanistan seems to have been that people somehow would not notice it much. He was not exactly against it, but he has never, as people say nowadays, taken “ownership” of it. This is a war: why has he never set up a war cabinet?

Posted by peiper     on 11/07/2009 at 06:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • UK • War On Terror •  
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