No appeaser
From Correlli Barnett Sir: Adopting a lofty moral stance that would do credit to the Reverend Blair himself. Michael Gove ('The deadly Mail', 17 April) denounces me and others for criticising (in the Daily Mail) George W. Bush's and Tony Blair's invasion of Iraq and its current messy consequences. We are, he says, 'appeasers'.
I am not an appeaser. My book The Collapse of British Power contains a powerful critique of Neville Chamberlain's attempt at 'appeasing' Adolf Hitler in 1937-9. I am on record as fully supporting the expedition to recover the Falklands from the Argentinian invaders. I was similarly in favour of the expulsion of Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait in 1991. But in the case of Bush's and Blair's attack on Iraq in 2003, there was neither a credible grand-strategic threat to this country nor a clear-cut casus belli as in 1981 or 1991.1 have never believed that technical breaches by Saddam of stale old UN resolutions justified so extreme a response as war, and the shedding of British blood.
Let me say it yet again — the invasion of Iraq never had any connection with the socalled 'war on terror' (i.e., al-Qa'eda). That there may well be a connection now, thanks to incoming foreign fighters in Iraq, is entirely the fault of Bush and Blair. In short, I judge Bush and Blair guilty of a colossal grandstrategic blunder. Whether they were morally 'right' (as they themselves and Gove sanctimoniously believe) is completely irrelevant.
Since Gove also criticises my predictive abilities as a military commentator, I wish to record that in August 2002, a month before the publication of the first of Blair's 'dodgy dossiers', I wrote an article for the Daily Mail in the guise of the Iraqi chief of staff advising Saddam Hussein to avoid open battle with American military technology, and instead 'fight a protracted war, inflicting local setbacks and a constant drip of casualties' by drawing the Americans into 'messy closerange fighting in the major cities'. I was wrong to think that this was how the Iraqis would fight the actual American invasion last year. But it is exactly how they are fighting the Americans today, more than 12 months after Rumsfeld's all too easy victory and its political vacuum of an aftermath.
Gove sneeringly cites a mid-war Mail article of mine last year predicting that American 'technological arrogance' would be humbled before the gates of Baghdad, and stating that the Iraq conflict had then not 'even reached the end of the beginning'. Well, it has taken 12 months for my prediction to come right. Today we do see American 'technological arrogance' humbled before the gates of Fallujah and Najaf; and our embroilment in Iraq has quite clearly 'not even reached the end of the beginning'.
Correlli Barnett
Norwich
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