Letters | 4 April 2009

Bloody rude

Sir: Michael Portillo (‘The view from Basra’, 28 March) accuses the British army of arrogance and, effectively, of incompetence. He says we’ve been humiliated. This may accord with his new television persona, but it is still disingenuous, apart from being bloody rude. It is his own political class that has been shown up — shamed, shown treacherous and craven — by reducing the British army again and again, until it could fit into Wembley stadium, but still expecting it to undertake counter-insurgency work.

The army has always maintained, in its advice to the politicians, that counter-insurgency in Basra would require a full infantry division. I’d also remind Portillo, for all his unction about us ‘having developed our doctrine, and understanding that not all insurgencies are like Northern Ireland’, that we have fought over 60 counter-insurgencies since the war. We remain the only army ever to have won a counter-revolutionary war (in Malaya), and we effectively wrote the textbook which General Petraeus so successfully applied.