Letters to the Editor | 6 January 2007

Blair, brave?

From Correlli Barnett

Sir: I wish there were something I could do to help poor deluded William Shawcross (‘The West must be the strong horse’, 30 December). He seems to be just about the only man in England other than our deranged Prime Minister and his ministerial stooges still to refuse to accept that the intervention in Iraq has resulted in a disaster. Moreover, Shawcross’s prescriptions for redeeming the disaster are sheer fantasy. For example, he writes, ‘There should be thousands more US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army. The same goes, on a smaller scale, for the British.’ But where are these soldiers to come from? Already the commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching American and British manpower to the very limit, if not beyond. Shawcross also tells us that it is ‘shocking that we have only trained a handful of Iraqi officers in Britain. There should be hundreds training here all the time.’