Actually, the General Staff’s manoeuvres on Fleet Street have, alas, been rather more successful than their efforts in Basra and Helmand province. I commend*, therefore, Paul Robinson’s article in this week’s edition of the magazine in which he argues that the Generals must take their share of responsibility for recent military failures. More provocatively still he suggests the Army has been saved by Labour since without Tony Blair’s zeal for expeditionary warfare it’s not quite clear what the army would be for these days.
There’s something to that in as much as I suspect that if Blair had not committed us to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the MoD budget would be, once again, the first port of call for Chancellors hell-bent on cutting costs across Whitehall.
Robinson writes:
The combination of this self-satisfied culture and the moral elevation of the soldier in the popular imagination has led to a modern version of the infamous dolchstosslegende, the stab-in-the-back theory which encouraged Germans to believe that they had not really been defeated in the first world war.
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