I saw Jeremy Paxman lose his languid scepticism a few weeks ago on Newsnight and exhibit what looked like amazement. Michael Rose had just said that if he were an Iraqi he would fight the Americans, or at least he could see why Iraqis did it. Is that, Paxman asked, what you want the families of our servicemen fighting in Iraq to know? Rose said yes. Now the reason, I suppose, Paxman abandoned his customary eyebrow-lifting was that Michael Rose is retired General Sir Michael Rose KCB, DSO etc, the ex-Commander of the 22nd SAS Regiment that fought in the Falklands, and commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia. If his slim book doesn’t convince you that Iraq is a lost cause and prompt evacuation is the only sane course, you are a Bush-Blair True Believer.
Rose’s thesis is a simple one: ‘George III’s inability to recognise what drove the American colonists to rebel against the British crown is exactly matched by George Bush’s lack of understanding of the motivations of Islamic extremist terrorists.’ Like any good commander, Rose goes for the high ground. Bush and Blair, he reminds us
continually repeat the message that peace returned to the Balkans by the use of military force. It was the bombing of the Serbs in September 1995 that brought peace at Dayton and it was the bombing of Yugoslavia that removed Milosevic from power in 1999.
Both assertions, Rose insists, are untrue. It was the new confederation of Muslims and Croats that largely defeated the Serbs, and the 1999 bombing — ‘the most intensive eleven and a half weeks in the history of war,’ which killed 10,000 people and drove another million from their homes — ‘failed entirely’.
The British could not defeat the insurgency in their American colonies, Rose writes, because they didn’t grasp who and what their enemy was.
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