Blair’s general woes

Last week, the British Army’s chief of staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, caused an uproar when he told interviewer Sarah Sands that, “we should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems…”
Mark Townsend and my old buddy Ned Temko had some great background on the whole Dannatt affair– including the hissy-fit of outrage that came from the US Embassy when news of the interview leaked out– in this piece, which ran in The Observer, last Sunday.
They noted this about reaction to Dannatt’s remarks from people in the British military:

There was, however, a tangible lift in the body language of the British soldiers swapping banter in the mess tents of Basra and Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan. Those enduring the searing heat and danger of the desert battlefields celebrated a boss who talked the way they thought…
A poll on an army website asking users whether Dannatt’s comments were right or wrong offers corroboration. By midday yesterday, 97 per cent believed their general was right or practically right with his assessment. No one deemed him wrong. The tone of the entries ranged widely, but the message was unmistakable.
‘Thank God – some genuine leadership based on reality,’ said one about their leader.

Since then, Blair’s woes with his mouthy generals have been multiplying.
On Tuesday, Brig. Ed Butler, the outgoing commander of the British forces in Afghanistan told reporters that, “The decision to divert forces to invade Iraq cost the West years of progress in Afghanistan.”
The author of that story, Peter Graff, notes that Britain still has more than 7,000 troops in Iraq, at the same time that it’s providing the overall NATO headquarters in Afghanistan as well as a task force in Helmand province. He continues:

British commanders acknowledge that running both long-term campaigns has left them with virtually no spare capacity, and they have begged other NATO countries urgently to send more troops and aircraft to Afghanistan, so far with little response.
Butler said the shortage of aircraft for resupplying his troops meant paratroops at remote forward bases were at times down to “belt rations” — eating only what they could carry.
“It was very close,” he said.

Butler noted that for now, the latest Taliban offensive in helmand province had been beaten back. But he added: “If we take our eye off the ball and we don’t continue to invest in it then there’s a danger they could come back in bigger numbers next year.”
A lot more anger toward Blair was expressed by Col. (retd.) Tim Collins, who had headed the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Collins says:

The timescale for any British withdrawal from Iraq will be a complex matter and one wholly dependent on our American and Iraqi allies.
Observers and commentators have given warning of the danger of failing to robustly pursue the mission in Iraq or face the possibility of actually compounding the problem.
Three years into the occupation, with no real improvement, it is time to admit failure. That is what the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, was doing last week. Indeed the British failure in Iraq may be characterised by history as “ill conceived and without enough effort”.

He notes that the British troops are “now almost confined to barracks.” (I believe that the same is true of the massive numbers of US troops in Iraq, too.)
He concludes thus:

The British Army has not lost its spine; far from it. But the continued deployment to Iraq, long past any earlier UK estimates, coupled by the muddled state of domestic government in the UK – cuts to military strength whilst liabilities are dramatically increased – has struck at the roots of our military.
Coupled with the further adventure in Afghanistan, our military has run out of resources. We must win in Afghanistan; our national security and control of the opium on to our streets demands this.
Iraq was a “nice to do”. The end has come not because of any deeply contemplated policy decision, but because Tony Blair and his mates have driven our military like joyriders in a stolen car. Gen Dannatt has informed them that it has just run out of petrol. Let’s hope they don’t torch it to cover their tracks.

Ouch.
We should note the strategic-level judgment that Collins was expressing there: essentially, that not losing in Afghanistan is more important to (British) national security than not losing in Iraq. It strikes me this is the nub of the issue being debated within the British Ministry of Defence these days.
I wonder if this debate has even been seriously raised yet within policymaking circles in Washington? The resource constraints within the military– mainly, the manpower constraint– seem to have reached a critical point in Britain earlier than they have reached it in the US. But perhaps it is just that the British generals are braver about speaking out in public– where they deem it absolutely necessary– than the many, many highly overpaid flag officers within the US military…
But this issue of “Afghanistan vs. Iraq” is one that will surely require some very focused attention in Washington in the weeks ahead.
On the issue of generals speaking out in democracies, the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson recently roundly criticized Dannatt for having done so. Recalling his time as a correspondent in Brazil in the late 1980s, he argued that generals really should not intervene in politics.
He wrote:

Dannatt, being correct in his analysis of the situation and properly worried about the state of his army, had two choices: He could have argued his case to Blair privately, or he could have resigned and spoken out publicly. Probably he has already done the former. Had he done the latter, I’d be singing his praises.
But I don’t like active-duty generals dabbling in politics, even if I agree with them. Dannatt should run for Parliament if he wants to set foreign policy. If I were Blair, I’d advance Dannatt’s political career by relieving him of his current duties.

I am not sure about Robinson’s argument here. I think, firstly, that there’s a large difference between an army chief of staff speaking out in public with a professional assessment of the state of his forces and the strategic challenges ahead, and a chief of staff who stages a coup to seize political power. The Brazil analogy really doesn’t seem to hold much water.
Secondly, I expect that Dannatt was prepared for the prospect that Blair might seek his speedy firing after the publication of the remarks. But he went ahead and uttered therm anyway. Realistically, though, I would say that Dannatt probably assessed his chances of getting fired as low. In essence, that’s because Tony Blair’s political stock– in the country and even within his own party– is so low, and over precisely this isssue of Iraq, too, that he would merely end up making a fool of himself had he tried to fire the general.
But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, one final note here. Lewis Page has a strong piece that defends Dannatt’s decision to speak out, on the Propsect mag website. He writes:

By his oath of attestation, Dannatt is loyal to the Queen, not to Tony Blair or the Labour party. As a practical matter, unwritten like so much of the British constitution, this means that his true superiors are the British public. He has done nothing wrong by giving a professional opinion to his real bosses.
Sadly, Dannatt’s outspokenness is unlikely to repeated by his successors. Although he will not be openly disciplined for speaking up on this one occasion—because Tony Blair doesn’t want to spend his last months in office conducting a messy purge—once the succession, presumably to Gordon Brown, has taken place, it will probably be business as usual for the civilian-military relationship.
That will be a bad thing, far more of a danger to the British constitution than any fantastical military rebellion. Openness in government and freedom of speech are even more fundamental than military subordination to civil power, and these vital principles have been under sustained attack for some time now. The elected representatives of the British people voted freely to send our troops into Iraq, after all. They did so principally because all professional advice against the invasion was ruthlessly suppressed. The principle of constitutional loyalty was used to crush all authoritative dissent. An intelligence officer, John Morrison, who dared to speak out in 2004 was summarily fired. It has been made plain to military people that they will suffer the same fate if they ever contradict the party line.
But the generals at the very top aren’t really afraid of being dismissed, or even passed over…

Good arguments there.