This interview was first published in the University of York’s political magazine, the Zahir, in June 2008.
With morbid anticipation, the UK media awaited the death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan. On June 8 it happened: three soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment were blown up by a suicide bomber in the south of the country. Quickly, Gordon Brown responded to the grim milestone. “They have paid the ultimate price”, he said, “but they have achieved something of lasting value - helping turn a lawless region sheltering terrorists into an emerging democracy.”
Brown, it seems, knows the importance of the army’s mission in Afghanistan. But has he done enough to ensure that British troops can achieve their aims? General Lord Guthrie, the former Chief of Defence Staff (1997-2001), thinks not. Defence spending has increased year on year since 2000. But, Lord Guthrie insists: “It has risen by a tiny amount, and the commitments have risen by a very great amount. We are now at war in two places, and we haven’t begun to fill the gap.”
Lord Guthrie, as a cross bench member of the House of Lords, is free to speak his mind. “It’s dead easy now, I’ve got a platform in the House of Lords and I sound off - I’m an independent.” But that hasn’t always been the case. Lord Guthrie was once lampooned as “Tony’s General” due to his genial relationship with the then Prime Minister. However, he won the respect of his critics by admitting fault later on. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday in 2007, Lord Guthrie said of the invasion of Iraq: “I felt it was right at the time. Now I’m not so sure. In fact I think it was probably wrong.”
If Lord Guthrie was ever Tony’s General, it is clear that his relationship with the current Prime Minister is a very different one. In fact, he has become one of Gordon Brown’s most fierce critics, deriding him only last November as “the most unsympathetic Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Aside from criticising the defence budget, Lord Guthrie, with a army career spanning more than four decades, is well-positioned to comment on military strategy. He admits that he is retired, and “a bit far away from it”, but nevertheless offers a radical approach to the situation in Afghanistan.
“I think we should think much more seriously about buying the poppy crop, and then destroying it, and keeping the little bit we need for medical matters.” So far, the attempts to replace the huge revenue raised by poppy famers, including the misguided US initiative to “grow pineapples”, has been unsuccessful. But, argues Lord Guthrie, “If you bought the poppy crop, they could live, they could feed themselves… the ordinary farmer is not rich.” Overall, he thinks “we are in a hole and we’re digging” in Afghanistan.
But does he view the situation in Iraq as being more hopeful? Lord Guthrie tells me: “Quite often people forget that when you go to war there are unforeseen consequences. You never quite know what’s going to happen next. Iraq is a very good example. There were 21 days of fighting a war and then there was a void which was filled by the ill-intentioned people.”
From his command experience in Kosovo and the Balkans, Lord Guthrie knows all too well the difficulties of rebuilding a country ravaged by war. “The actual fighting is quite easy – it’s very dangerous and very frightening – but putting together a country after a war is very much harder. It usually goes on for a very long time and ends up being far more expensive than the war itself.”
The coalition, he thinks, made some “very serious mistakes in Iraq” – For one, Lord Guthrie believes there were too few people on the ground: “We should have tried to take the Iraqi army to our bosom to get them to help us rebuild Iraq. Well we didn’t. What we did was we let [the soldiers] go home without their pensions, their pay and any prospects, and yet they went home with their rifles.”
Importantly, Lord Guthrie believes too much emphasis was placed on dismantling the Ba’ath party. “Everybody who was anybody was a Ba’athist. It didn’t mean to say they liked Saddam Hussein, but it did mean to say they wanted a job, they wanted their families looked after.” So, will Iraq work in the end? “I think it is too early to say…It takes a hugely long time to impose a peaceful, stable society.”
As the US presidential elections gather pace, American attitudes towards Iran are quickly becoming contentious. Does Lord Guthrie think would we would be able to invade a hostile Iran? “I certainly would not like to see us doing it by ourselves. I don’t think we are ready to invade Iran. Nor do I think we should invade Iran. But I think there are more likely scenarios when you might have to do something and there’s not much left – we have a very small army now, it’s highly skilled and highly professional, but it’s fighting two wars.”
Lord Guthrie has visited Iran. The Iranians, he tells me, “are an very interesting people. Some of them are extremely well-educated. They are not fools. They don’t like the Americans and they are damned if they are going to be pushed around by them. They view themselves as a great civilisation – a much older civilisation than the United states or Europe – and there is some truth in that. They don’t want to be lectured, and so there are not particularly easy to deal with.” At the moment, Lord Guthrie believes the situation with Iran has “simmered down.” But, he concedes: “If another 9/11 type incident happened, and the Iranians’ fingerprints were on it, I would probably be saying something a bit different.”
Choosing whether or not to go to war is not the prerogative of the Chief of Defence Staff. But it is their duty to advise the politicians of the day on military strategy and the army’s capability to achieve the task it sets out to do. Nevertheless, Lord Guthrie is a firm believer in the Christian tradition of the “just” war. But, he says, “Islam is difficult. Most Muslims don’t believe in war any more than we do. But they haven’t they kind of tradition we have. And the Jews haven’t got the kind of tradition like we have either.”
The tradition, Lord Guthrie argues, was developed by the great thinkers, such as St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas – they wrote of the just reasons for going to war. But listening to Lord Guthrie, as he tells me about this Christian tradition, I can’t help thinking: the Iraq war, which he supported, does not fill any of the criteria.
The Next Post: The Langwith bar saga: power to the students
The Previous Post: How to get past a Soho bouncer: recite the Credo
Comment Down Here
You can follow any responses to this entry via its RSS comments feed. You may also leave a trackback by clicking this link.