George Trefgarne writes a column for the Daily Mail
Uniquely among European nations, Britain does not lose wars. Yet we are on the verge of losing two at once, in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the long term strategic significance of Sir Richard Dannatt’s intervention last week, in which he called for British troops to leave Iraq “soon”. The challenge for the country, and for the Conservatives, is to develop a right of centre critique of Tony Blair’s foreign policy, before defeat/withdrawal in Iraq is exploited by the Left. For if the Left are allowed to dominate the ensuing debate, the consequences will be grave indeed: a surge in anti-Americanism jeopardising the special relationship, a tilt in public opinion in the opposite direction towards a federal Europe, and a dangerous reversal in the War on Terror.
The general public, in my experience, seem intuitively to understand that we are heading towards a foreign policy crisis. For them, this is the biggest political issue. Yet, for some reason, the only group more in denial of this than Tony Blair is the Conservative Party. True, in his recent foreign policy speech, David Cameron began to tiptoe away from following George Bush & Co over the top one more time. And he and William Hague described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as “disproportionate” (surely an empirical fact, given the Israeli reliance on air power). But the official Conservative line on Dannatt has been remarkably sotto voce. I listened to Liam Fox, the party’s defence spokesman, on the radio and could not actually understand what he was going on about.
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