The mawkishness that shows Britain no longer knows what its heroes are dying for
They were words one hardly expected to hear from one of our most distinguished military figures — especially in the week of Remembrance Sunday.
However, that only makes the comments at the weekend of Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Fry, former commander of British forces in Iraq, all the more disturbing.
He said the British people had developed a dangerously ‘mawkish’ attitude towards the Armed Forces.
General Sir Robert Fry, right, said the British had developed a 'mawkish' attitude towards the Armed Forces (file pic)
‘I think that the British people hold the Armed Forces in a state of excessive reverence at the present time. It is a greater infatuation than at any other stage of recent military history that I can recall,’ he said.
With these comments, he has put his finger on a subtle, but crucial and potentially catastrophic shift in our national psyche.
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So what’s wrong with ‘reverence’, you may ask. Well, General Fry is making a brutal and, indeed, shocking observation - that the British hold dead soldiers in deep esteem while despising the causes for which they are currently laying down their lives.
This is because fundamental assumptions about this nation and the wars fought on its behalf have been shattered.
For most of the past two centuries, he observed, there had been an unspoken agreement that any war fought by Britain would be based on acknowledged rules; this country would most likely win that war; and the outcome would be largely beneficial.
That consensus, however, was broken with the war in Iraq — and may never
be repaired.
The result has been that the public now mourn excessively the soldiers who have fallen in battle — who are seen increasingly as the victims, not of the enemies of this country but of its government that commits Britain to fight wars its people no longer support.
That is an utterly devastating observation. Devastating because it is true — and because of its implications.
For Britain is a fighting nation. It is a land of historic and classic warrior heroes. Military power is part of its DNA.
For centuries, it has successfully used that power to advance its national interests abroad and defend them at home. From the Armada to Trafalgar to the Battle of Britain, military prowess has been synonymous with British greatness and is etched deep into the nation’s cultural memory.
Understanding the fact that wars to defend the nation inescapably entail sacrifice, the British once bore such losses stoically.
Until now — when public displays of emotion over fallen soldiers have reached such a pitch that Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute, has described them as ‘recreational grief’ in memory of soldiers sent by useless governments to fight pointless wars.
Such erosion of the consensus about military power arguably started long before Iraq.
The widespread use of British soldiers in ‘peace-keeping forces’ stretched the patience of the public, who often found it hard to understand why it was necessary to police the world in this way, let alone see what good it did.
It is rooted further back still, in the last century’s two world wars which, although Britain won them, exacted a terrible toll of casualties and provoked as a result a near-terminal revulsion against war itself.
There is surely a more profound reason still. The acceptance that soldiers fight and die for the good of the nation is based on belief in something beyond the self.
But with the erosion of religious faith and the corresponding conviction that there is nothing beyond this world, the idea of dying for any cause becomes less and less persuasive.
Virtues such as heroism, altruism and self-sacrifice have thus been displaced by the culture of instant gratification, while true feeling for others has been replaced by false emotion or mawkish sentimentality.
Throughout this dismaying process of cultural decline, the Armed Forces have remained virtually the last redoubt of Britain’s vanishing virtues such as courage, orderliness, stoicism and an unshakeable belief in the greater good.
But all around, the rest of British society has been losing its belief in the nation — and its willingness to fight and die to defend it. And if the public no longer supports the aims for which the Armed Forces wage war, these suffer a catastrophic slump in morale.
As Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards has ominously warned about the premature withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan: ‘If we lose this war, it will be in the homes of this country, as people tire of it.’
Rightly or wrongly, the war in Iraq shattered public trust in the political and defence establishment ever to tell the truth about why a war is necessary in the national interest.
Now Britain is mired in Afghanistan, many think that, too, is a war we should not be fighting.
Personally, I happened to support both wars, and still do.
But catastrophic mistakes have been made in explaining precisely why these were so necessary.
In particular, there has been an almost total failure to convince people that we are living in a very different world with a very different kind of warfare that doesn’t fit the old assumptions.
We are up against an enemy we can’t identify easily because it doesn’t wear the uniform of a country’s army, and it often chooses to operate under the false flags of one geographical conflict after another.
This is what General Richards was getting at this weekend when he said that Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism could never be defeated.
What he meant was that there could be no clear-cut victory, where British troops would march into the capital of a country it had vanquished or liberated.
As for Islamic extremism, an idea, however dangerous, cannot be defeated through military means. But as the general said, it can certainly be contained so that people are protected from it.
But that means an open-ended military commitment. And that depends crucially on popular support.
Without that support, Britain and the West will lose — to an enemy that is fighting on many fronts to bring down the West.
General Richards says: ‘Don’t give up, folks.’ But many are doing precisely that. Not just over Afghanistan or Iraq, but over the very idea that this country’s political and military commanders can be trusted never to put its soldiers in harm’s way unless it really is in the national interest to do so.
A country that no longer understands what it is fighting against — or even more crucially, what it is fighting for — will not, in the long term, survive.
This is all so desperately tragic. This is Britain we are talking about — that land of the lion-hearted that lit the lamp of liberty for the world and whose greatest nobility lay in ensuring that its light was never extinguished.
Yet now that mighty heart is all but broken. Almost the last place in which
it still continues to beat on is in our Armed Forces.
Yes, we must, of course, mourn our fallen soldiers. But in order to respect their ultimate sacrifice, we must recognise and support the cause — our national cause — for which they continue to lay down their lives.
