Sir, Remarkably, the Armed Forces Minister, Bill Rammell, devoted an entire speech to analysing the public’s growing resistance to the use of military power (letters, Jan 15 and 16) without mentioning the most conspicuous reason: the widely held view that the public were misled over the reasons for Britain’s military involvement in Iraq. Instead, he attributes the ‘public’s attitude to a decline in deference to authority, the 24-hour news cycle, risk aversion and “a freedom of information culture”. On this account, the Government’s conduct plays no part in the problem.
Mr Rammell appears to have adopted the view of the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who, in his 1994 evidence to the Scott inquiry on arms to Iraq, said: “There is nothing necessarily open to criticism in incompatibility between policy and presentation of policy . . . It [the Government] is not necessarily to be criticised for a difference between policy and public presentation of policy.”
It is partly as a result of such views that we now have a “freedom of information culture”.
Maurice Frankel
Director Campaign for Freedom of Information
Sir, I was involved in commissioning weekly surveys of public opinion during the Falklands conflict. It is often forgotten how split opinion was at the outset. Later, views in favour of the war hardened, even in the face of disasters, but not for a while. I came to believe that the struggle for hearts and minds at home is the decisive battle of any modern war.
In that struggle over Afghanistan, the key difference with the past is not that the British public have become more squeamish or cynical. It is that, with notable exceptions, public opinion has not been engaged. During the Falklands conflict, the public were persuaded by political leaders that there were straightforward, understandable reasons to go to war (whether they agreed with them or not), the objectives were simple and achievable, the war was being led reasonably competently as well as bravely, and the end was always in sight. None of those requirements has been satisfied in the current conflict.
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Hugh Pile
Godalming, Surrey
Sir, The war in Afghanistan is simply the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong place. We see our military and politicians as being out of their depth in a society and culture they do not understand. In the meantime a whole generation of Afghans is being radicalised and who will in the longer term become a far more serious threat to our security when, more likely than not as a mid-sized post-imperial nation, we will be in inglorious and impotent isolation as a result of this misconceived war.
Roy Johnson
Hexham, Northumberland