Guardian UK: As Libya shows, our military shrinks but Britain's crush on war does not

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As Libya shows, our military shrinks but Britain's crush on war does not
The urge to launch wars quickly – and be seen to win them decisively – is an alarming impulse of our modern governments

Andy Beckett
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 August 2011


For a country that has been at war almost non-stop for the last decade and a half, Britain finds it strikingly hard to stay level-headed about how its wars are going. Less than a fortnight ago the word "stalemate" was still being used in British newspapers' Libyan conflict coverage; now Britain's limited contribution to the Nato operation there is widely seen by the press as a major foreign policy triumph. The same manic progression from pessimism to optimism, and sometimes back again, has been the British media response to all our recent major military campaigns, from Iraq to Kosovo to Afghanistan.

In 2001, apparent victory in the last prompted a memorably reckless piece of political point-scoring by the Sun. "Shame of the Traitors" was the headline over an extra-long leader in the paper the day after Kabul fell to the British-backed Northern Alliance. Rounding on the Guardian, the Independent, the Mirror, the New Statesman and "the left" in general, the Sun gloated: "The wobblers said we couldn't win the war before the winter snows set in. They were wrong! They said there would be hundreds – or even thousands of allied deaths … They were wrong! They said the Americans were bombing thousands of innocent civilians … They were wrong!" Ten years on, that crowing sounds excruciatingly hasty. It also sounds dismally parochial: a brutal civil war, with big international repercussions, reduced to a Fleet Street squabble.

Wars are complicated; their outcomes often unpredictable – especially in faraway countries of which we know little. And since making peace with our European rivals in 1945 and withdrawing from almost all our colonies in the 50s and 60s, it has been in distant, unfamiliar places that we have fought. Bellicose British journalists who opine about such conflicts from a safe distance, judging in an afternoon the merits of the Kosovo Liberation Army or Libya's National Transitional Council, and the justification and best military tactics for siding with them, ought to be more careful.

It's hard to see that happening. The British press generally prefers certainty to caution and nuance. Decades of cutbacks in reporting from abroad, driven by recession, the digital erosion of newspaper profits and, quite possibly, a growing national introversion, mean the foreign context for our military interventions feels in ever-shorter supply. In Libya, who are the key anti-Gaddafi protagonists? What do they really want? What is the exact balance between secular and religious forces? Only the keenest students of the last six months' Libyan coverage are likely to know. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/libya-shows-british-crush-war-growing