By Mick Hume (THE TIMES, 03/03/06):
This is an extract of 'Notebook'
GRIEF-STRICKEN families of British soldiers killed on active service are now among the most prominent critics of the Iraq war. This week, as two more deaths brought the UK death toll in Iraq to 103, bereaved relatives went to Downing Street with an open letter to Tony Blair, demanding that the Prime Minister bring the troops home and attacking his refusal to meet them.
Why are army families like these, who might have been the firmest supporters of past military actions, suddenly looking more like Mr Blair’s enemy within? The organisation Military Families against the War claims that it is “no doubt related to how dangerous it is [in Iraq] now”.
However, the Iraqi conflict appears considerably less dangerous for British troops than many previous wars. Even the Northern Ireland Troubles had a higher rate of attrition. Yet there were no high-profile relatives’ protests against past wars.
What is more, to judge by the casualty figures, Iraq itself has become less dangerous for British forces (if not for Iraqis) over the past three years. From March 2003 to February 2004, there were 59 UK deaths — 33 of them during the initial conflict with Saddam Hussein’s forces, the other 26 afterwards. The following year to February 2005, 27 British servicemen died. In the past year, that total fell to 17.
It seems that the fewer British deaths there have been, the louder bereaved families have protested against the war. This is clearly about something more than the body count alone. Those families have lost not only their loved ones, but any sense that they died for something worthwhile. The biggest military casualty in Iraq has been a belief in what Britain stands for there.
In the past, bereaved military families could have mixed their grief with pride, a feeling that the death was in a noble cause. How could they feel any such thing about the Iraq war, when the official justification for this shambolic adventure has shifted so often? Little wonder the Prime Minister is not keen to meet the families; what would he say, given that even his Government seems uncertain what they are supposed to be fighting for?
To many of the bereaved, it must appear that their loved ones died for nothing, that their deaths have no more meaning than the recent murder of a soldier on leave from Iraq, fatally stabbed in Birmingham by a mugger after his gold chain.
Nobody could have anything but sympathy for the bereaved. However, there is another, rather less noble, reason why their protests have become so prominent. The antiwar movement has sought publicly to exploit their private grief as a form of emotional blackmail.
There are many good arguments against the Iraq war, but a soldier’s coffin is not necessarily one of them. It can tell us nothing about the value or otherwise of the cause for which he died. Nor is grief alone proof of a good cause; after all, even Saddam wept for his dead sons.
Antiwar activists should come up with some more convincing arguments of their own, rather than cynically trying to use the bereaved as human shields to hide behind. Those who want to stop the war would do better to stop the shroud-waving.