Military

All of the buccaneering rhetoric has been sucked from the Libyan conflict this week, replaced with words of concession, compromise and caution. A few days ago, it was the news that — contrary to what they might previously have said — the government is prepared to let Gaddafi remain in the country after all. Today, William Hague deploys the same line in an interview with the Times (£), in which he also warns that there are "a lot of problems and even convulsions" to come in northern Africa. As it happens, the depressed mood of our foreign-policymakers reflects the tide of public opinion. Here, for CoffeeHousers' benefit, are a couple of graphs that we've made from YouGov's polling questions on Libya.

Earlier this week, there was a European Court of Human Rights ruling that is worth dwelling on. To summarise: the Court held that the UK's human rights obligations apply to its acts in Iraq, and that the UK had violated the European Convention on Human Rights in its failure to adequately investigate the killing of five Iraqi civilians by its forces there. The judgment overturns a House of Lords majority ruling four years ago that there was no UK human rights jurisdiction regarding the deaths. The obligation on soldiers to protect the vulnerable during military operations is not, of course, new. It underlies the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (as well as their predecessors and Additional Protocols of 1977). Thus, soldiers have had a duty to protect civilians for years.

Another day, yesterday, to remind us of the precariousness of everything in Afghanistan. With David Cameron in the country, it was announced, first, that a British soldier had gone missing from his base; and, then, that the same soldier had been found dead with gunshot wounds. "His exact cause of death is still to be established," said a spokesman, "and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and death are currently under investigation." His is the 375th British military death in the country since operations began. And, of course, the politics quiver on in the background.

Talk about an own goal. Whatever Air Chief Marshall Sir Simon Bryant thought he was achieving when he told MPs that the RAF were "running hot" because of the Libya intervention, the result has been to fuel the debate about the appropriate role of military officers in the public debate – and, in the latest instalment of the debate, if the current military leadership is actually up to the job. It is an important question – nothing should be taboo in a democracy and since Britain has none of the parliamentary oversight that the US congress has over military leaders, this debate is an important form of scrutiny. In my experience in Basra and Kabul, many of our military leaders must take part of the blame for Britain’s failure.

Charles Moore’s column in the Telegraph today makes a very good case against enshrining the military covenant in law. As Charles argues, once the lawyers and the judges get their hands on it there could be a whole slew of unintended consequences. Judges could decide, for instance, that the court martial system does not offer soldiers ‘fair treatment’. Indeed, it is worth noting that the Major General, now retired, who drafted the covenant does not believe that it should be made law for precisely this reason. There’s no doubt that under the last government were expected to fight wars on peace time budgets and that spending on the military overall was too low. But putting the covenant into law is not the right solution to that problem.

Recent wars have given rise to an unusual phenomenon in British civil-military relations: frequent, and often high-profile interventions, by serving or recently retired senior military officers in public debates. The latest has been the intervention of Britain's chief naval officer, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, who questioned the Navy’s ability to sustain the Libya campaign. Different prime ministers have dealt with this kind of outspokenness in different ways. Tony Blair was too weak to rein in Army chief Sir General Richard Dannatt, while Gordon Brown did not have the credibility, vis-à-vis the military, to do so either. David Cameron is different. He is at the height of his powers and determined that he, not the military leadership, should exercise command.