Reply #459: So we're going to bolt from Iraq. Where are the cries of complaint?

[bemildred]

The game is nearly up: not the military game, the psychological one. We can no longer take the strain in Iraq. We are going to make a bolt for it. You know that, don’t you? I suspect most British people do. It’s bearing down on us with a terrible inevitability.

Well? I am waiting. A number of us are waiting. We were expecting an angry chorus from a particular quarter. So why the silence? You could hear a pin drop. Why don’t they sing out, the armchair warriors of Fleet Street? George W. Bush and his friends are preparing to scuttle Iraq, and nobody’s complaining.

Where are they, those editorialisers whose confident “Tally-ho!” cheered our lads into Basra and Baghdad and whose cry was that we were “in this for the long haul”, to “finish the job”? Finish the job indeed — do they really think, does anybody think, that the job is finished? Does anyone seriously suggest that a free and democratic Iraq is now heading into the home straight?

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This should be their moment. Anyone can cry “Forward!” when the tanks are rolling. It’s when the operation gets bogged down, when people are dying, when the end looks further off than ever, that the voices of the prophets are needed to rally morale. If hearts are growing faint in Washington and resolve is faltering in the capitals of the Coalition of the Willing — if the whispers of “time to start scaling back the commitment ” are growing more insistent — then where, when their instincts should surely tell them they are needed most, are the bugle-boys of the British media?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1732779,00.html