Giving succour to terrorists...

It's getting near to that time in history again boys and girls...

In case anyone missed the jaw-dropping interview between Jeremy Paxman and retired General Michael Rose about the ‘war’ in Iraq last night, here’s a link to the BBC page featuring the choicest quotes…

"As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said 'if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms … The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way."

“It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved."

"The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq."


Given the fact that Paxman’s show has been unashamedly parroting government horsecrap about fighting Al Qaeda ‘over there instead of over here’, the steady progress that is being made in Iraq and the dangers of falling geopolitical dominoes for the last three years, the look of shocked surprise on Paxman’s face was more than understandable.

My ears could have been tricking me but at one point I could swear Rose said that the insurgents were 'right' to resist the occupation.

And throughout the all too brief interview all I could keep thinking was that if General Rose was a) brown, and b) not a former senior military commander, he would have been running a moderate risk of being locked-up for 30 days without charge whilst the police rummaged through his household cupboards in search of flashlights, flour, bleach, fruit, Manchester United posters, re-usable sandwich boxes, toothbrushes and any other 'must have' terrorist accessories.

But he’s not. So he wasn’t

"If I had a choice of going up against jihadists armed with AK-47s, RPGs and Semtex or jihadists packing a few of these babies I'd take the AKs every time..."

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