There is much talk in the UK and here in the States about today's Daily Mail interview with General Sir Richard Dannatt, in which he said that the British military presence in Iraq is making things worse (although he rather qualified these comments this morning on the Today programme).
In the melee surrounding this story, I came across this truly astonishing statement from No 10 Downing Street. Asked about the general's statements, the Prime Minister's spokesman said that the UK:
did not want to be in Iraq any more than we had to be, but the people who decided that in the end was the Iraqi Government [my emphasis]
Can this be right? Has the UK government now delegated its own military deployment policy totally and utterly to a foreign government? Do parliament, ministers, the Prime Minister, the British public now have zero say in whether British soldiers continue to fight on foreign soil? If true, this statement seems to me an astounding admission.
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