Thursday, 28 May 2009

Soldiering On

Military recruitment is at its highest for five years. The recession? No doubt a factor. But at least as important is the successful, if basically false, presentation of the end of British involvement in the Iraq War.
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9 comments:

  1. Ali28 May 2009 at 15:06

    What evidence do you have for this claim?

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  2. JohnJGMooney28 May 2009 at 15:13

    Oh I dont think the "end" of the war in Iraq has been a factor at all. Any good news has been more than offset by the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan. I understand that there have been two fatalities announced today....
    To some extent the British Government has been "lucky" (horribly insensitive word to use and I apologise for not thinking of a more fitting one) that casualties are usually in ones and twos. A single major incident in Afghanistan (eg the downing of a troop carrier plane) might cause a deeper public revulsion.
    This is perhaps the problem with a volunteer (non conscripted) army...it is difficult to imagine that a conscripted army would have been so callously treated.
    Of course economic downtown is effectively creating a conscript army by stealth.

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  3. David Lindsay28 May 2009 at 15:34

    About as much as Kevan Jones has for attributing it to the recession, Ali. Except that mine is more plausible. The Forces openly blamed low recruitment on the Iraq War for several years.

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  4. JohnJGMooney28 May 2009 at 16:07

    Actually your explanation is not in any way plausible.

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  5. David Lindsay28 May 2009 at 16:09

    Well, at one time the Army even put someone up on Newsnight to say that they couldn't recruit because of the war. Now we are pretending that the war is over. And, would you believe it, recruitment is up.

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  6. Astes28 May 2009 at 16:37

    So the kids all want to get posted to Afghanistan, then?

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  7. David Lindsay28 May 2009 at 16:49

    That war continues to be given the benefit of the doubt by much of the public, because it has never been properly debated in the way that Iraq was. If it were, then it wouldn't be.

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  8. Astes28 May 2009 at 17:14

    Whether it's a just war or not, the prospect of getting blown up by a pipe bomb is unlikely to be massively appetising for most people, I would have thought.

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  9. David Lindsay28 May 2009 at 17:20

    And such people were never going to join the Forces, no matter what.

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