NYT : General’s Remarks on Iraq Cause Stir in Britain

General’s Remarks on Iraq Cause Stir in Britain

By ALAN COWELL | October 13, 2006

ST ANDREWS, Scotland, Oct. 14 – The British government sought today to defuse an embarrassing public debate over remarks by its top military commander that Britain should withdraw its troops from Iraq ‘’sometime soon.”

The comments were interpreted by some government critics as a challenge to the authority of Prime Minister Tony Blair since they seemed to be a direct contradiction of his insistence that a retreat from Iraq would be ”a craven act of surrender.”

The officer, General Sir Richard Dannatt, modified some of his remarks in a series of radio and television interviews to expand on his comments in The Daily Mail tabloid. But he did not completely retract his assessment that the presence of British forces in Iraq ‘’exacerbated” the violence there.

‘’I have withdrawn none of the comments that I have made,” he said in a radio interview. ‘’I have given a little more explanation about what I meant by ’sometime soon’; that’s not backtracking.”

The dispute overshadowed Mr. Blair’s efforts at this Scottish golf resort to wrest a political settlement in Northern Ireland from the province’s fractious parties. Mr Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, are co-hosting a major gathering of Northern Ireland leaders including Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, and Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.

At a briefing here, Mr Blair’s spokesman said the general’s remarks following his Daily Mail interview showed there was ‘’not a cigarette paper between” the solider and Mr Blair.

‘’He said we are going to see this through. He said: I’m on record saying we will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. He also said that he remains committed to the vision of a unitary state in Iraq with a democratically elected government and security forces that underpin that government,” the spokesman said, referring to the general.

The spokesman, who is not identified in public under civil service customs, declined to say whether the British authorities had been in touch with the White House over the general’s comments, which coincided with other news likely to strengthen opponents of the war.

An inquest in Oxford, England, found today that Terry Lloyd, a British television war correspondent killed in Iraq in March, 2003, had been ‘’unlawfully killed” by United States forces who opened fire on a vehicle carrying the wounded reporter away from a battlefield.

The coroner in Oxford, Andrew Walker, said the American troops should not have fired on the vehicle. Mr Lloyd was working as a ‘’unilateral” journalist, meaning he was not embedded with the allied forces moving against Saddam Hussein. The inquest saw graphic video footage of the fighting.

Britain’s National Union of Journalists called Mr Lloyd’s death a ‘’war crime” and Mr Walker, the coroner, said he would write to the attorney general urging him to prosecute the killers. In the fighting, Mr Lloyd’s Lebanese translator, Hussein Osman, also died and French cameraman, Fred Nerac, is still missing, presumed dead.

General Dannatt’s comments drew widespread approval among anti-war legislators and campaigners and on unofficial websites used by military bloggers, including soldiers in the field. Britain has some 7,000 troops based primarily around Basra in the south of the country.

In the newspaper interview, General Dannatt said British soldiers should leave Iraq ‘’sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.”

General Dannatt told the BBC this morning in a radio interview: ‘’It was never my intention to have this hoo-ha.”

‘’My intention is particularly to speak up for what is right for the Army. That is my job. That is my constituency,” he said, apparently alluding to the suggestion by some soldiers that the army is overstretched with major combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the same radio show, Col. Tim Collins, who fought in Iraq in 2003 said the general’s comments had offered a ‘’refreshing and very honest insight into what the Army generally feels.”

‘’There comes a time when the realization on the ground is that the people of Iraq do resent foreign intervention and there comes a time when we have got to look forward to when we can hand it over to the Iraqis for them to sort out,” Colonel Collins said.

In an interview with Sky News, General Dannatt insisted:‘’We are not on the run; we are not hauling our colors down. We are going to see this thing through but we have got to get on with it; we can’t be there for years and years in the sorts of numbers we are.”

‘’We all recognize that. There is nothing new in what I am saying there and that’s what I mean by ’sometime soon’: when the mission is substantially done,” he said. ‘’That is what our aim is. But it is to leave sometime soon when the mission is done.”