Ming is right again about the Iraq war

Well done to Ming Campbell for raising the issue of the Iraq withdrawal timetable, as previously blogged about. Polly Toynbee has described the Liberal Democrats as "right, right and right again about the Iraq war"

As usual with Ming, his letter to Brown was measured and authoritative:

We have a moral obligation to the young men and women of our armed forces who we ask to do dangerous and difficult tasks, and it seems to me that the prime minister is ignoring the reality on the ground, but second, the increasingly vocal anxieties and reservations being expressed by senior army officers....And there really are two questions: First is, what political objectives are being achieved by our continued presence in the south of Iraq and what military objectives are being achieved? And so far, and certainly not in this letter, the prime minister does not seem to me to have provided coherent answers to either of these questions.

Sadly, the Iraq mission appears to be the classic military bête noire of a campaign with no proper political objective. A quicksand mission.

While that looks a pretty clinical observation in print, we have to remember that British soldiers are dying for this open ended Bush bail-out errand.