Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2006
Our wounded soldiers deserve better treatment
Tony Blair is the most bellicose Prime Minister in British history, punctuating his premiership with military intervention in distant lands.
He has sent troops into combat on six occasions – air strikes against Iraq in 1998 and against Kosovo in 1999, the "invasion" of Sierra Leone in 2000, of Afghanistan in 2001, of Iraq in 2003, and now the second deployment in Afghanistan to quell the Taliban insurgency.
Mr Blair adumbrated the philosophy behind this serial interventionism in his 1999 speech in Chicago in which he warned that appeasement does not work and that the most pressing foreign policy problem facing the West was "to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts".
The corollary to Mr Blair's in many ways laudable desire to right the world's wrongs is unprecedented pressure on the UK's Armed Forces. With the exception of the last century's two world wars, it is arguable that they have never in modern times been so stretched and so hard-worked over such a protracted period as under this New Labour Government and its Chicago doctrine. In these circumstances, our Servicemen and women have a right to expect only the very best treatment before, during and after combat.
If only. To the dreadful catalogue of equipment shortages and failures that have all too frequently characterised these armed interventions must now be added the unforgivable treatment meted out to wounded soldiers.
The grotesque spectacle – reported in this newspaper yesterday – of a wounded paratrooper being berated in an NHS ward by an angry Muslim who accused him of "killing my Muslim brothers in Afghanistan" simply beggars belief. Military casualties are only being treated in NHS hospitals at all because successive governments, in a crass display of short-term expediency, sold off military hospitals to property developers to help raise cash.
The result? British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq joke that they would prefer to take a more serious combat injury because that would mean them being sent to the US military hospital in Ramstein in Germany – not thrown on the mercies of a general NHS ward and taking their chances with the possibility of being harangued (or worse) by an aggrieved Muslim wandering in off the street.
Mr Blair's assertive foreign policy in a world made dangerous by Islamic terrorism can be justified.
What cannot be justified is the casual neglect with which the brave men and women who have helped him deliver that policy are being dealt with. Their courage, skill and professionalism are rightly lauded around the world and this Government owes them an enormous debt of gratitude. It's time it started to repay that debt by ensuring wounded soldiers receive the treatment they so richly deserve.