people in the UK didn't care a toss either way as long as the IRA didn't bomb London or Manchester shopping centres.
And there's the crux of it. People don't give a toss what happens in the rest of the world so long as it doesn't affect them too badly at home.
They don't mind seeing Palestinians and Israelis killing each other, or slaughter in Darfur, but they do mind seeing British troops dying, and they mind even more seeing British troops actually killing.
It was Churchill, I think, who said "The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter". And he's right, because people, me included, are stupid, selfish and short sighted. We want
our little lives to be painless and enjoyable, and if you don't like the news you turn it off - once the news starts actually affecting you then you get all worked up about it.
The problem is that if we do what the "average voter" wants we'd be out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a week and we'd be happy for about a year. Then we'd be in the sh!t, because it's not a nation or a small group of people we are fighting against, it's an ideology, a twisting of a religion, a way of thinking which is entirely alien to and wants to end
our way of thinking. They won't give up because we leave their countries - they'll come to ours, just as they did on 9 Sept 2001.
Fortunately we live in a Constitutional Monarchy, not a democracy. Not giving the average voter what he wants is akin to not giving a child too many sweets - it's for our own good.