Fully agree with you, Harry.
Barry, the General actually stated that any military response would have no strategic meaning unless it meant sending us into all out war.
He is therefore warning PM Cameron against ANY form of military intervention in Syria, as a bomb and target campaign alone, as in Libya, would not succeed.
You rightly imply that the Cabinet has suggested a military intervention (albeit possibly - POSSIBLY - not using ground troops - which is VERY unlikely though), but the Army has clearly said that it would be unsuccessful and could lead to an all-out war between Britain and Syria, as only a massive full-scale war would have any meaning on the battlefield.
So we have to see whether the Cabinet will be deterred from some Libya-style attack using only warplanes and warships and missiles, as it would be to no avail from a military-strategic point of view. It would have to be all-out war with enormous deployment of ground forces to have any chance of accomplishment.
But the Public in Britain do not want another Iraq or Afghanistan war with troops being sacrificed.
It is indeed unheard of that the commander of the British Army has publicly warned the Prime Minister not to get our Country involved in another war, INCLUDING a "limited" hit and run campaign using only aircraft and ship-propelled missiles.
For this is evidently the message the General is conveying.
He's doing it publicly, and we MUST support him!
It just takes a trip on the news sites to see what a mess Libya is in now, to see where Libyan weapons formerly belonging to the previous Libyan army have ended up, namely all over northern Africa in the hands of Al Qaeda groups now at war in Mali.
It takes only a brief view of the news to see how Iraq ended up, with non-stop killings going on ever since T. Blair marched in, over a million refugees fleeing the country, and now on the brink of a civil war between north and south Iraq.
And we all know how the Afghanistan debacle ended up.
Indeed Syria now is no different to what Iraq became ever since T. Blair marched in: the same number of refugees, but a lot less dead people, to date, than in Iraq.
Iraq is still top of the list in terms of dead and injured people, terrorism and Al Qaeda.
So PM Cameron had better take the superior advice of the Army and keep out of Syria, after all, this is our Country, not the personal chess-board of the Cabinet.
Whereas Syria is not our country.
