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How foolish to let Harry play soldiers
If Harry were to go to Iraq and be captured, he would be lucky to lose only his ears.
‘We are awaiting the arrival of the young handsome spoilt prince with bated breath and we confidently expect he will come out into the open on the battlefield. We will be generous with him. For we will return him to his grandmother but without ears.”
This might sound like some savage medieval fairy story, or primitive warrior saga. Unfortunately, it is all too contemporary and all too real. It is the very recent threat of Abu Zaid, commander of the Malik Ibn Al Ashtar brigade of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army militia in Iraq, promising what his men will do to Prince Harry if he goes with his regiment to fight in their country.
Actually if Harry were to go to Iraq, and be captured by one of the many armed factions openly after his blood and his name, he would be very lucky to lose only his ears. He would be much more likely to lose his head, horribly and publicly, on footage seen repeatedly all over the world, across the internet, after weeks or months of public humiliation and torture.
Meanwhile the most terrible questions of ransoms and trade-offs would be endlessly debated, to the shame and alarm of the British and their allies, and to the joy of Islamist extremists all over the world.
The effect would be desperately inflammatory all round; symbols have great power, particularly in unsophisticated cultures – this red-haired, blue-eyed, hard-living young man is a prince of the kufr, the unbelievers, and the decadent West to many, and to others his capture would be a mad Muslim atrocity too far – and it is extremely likely that Harry’s ears (if not his head) would be the casus belli of a much wider and even more terrifying conflict than the one going on now. Already Harry’s photographs are being circulated in Iraq and bounties being promised: this is a disaster waiting to happen.
The top brass of the British armed forces are clearly useless at public relations – the recent fiasco over the naval hostages in Iran is proof of that – but you might have thought that even they would have spotted something so glaringly obvious: the risk – high or low, and in this case very high – that Harry might be captured in Iraq is, and always was, absolutely unacceptable. He should never have been allowed for an instant to think he would be allowed to go.
That is clearly very hard on him, of course. He wants to act like any other professional soldier, and take just the same risks and show just as much courage, which no doubt he would.
But Harry can never be like any other soldier; he was born to a symbolic role, whether he likes it or not. I simply cannot imagine why General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, ignored this obvious and inescapable fact when he decided so inexplicably last year that Harry should be allowed to go to Iraq, and why even now he is dithering about changing his mind.
Harry has supposedly said he is not afraid to die, and there is no reason to doubt his courage. But death is not the worst thing in a very dirty war, either for him or for his country.
The risk of his capture is not the only problem, though by itself it is quite enough to keep him at home. There is also the extreme and exceptional risk to any men serving with him. That ought also to have been obvious to the top brass from the day Harry enlisted, and indeed before then.
Last Friday the front page headline of The Times, above a picture of soldiers bringing home a coffin from Iraq, was “Dry run attack forces Prince Harry retreat”. Senior army officers say they believe a fatal attack last week on two British soldiers in Iraq was a rehearsal for an attempt on Harry’s life.
The attack was made on a Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle, which is the type of vehicle Harry will use, in a part of the country where he will serve. If army sources are right in their fears that insurgents are well-enough informed to target Harry and his troops so precisely in this way, then the prince’s men are at especially high risk, as well as the prince himself. He cannot want that, and nor can their senior officers or their families.
And it is and always was so very obviously the problem with letting the poor boy go. His loyalty to his men alone should keep him home, to keep them (rather than himself) out of exceptional danger. The hard truth is that they would be safer under another officer, as would their entire base and the whole military endeavour in Iraq.
The problem began when Harry was encouraged, or allowed, to think, under General Sir Mike Jackson, that he could be a real soldier – I’m not sure that Prince William ever was. No matter how well Harry and his brother did at Sandhurst, no matter how great their officer potential, no matter how inspiring their courage or their leadership, they could never have hoped to do anything more than playing at soldiers, for all the resoundingly obvious reasons.
You have only to think of the horrifying videos of Ken Bigley, or the draped coffin of Corporal Ben Leaning, killed in the supposed “dry run” attack. The fact that Prince Andrew was allowed to serve in the Falklands war is irrelevant; the circumstances were entirely different, and in any case he shouldn’t have gone. If Harry was too young to appreciate that, his senior officers certainly were not.
It is perhaps the greatest hardship of being born royal, or at least a senior member of the royal family; it means being not as others are. It means leading not a real life, but a ritual life, for much of the time; it means both the loss of freedom and responsibility, very often.
It is a hard lot, in that sense, as Harry must be finding, and as his father has clearly so often felt. It is not easy, under such constraints to find a role that is personally satisfying, however much one might believe that the royal role is worth playing. Those many people who believe that the monarchy has served us well and is well worth preserving, ought perhaps to spare a thought for the personal cost to its members, and allow them to enjoy the privileges of their position, however spoilt they might sometimes seem – since they are forced, whether they like it or not, to endure its pain.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 29, 2007 | Comments (0)
Sorry, but we can’t just lock up pyschos
It takes a strange kind of mother to force her tiny children to hit and punch each other, to goad them with insults to fight harder and to film them as they weep, laughing all the while. That is what Zara Care did to her two-year-old boy and her three-year-old girl, egged on by her own mother and two of her sisters.
Quite rightly, her children were taken away from her for ever at Plymouth crown court last week and given into the custody of their paternal grandparents. The unfortunately named Ms Care also pleaded guilty to other offences of child cruelty, including ill treatment, neglect and abandonment.
In such circumstances it is usual to point an accusing finger at social services. Why did they not prevent this happening in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious that Care’s family was extremely dysfunctional?
However — and without knowing all the facts — I doubt that would be fair. There are countless young mothers (and fathers) who come from horribly dysfunctional families, who may suffer from personality disorders or low intelligence, not to mention poverty, illiteracy and drink or drug abuse. It must be difficult for social workers, doctors, nurses or teachers to predict that, of all these inadequate mothers, this particular one will do her children serious harm.
Even if, most improbably, one could make such a prediction with any confidence, what should one then do? Lock the woman up, or take away her babies before she has done anything wrong, just in case?
Zara Care’s story made me think again of the Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-hui. There were many indications that he was disturbed. Several times his teachers warned the university’s counselling services, the police and the dean of studies about his frightening behaviour. It emerged that nearly 18 months ago Cho was declared mentally ill and “an imminent danger to others” by a judge, and was admitted to a mental health unit. But before long he was released for outpatient treatment after a doctor certified that although Cho was mentally ill, “he does not present an imminent danger to himself or others”.
I mention this not to point blame at Virginia Tech or those responsible for Cho and for the safety of all students. It must be obvious to any fair-minded person that it is extremely difficult to determine whether a disturbed person is dangerous and, having done so, what to do about him.
Does he suffer from a mental illness that can be treated? Does he suffer from a personality disorder that cannot? These diagnoses are hard to make. What’s more, the fashions in diagnosis change. So, too, do ideas of what can and cannot be treated. It is still not legal in this country to detain someone without being able to treat him.
Professional judgment is very erratic — Cho’s doctors disagreed, for example, and scientific understanding of the human psyche is still primitive. In America, the FBI and secret services have considered profiling school shooters like Cho, to stop them before they start, but have concluded that it is not possible at present.
By coincidence, these questions were well debated in the House of Commons last week. For nearly 10 years the government has being trying to change the law on mental illness, or what we now have to call mental health. Last Monday its controversial mental health bill received a second reading. The bill’s main purpose is to lay down the circumstances in which a mentally ill person can be compulsorily detained or treated without consent.
The government is partly responding to outrage at the terrifying murders committed by mentally ill people who have been released from mental hospitals or were supposedly being treated in the community. It’s not possible to be sure how many people are killed this way each year, but the number for the past eight years in England and Wales seems to be about 50.
True to form, the government and Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, incline in the direction of compulsion and control. Their many critics on all political and medical sides, especially in the Lords, have tried with some success to soften the terms of the bill in the direction of freedom and civil rights.
Professor Sheila Hollins, the mother of Abigail Witchalls who was paralysed in an attack by a disturbed young man, is also president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She argues in support of the Lords amendments in the interests of patients’ rights. So does Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, and an alliance of medical professionals and civil libertarians. My heart and instincts are with them — for now.
In future, I suspect, their convictions and my inclinations will change. In future it will become easier and easier to recognise from their earliest years, with proper scientific predictors, the men and women who will almost certainly do harm to others. Then, I suspect, the balance between personal freedom and security will change dramatically.
It is already happening. A few years ago American studies of children with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder argued that they were much more likely than others to commit violent crimes later and that this could be identified by brain scans. The scans could even suggest the degree of probability.
Dutch studies of a family of highly aggressive and impulsive (but mentally healthy) men claim to have found clear genetic markers for their condition. What’s more, it will probably become easier to treat or to control such people by new scientific means — one of the objections to locking up psychopaths is that they cannot be treated. Then the question of their civil liberties will fade and with it our objections.
Meanwhile, in America there is a voluntary gated community of convicted paedophiles, who have come together for protection from themselves and others. Outside their ghetto they know they will almost certainly attack again and be attacked in turn. Perhaps this solution could be offered to others with dangerous and untreatable problems — shooters, sadists and psychopaths.
It is a miserable image, but perhaps it’s better than the alternative — being locked up, being given compulsory community treatment orders or being lynched.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 22, 2007 | Comments (0)
The good wife is an old fashioned realist
How to be a perfect wife is not, you might have thought, a very contemporary question. Decades of feminism have been much more concerned with how to be a perfect career woman, exotic lover, fully fledged fashionista, alpha female and, latterly, yummy mummy; being a wife has been somewhat incidental, even for those who get married or stay married.
Gloomy research appears from time to time, suggesting that when women who try to have it all find they can’t, the first thing they give up on is their husbands, not least on sex with their husbands. That may be partly why two marriages out of three end in divorce and most people don’t marry at all; marriage rates are at their lowest since records began.
So was rather quaint to read in The Times last week an article entitled “In search of the good wife”, complete with a questionnaire from 1958. “Do you renew your nail varnish as soon as it chips?” it demands. “Do you go through his clothes every month or so to check on minor repairs? And then do you make them? Would you stay on at a party when you knew he was tired and wanted to go home? Do you use table napkins? Do you know the cheapest cuts of meat? Do you clean your handbag as often as you clean your shoes? Do you resent it when he has a night out with the boys?”
A familiar picture soon emerges of a carefully groomed woman with primped hair and a wasp waist who calms down the children and touches up her lipstick when her husband comes home from work, listens charmingly to his day’s debriefing, and then offers him a well cooked but thrifty dinner.
There was a time not so long ago when that would have been simply ridiculous. This traditional vision of matrimonial labour was considered not just laughable but repressive: a woman’s abilities and ambitions were sacrificed to her husband’s, without any security other than his goodwill.
Now, though, it seems that this vision is being revisited, and not only by Stepford wives, or those alarming “surrendered wives” of the American religious right. Ordinary women are at last beginning to realise that feminists, in their passionate rejection of traditional marriage, may have thrown out the man with the bathwater, and that they rather wish they hadn’t. A man, like a woman, needs an incentive to get married and stay married; feminism forgot that, and forgot too that marriage is more in women’s interests than in men’s.
So the old fashioned question has become interesting again, at least for women who want to find and keep a husband and realise, increasingly, how difficult that is: what makes a good wife? I think women should start by facing some awkward facts.
It’s a mistake in any relationship to insist too much on egalitarian principles. Feminism, understandably, has concentrated too much on women's rights and, by extension, too much on husbands’ duties. Why, on top of working long hours and forsaking all others, would a man put out the garbage and change the nappies for a woman who is too busy with her own career and too tired by her own schedule to bother much about him? Or, to be blunt, to have sex with him?
It may be his duty to put up and shut up and keep on doing the late night feeds and the early morning commuting, but it’s hardly very appealing. Nor is insisting on these duties a very clever way of trying to hold on to a husband, if that is what a woman wants.
One hard fact a would-be wife has to face — and I was absolutely horrified to realise this myself — is that it’s not possible for a married couple to have two demanding jobs and children and a good relationship. Something has to give. If the relationship has to be neglected, then the marriage will fail, which will be very bad for the children. If the children are neglected, then the marriage is worthless anyway.
So something must give on the work front and this is probably, for many women, the price of being a good wife and having a good marriage. Unless a couple are extremely well paid, and have plenty of domestic help, her brilliant career will have to be less brilliant for a while; she will have to spend some time in the Mummy lane.
It could, of course, be the other way round. But another harsh truth is that alpha males won't stay at home in the Daddy lane and nor will plenty of other males of all descriptions; they refuse to be ersatz housewives. They would rather not get married, and as the figures show, increasingly they aren’t, and increasingly, if they are, they move out. So rule number one for a wife is to forget about equal rights and entitlements. Think instead about motivation.
When you want to please your child, or your lover, you think hard about what might make them happy and then do it. It’s not a chore, or even if it is that hardly matters; it’s an act of love or of loyalty. Yet strangely, in marriage this obvious motivational technique seems to wither away with the wedding flowers. Women are convinced it is their right not to have sex when they don’t feel like it, and it is a man’s duty to wash up, though he hates it — and so it is, of course. But that’s not the point. Granny was right; never say no, and never nag.
I think that my generation, and later ones even more so, have been led astray by romantic 1960s notions of sincerity and authenticity; it began to be believed that in the name of existential good faith and psychological well being individuals ought always to act and speak in accordance with their feelings — telling it like is and letting it all hang out. So sex without passionate desire — the boffe de politesse of a kindly marriage — is inauthentic.
Similarly, talking without expressing all one’s resentments and expectations and anxieties is a kind of insincerity, or dishonesty even. But this rather adolescent attitude is entirely at odds with the tolerance, discretion and generosity of body and spirit needed in a good marriage.
Husbands are mostly quite simple. Generally, what they want is unlimited, enthusiastic sex, constant reassurance, good food and plenty of freedom, of at least three of these four. Some can be trained to be very helpful domestically and some even enjoy it; but most are not bred for it. But they have many excellent and endearing qualities; the rewards of living with a well-motivated husband, if not quite above rubies, are very considerable, high though the price may be.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 15, 2007 | Comments (3)
