Sir, May I strongly endorse Matthew Parris’s trenchant criticisms of our military actions in the Middle East over the past 20 years (“Let’s call time on this post-imperial dreaming”,Jan 5)? Our government has consistently failed to take sufficient account of the complexities of these societies. Instead, they have adopted a moralistic basis for military involvement which, despite the skills and courage of our armed forces, has made a bad situation much worse in all three cases — Iraq, Libya and Syria. I suspect that part of the justification was the need to support American action given their key role in Nato, the bedrock of our security. This is not quite post-imperial dreaming but it is certainly no defence for a series of avoidable and costly…

Source: The Times January 06, 2019 23:59 UTC