Start the Week

23/05/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the former British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, about the failures of Western policy in Afghanistan, and how diplomacy would have been a better option than the gun. In 2003 Baha Mousa was arrested by the British Army in Basra, in Iraq. Two days later he was dead. Richard Norton-Taylor sifts through all the evidence to bring the public inquiry into his death to the stage. David Pryce-Jones asks what motivates those who take up foreign causes, to the detriment of their own country, in Treason of the Heart. And the philosopher Angie Hobbs turns to the Greek Gods to untangle modern ideas of heroism and bravery.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 23 May 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At Sprouts, our wide open layout invites you in, with healthy around every corner, and tasty on every shelf. So when you walk in, you feel, this is that Sprouts feeling. At Sprouts, our shelves are filled with new, exciting and delicious discoveries, like a new oat milk that's gluten free, and sustainable. This is that Sprouts feeling. Thank you for downloading the Start The Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Good morning. This week, war will be much in the news as President Obama arrives to discuss the bloody conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya with David Cameron, and war is our theme as well. David Price-Jones has written a study of those who, over the centuries, have left Britain to go and fight for foreign causes, idealists or traitors, he asks. Angie Hobbs is a philosopher studying what it means to be a hero from ancient times to now. The Guardians Richard Norton Taylor has turned transcripts of the inquiry into the death of the Iraqi civilian Baha Musa, at the hands of British troops into a play, and we're going to start with Sherrod Cooper-Culls, formerly our man in Kabul, who has written a gripping memoir of his time in Afghanistan, strongly critical of the conduct of that conflict and relations in particular between politicians and soldiers. Sherrod, can I just start by taking you back to the moment when you were in Saudi Arabia and you got the call to go to Afghanistan? What you hoped and feared for that time? Well Andrew, I thought, like many people, that it was the good war, I'd been very doubtful about the wisdom of invading Iraq, there was a romantic feeling about going up the Hindu Kush into the great valleys of Afghanistan, and there was a feeling that being our ambassador in Kabul at that time, when we were ramping up the military campaign, was going to be a real job. And you arrived to find us clearly a shattered city, a rather sort of scattered and provisional kind of British diplomatic compound, where you were then going to be living on porridge for a few years to come, and the key relationships were going to be not only with Karzai, about whom we'll speak in a moment, but also of course with the Americans. Yes, with the American ambassador, Bill Wood, who was a highly intelligent, is a highly intelligent man, a great lover of PG Woodhouse, but absolutely devoted to the war on drugs, as well as the war on terror. He'd come from Colombia, and my first evening with him, he spent telling me how he wanted to spray the whole of the Helmand Valley from north to south with random, and he was called chemical bill, he was known as. That was the nickname he'd already been given by the Kabul diplomatic corps. And Karzai, you met early on, clearly quite a charming man in many ways, but a very, very difficult individual too. Yes, I became increasingly fond of Karzai, he's a great king, but a very poor chief executive, he doesn't enjoy administration, he knows he doesn't enjoy administration, he's doing an almost impossible job, and many of his criticisms of what we were getting wrong, civilian casualties the way we stirred up a hornet's nest in Helmand, as David Richards and others have admitted now, we did. Many of his criticisms were right, right maybe for the wrong reasons, but he's a decent, weak man caught in an extraordinarily difficult position. And caught in a capital where vast amounts of money have simply been stolen from the bank we now find and disappeared off to sort of posh houses and the gulf. Stolen from the bank, stolen from Western aid money, stolen from the drugs trade, I never found evidence that Karzai himself was corrupt, but there were plenty of people around him who were taking suitcases full of dollar bills out to Dubai or wherever. I'm tracing the next few steps of this unhappy story. A lot of the analysis of your narrative concerns the relationship between the military, British military in our case obviously, but also the American military by extension and the politicians at home. The military keeps saying we need more of this, we need more of that, we need more boots on the ground, we need more helicopters, then we can finish the job. And one aspect of the great mysteries of all of this is why politicians are not challenging and asking more well what is the job that we are finishing, what is the nature of the task? Well you've put your finger on the heart of it and I went out to Afghanistan as a huge enthusiast of the military and I still am, I've nothing but praise for the courage and professionalism of the soldiers on the ground. But the generals back in Whitehall are natural enthusiasts and naturally keen to defend their institutions and up until the British general election last year we had a Labour Prime Minister who was terrified of criticism from the Tory press, from the opposition of being of not backing our boys. So instead of following his instincts which were that simply pouring more troops in without a political strategy was not going to do any lasting good. It does do temporary local good but it's not sustainable after we leave. Gordon Brown was pushed time and again by an over-enthusiastic military into sending more troops and the same happened on a much larger scale with President Obama. And what is so heartening is in your interview yesterday Andrew and David Cameron I know believes this as well. We've at last got the politicians pushing back and saying hang on a moment, military force is a means not an end. It's a subset of a wider political strategy and for too long we've believed that pouring troops in which is actually applying an aesthetic to locally and temporally to a patient who's suffering from cancer and we haven't been dealing with curing the causes of the disease which run much deeper and wider than simply the problem of the Taliban and a Pashtun insurgency in certain areas of the country. And Obama now is coming out has got the political courage to come out and say that David Cameron has known that from the beginning we had a seminar at checkers last year but he can't do anything without the Americans but the military are naturally enthusiastic they wouldn't be good soldiers if they weren't but sometimes they need a confident politician to say hang on the can do approach isn't enough. I suppose the great dilemma is that the fear that if once the pullout begins and it's clearly going to start this summer and we don't know how long and how quickly it's going to go on for that the Taliban simply sweep back like the sea and we are right back with all the hideous consequences of Taliban ruled Kabul and all of it will go down as completely wasted blood and treasure. Yeah well again who you put your finger on the heart of the question and by leaving it so late giving ourselves three years to pursue a political solution we're running a huge risk I mean Britain in Northern Ireland my son wrote a thesis on this Britain in Northern Ireland started talking to the IRA in 1972 started pursuing a political solution it's only in the last few months that the CIA has been authorized to open proper serious channels to the Taliban and building a political process which involves not just the Taliban but all the internal parties all the regional parties it's a double deck of bus with the regional players Pakistan India China Russia the great game round three if you like them on the top deck so do you think we might end up with a quasi partitioned Afghanistan with Taliban ruled areas Northern Alliance ruled areas Kabul separate and large Western bases there in case Al-Qaeda return I hope very much not I mean what we need is a serious far reaching political settlement and that means leadership from the top it means the American president it means the American secretary of state leading this process Richard Norton Taylor we come back to the generals it's clear that all low as as the generals were the politicians defer to the generals the generals were also I think frightened that if they didn't go they didn't say we can do it x y and z and do anything you like the Tony Blair which wasn't in 2006 I think to go into Afghanistan they would Blair would turn around and say we can't have a budget then what's the point of having an army if you can't do what we want you to do a Tony Blair in particular and I think also the army then and the defense chiefs in general were concerned because they came out of southern Iraq with a sort of tail between their legs and they want to prove themselves in Afghanistan and you can see can't you actually read that if you're a politician if you're a minister you have fervently patriotic pro army press at home if a general says I need this or I need that my boys need this my boys need that the politician who says no well you can't have it's a brave fellow yes he is and of course what's nice when you become a politician is you have the generals coming to you saying yes we can do it sir of course sir but just we need another 150 armoured vehicles and another battalion or two and you have the civil servants and the diplomats and the intelligence analysts saying on the one hand sir on the other hand minister this is all very difficult minister so you know the temptation to go with the military against your better political instincts is overwhelming but you repent at leisure for mistakes made like that David price change there's always an argument for talking to your enemy but it's a slippery slope because once you start you make concessions you make an appeasement you lead to board surrender and it may not work look at Hezbollah look at Hamas look at the IRA you impart these people by giving them more importance than they deserve and I understand that the political process I'm sure you're right is necessary but it contains very great dangers too well I could hardly disagree more David I'm afraid insurgents are never ended by military force in one I was ambassador in Israel and one of the great tragedies in Israel was that in the 1930s Britain suppressed by force the Arab uprising as you know from 1936 to 1939 using absolutely brutal methods a young British officer called Bernard Montgomery was part of the hugely increased British forces in Palestine then and then after the war the Jewish insurgency started and the general officer commanding in Palestine the High Commissioner sent a cable to London to the war office and colonial office saying we need to negotiate with the moderate Jewish insurgents with the Zionist we need a sensible political solution and General Montgomery who was by then chief of the Imperial General staff wrote on that cable this is appeasement we don't talk to terrorists we're going to crush the Jewish insurgency by force as we cut crushed the Arab insurgency by the end in Palestine Britain had a hundred thousand men a guards brigade twenty thousand paramilitary police the Sikh Fairbourn Division fresh from Arnhem and we lost we left Palestine with our tail between our legs and as we saw with Obama's speech this week we are still living with the consequences of that fateful decision well Malaysia is a different story and I think a lot of people are unhappy that the IRA have been empowered in Northern Ireland and of course you are absolutely right that you military means alone are not sufficient but once you start in negotiating with people who wish you ill you're in trouble Angie Hobbs philosophical perspective please yes it's a similar question I mean I completely agree that talking to the Taliban is crucial and I noted that Obama was endorsing that policy with some qualifications over the weekend I just wonder if and I don't think that talking to people who are potentially hostile to you means that you're in any way condoning or endorsing what they're doing I just wondered do you think there are any examples of acts which are so extreme that you kind of think in this particular instance talking's no good for instance coming across extermination or concentration camps in the second world 9 or 9/11 potentially are there ever instances where you think in this case for once there's a rare exception dialogue is useless they just have to go I'm just interested I don't know I completely agree I mean you need to combine the gun with the olive branch and the tragedy in Afghanistan is that for years we've been using the gun without a serious olive branch special forces have been going out killing the Taliban but we haven't been harvesting that politically just before we move on Sarah do you think looking back this is a war that should not have been fought now I think we had to go into Afghanistan but I think trying to could could we not have held off and got our kinder expelled well as I say in the book we could have done but I think realistically the pressure on the United States president for violent revenge the pressure from the American people to do something violent and immediate after the appalling atrocity of 9/11 was overwhelming and if we could have waited we could have waited for the Taliban to spit out the Arabs who'd betrayed their hospitality the Arab terrorists but I don't think that was realistic the big mistake was mission creep moving from dealing with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to as Richard Holbrook says fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country but we were trying to rebuild Afghanistan as a modern democracy with a constitution that specifies 14 national elections in the next 20 years we're outside their political process and we don't know we can never be able to find out what the true relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is that's their business we can't find that out and it's always the case and dealing with these enemies it's the same with his bowler and hummus we don't know their internal political process and where is the disadvantage David Price judge we we could talk about this for the rest of the program very very easily but we're going to move on to your book treason of the heart from Thomas Payne to Kim Filby and this is a book about people idealists or extremists of left right and all sorts of different views who leave these shores and go off and fight foreign wars and it includes people who are sort of icons to the left Thomas Payne being an obvious example who was involved the American Revolution and then the French Revolution through to modern traitors and people from the right all the the people who went to off to fight for black shirts and indeed ended up fighting for Hitler some of them what unites such a disparate group of people in your view well I think there were several common factors the one that surprised me most I think was the the hatred that they felt for their own country it's a common theme for pretty much all the people that I'm writing about I mean Tom Payne loathed England and everything to do with it and it goes right the way through people like Baron expressed the hatred of England and of course when you come to the those who support Hitler and Stalin they are really preferring monsters to the quiet life of shall we say em forced to return and that's one thing I think the other thing is self righteousness they all of them believe that they are absolutely in possession of the truth and make everybody else aware of that truth and I think the last part of the thing is is the condescension that because they came from Britain Britain was a very secure and have relatively constitutional country they felt it was quite free to give them make other people fall in with our opinions so the patronisation tone of it all is simply extraordinary do you not think you I mean you could see it from the other side and say that these are people with a vision of a better world of some kind and they go abroad because they think it's open to be created there that there is America here is a potential new kind of society that can be built or whether it's going to be even down to the deluded people who went to Russia dreaming that this was going to be the new civilisation the webs famously with their book Soviet communism and new civilisation they called it that there is a sort of there is a note of trying to remake the world and at least they didn't try and remake it here well that is of course Tom Payne's view Tom Payne was right in the sense that America should have been independent and all the buzzers free of the time thought that too but he was right for the wrong reason I mean he was right in the idealism but wrong in his motivation which was to hurt England I mean at the end of it all really there's corpses and I the thing that really I suppose emerges from my book is that idealism is intimately connected with killing other people that that's what they felt they wanted to was the right course of action and when you take up all sorts of minor nationalisms which is one of the subjects of my book I mean taking up the Armenian cause or the Italian cause or Greek cause with the Byron's case yes the Greek cause or the Spanish Civil War and the idealism is overcast by the fact that a lot of people are going to get killed and what about the again the counter argument that it may be dreadful that they all went to when killed people abroad but what would this country have been like if they had pursued their visions at home well I think it was it was impossible I think that the public opinion wouldn't have followed with them that that is again one of the rather curious things is to see the standard procedure that what happens is there are a small number of very strong minded people and they set up a committee and they get an MP or two and then they get their hold on public opinion that way everybody John wants to jump in Angie Hobbs first of all is David I'm interested in how you define treason because of course within a particular nation state it's usually defined by the people who run that state so you're going to get a lot of different legal conceptions of what counts as treason and if the people running that state are a vile dictatorship then somebody working for the common good could be denounced as a traitor so treason and it's a very tricky term I'm wondering how you think of it well I call my book treason of the heart and the heart is not the whole person of course there is different kinds of treason and I was really interested in ideology what and what makes these people go abroad looking for foreign causes to fight for does that help you so it's a kind of sanctity of the nation state is that underpinning your argument here no I suppose it's like this nation state this that's right this nation state okay not all of them it's treason of ideology but also religion Kim Filby's father of Islam became a convent to Islam which is interesting in Kim film is only rather self-serving book My Silent War the preface was by Graham Greene a catholic who likened Filby's enthusiasm or red enthusiasm for communism as a religion rather like if you're in Elizabethan England you are divided loyalties your your catholic you are your loyalties at the catholic church Phillip the second of Spain not any part of the of the British state George Blake's background was interesting he his mother was a Calvinist Dutch woman his father was a Turkish Jewish merchant live in Egypt I think the intelligence service thought this is a wonderful guy because he spoke a lot of languages and so on but where would his loyalties he actually asked himself that of course there is a what I'm talking about really is a transfer of allegiance on time I mean normally speaking you you are you have some allegiance to the place where you're born the language that you grew up in the sometimes the religion that you grew up with the people around you the landscape these give you an identity so what that's what we're talking about and all the characters in my book are doing making transfers of allegiance to another identity and it's the transfer of allegiance and the motivation and how they actually did it but it's very interesting to see Phil beer as a matter of whom you who raised I mean he explained it purely in terms of power do you remember in that same book that you referred to he says he says that when made an offer by the KGB it was an offer from a power that he couldn't refuse you know I'm not saying I said with those Graham Graham Graham when I even saying that comparing communism with Catholicism yeah well he was a Graham Graham was a mischief maker wasn't he well perhaps I could borrow a quotation which I'm sure Angie is familiar with from the Delphic oracle nothing in excess Maden Agon and David I find your approach rather sort of gloomy and one sided because I think there are there is a place for idealism and there are people who go to fight abroad for very laudable motives and I think of the Polish exile community here who went to support a free Poland not necessarily fighting but I think above all of a group you don't really mention in your book which is British jury who went to Palestine to fight for a free Palestine there were bodies there was idealism and I mean you don't mention them but I would be the last to condemn those people for going out and fighting for a Jewish state I mean I think we should have negotiated a solution but we didn't and if I were a British Jew I would have understood that but you seem to be condemning them or have I got you wrong I didn't touch on that because it seemed a special case and I was trying to be more general really and I of course I wouldn't condemn such people but their motivation was pretty clear I mean they were actually not transferring allegiance but spreading an allegiance that they had grown up with how often do you think that people who turned violently against this country did so because of an early experience in their childhood or adolescence well that's what William Covid says was that motivating Tom Payne that something happened in the childhood of Tom Payne that turned him against England I think the same is probably true about Baron and I think it's probably true about Lawrence O'Rabia who did immense harm to Great Britain and it was a very strange character yes a very strange character that going into the details right you mentioned Byron there who would be I suppose an archetypal hero a bionic hero we still talk about that and Jehob you're writing a book about heroes and heroism you're a philosopher but particularly interested in ancient or classical philosophy and so you start with the classical notion of hero which has a very specific meaning yes it often has an almost semi-technical sense a heros of somebody who has one divine parent and one mortal parent such as Achilles and I'm sure there were many ancient Greeks who did take that religious view seriously and even for the more secular minded amongst them it conveyed the notion of somebody who was exceptional who did something which was at least perceived to be of outstanding benefit to their community or a subgroup in their community which other people just couldn't do and that notion of the exceptionality with both the benefits and the potential for harm at that continues what's so interesting is that though of course the content of the notion of the hero changes throughout the ages and throughout the cultures and as I'm sure we'll go on to discuss one can find out an awful lot about a community or culture and indeed one's potential enemy by finding out who their heroes are every culture needs heroes from a very wide variety of psychological and economic reasons and where we are now of course is that though to some extent the word hero is sort of produced in the media to a large extent and has become cheapened and has become confused with celebrity in many cases the term heroism in my research is that has not been so cheapened we seem to want to retain some kind of notion of purity in the notion of heroism even if for all sorts of economic and political and military reasons we bandy the term hero around because in the ancient world there was no sense that a hero had to be a generally admirable morally upright attractive figure I mean I'm thinking of Achilles and his dreadful petulant sulk as recorded by Homer all the behavior of many I guess Roman heroes who are extremely they may be corrupt they may be promiscuous they may be exceedingly violent even cruel but they can still be heroes because they achieve that special thing that nobody else can do yes I mean heroism is not the same as courage it will often involve the virtue of courage there's of course a big philosophical debate about whether the courage have subjective or objective criteria but for a hero I would argue the the criteria are subjective does an individual a community a nation whatever whoever the hero belongs to do they perceive this person to be performing acts of great benefit to them so yes subjective criteria at what point does the notion of fighting and heroism become taken apart I'm thinking for instance not far from here there's a statue of Edith Cavall the nurse who was shot at dawn for helping prisoners escape never fought and said famously that patriotism is not enough but was a hero what when does that start okay well I'll be contentious here I would very specifically say it begins with Plato I know you I might say that he's what he is one of my heroes he argues throughout his dialogues that a character like Socrates who though he fought admirably on military campaign is primarily of course noted for his mental strength in upholding the values of philosophy and the face of Athenian attack in a death sentence so Plato will portray Socrates as a hero Plato's always saying there are other kinds of model you can be a hero in peace time it doesn't have to be on the battlefield there are various ways in which you can benefit your community through being a philosopher a scientist I was going to say an artist but of course Plato has some bivalent views about artists so you start to get these notions untangled and of course we get a lot of tensions throughout history between the notion of the military hero the social justice reformer and so on so your hero is a sort of profound anti-democrat who wants to support tyrants and who admires Socrates who's of course very very hostile to the Athenian democratic polis and he's remembered as a hero because of his death the whole point is the whole point well that's the whole point you don't have to admire every feature of your hero to regard him as a hero I don't I don't admire every view of Winston Churchill but I still think for those days in 1940 exactly they don't have to be entirely virtuous people by any means the modern hero the modern hero you said yourself that this has been a degraded term would you say for instance that the fact that every British soldier is routinely described as a hero in the press is an example of that well this is interesting when there's the next military or political blunder if that should ever happen just check how quickly some military commander or politician calls the people who have fallen through their own mistakes a hero now sometimes these soldiers may well be heroes at other times they just got unlucky and were in the wrong place at the wrong time it's a very good ruse to divert attention and also less cynically it's a way of reassuring the families their loved ones didn't die in vain or other people were saying help for heroes which from the tabloid press go on for every single soldier who is an afghanistan is a hero I don't think they would like to be called a hero particularly that kind of label rather self-conscious label they are very very brave but that is different from being a quote hero unquote isn't it? I agree I mean there's a difference I think between courage and heroism I mean for me the notion of heroism has a notion of going beyond duty about it I mean the technical term would be super irrigation and you're you're not just doing what your job requires you to do you're going beyond that now of course there's a there's a debate about who says what your duty is and whose perception is involved in very often we will see people interviewed on television who we think have committed the most heroic acts but they will often modestly and genuinely describe themselves as just doing their duty when Nelson but then it can go the other way when Nelson sort of said you know England expects that every man will do his duty he's actually calling on his his men to perform some pretty heroic actions but he redescribes them as duty because it's a way to get them on board and to make them feel this is doable they can achieve this so that it can be manipulated both ways David Price changed if the figure of Achilles is going to be a hero it doesn't doesn't Homer present him as somebody who does something really dreadful in killing Hector and that your sympathy it goes towards Hector whose corpse is being dragged behind the chariot and the our hero is a show-off and a cruel man and he may be benefiting society as you say but but there are bad aspects of that oh of course well I mean Homer or if there is one Homer it's a very great artist the writer who collects all the stories that form the iliad is a very great artist so you get the rich complexity of Achilles yes some of his actions are they're not they're criticized by other characters in the iliad themselves these are these are terrible massacres that the Trojan you this for instance he goes on a sort of a blood rampage and that's not softened down but at the same time he's the only character who questions the whole notion of war what am I here why am I here making widows and orphans so you get that subtlety and yes Hector's portrayed as a hero as well and and in the end that's where your sympathy is live but that's the genius of Homer he's saying all these people are regarded as heroes in different ways for different reasons and they're all complicated well let's let's turn now to other soldiers and a distinctly unheroic episode Richard Norton Taylor which I think a lot of people will remember from their television news screens at the time where a man called Baja Musa who was in a hotel I think the hotel was arrested with others some of them rather elderly men by the British army in Basra in 2003 and Baja Musa died in detention and you have taken the transcripts of the inquiry into his death and you have created a stage play called tactical questioning scenes from the Baja Musa inquiry can we start Richard by sort of describing the conditions in which these soldiers were operating at the time and what had happened just before the arrest of these people well as the commanding officer I call men donkra and the soldiers officers said an insisted and repeated time and time again it was very hot in Basra at the time it was 50 plus degrees and so on now the real point is that they were ill prepared for the invasion of Iraq as we know from a choke on inquiry and other things now this particular regiment I think described by the head of the army at time General Sir Mike Jackson as a stain on the British army as a whole there's particular regiment though one of the first battalion of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment it was said had a little reputation of being quite a faggish lot and they were certainly ill-disciplined by the evidence anyway they picked up these um they've been some particularly traumatic killings just before that there'd been the killing of an officer in an ambulance by an insurgent in Basra and then a number of Royal Ministry policemen had been killed now their officers told the soldiers going looking for insurgents looking for people who may know about these previous incidents they hyped them up the officers hyped up the soldiers now that helps to explain it doesn't condone um but it helps maybe to explain the attitude of the soldiers so so these were pumped up um overheated in every way and under trained soldiers and they were going out into Basra looking for insurgents one of the people that they picked up was Baham Musa tell us about him Basa Musa unfortunately but he was a hotel receptionist in in Basra and he uh and and nine others of his colleagues were um arrested and they were taken into the compound into the into the army's compound or temporary detention centers they called it and they were held they were initially they were hooded they were hooded subjected to noise uh sleep deprivation and so on techniques which by the way had been banned by Edward Heath way back in 1972 after Northern Ireland and the European Court of Human Rights and so on and um but they were they were hooded and they were beaten up and videos show how they were and some people call it from Britain's Abu Ghraib actually um they were they were abused tremendously and um they had some of these were quite elderly men weren't they they were quite elderly men some that were one one one was also a young man uh it's a late teenager who was put beside taken out of the detention center put beside a hot generator which was noisy and hot why to make him uh to make him uh to to make him more acceptable all these more open interrogation they said it's an inter interrogation technique was to put this young fellow by a hot generator they're all scared stiff there's no evidence against them and um it was against all the the well that the the discipline the the internal laws if you like and the rules of the British Army as well as international law but the chain of command did not even know what the laws said and and describe described forest conditions in the room in which they were being held after a day or two well there are a number of in a very in a very small detention center it was very hot they were they were hooded they were thrown to kneel with their their hands behind their back sometimes they were kneeling for hours on end they were they were hooded um for four hours and hours on end and um so you you you taught the transcripts of the inquiry in because other moose died um in the course of this and there was an inquiry into it behind moose and you take the transcripts which would be very very lengthy raw transcript and turned it into something that he people can go out to if not for entertainment as it were but at least for uh education i suppose in a theater well explanation i think i think that the tricycle theater on a Nicholas Ken we've done quite a few what we call tribunal plays which you take public inquiries nice sort of edit them down and bloody sundaives of ten years edited down to about two or three hours you can do that actually um i think the theater is a tremendous uh platform or vehicle talking as a journalist extension of Germanism is in a way well i was a good i'll ask you this because are you not doing very much what you've been doing as a judge looking for the colonel um the key turning points and drawing them out but if you're running if you're if you're running public inquiries you're running court case and maybe there's a odd sort of 500 word you're doing in an article for a newspaper or maybe two uh minutes on a radio program or uh you know half a um a minute on the on the television you get a rather scattered inconsistent i think appreciation of that so what do we do we have two uh two hours in a bit 90 minutes actually in the Baja music case there are bums on seats there are people who come and can without sounding too sort of arrogant about there's an explanation by definition you can have 20 000 words rather than 250 words and what is the question that you are explaining you're explaining why uh the uh soldiers in this case soldiers behaved like they did the context if you like the argument which makes it easy for us because they're all based on public inquiries where you get a their defendant uh a lawyer and a prosecuting lawyer so they're actually put in on the spot if you're like they put it in a corner so they have to explain things and their ultimate contest that yeah in a way and uh they'd also explain why they behaved like like they did and this is an extraordinary episode in a in a rather ill-prepared um uh serious military military invasion shared group of course well i i read uh some of these transcripts and it's just heartbreaking and it's obviously heartbreaking for the Iraqis uh absolutely heartbreaking but also for these young British soldiers who are completely out of their depth and i wouldn't want to be too moralistic about this i think this is what war does to people the veneer of civilization is very thin and for all the talk from generals and politicians about moral armies and about uh the rules of war when you put young testosterone filled uh young people in that sort of situation uh something cracks it cracks in every army the British army the American army the French in Algeria the israel defense force we've seen it time and again and there's a limit to how you can stop this i mean you have to bear down on it but it's almost an inevitable consequence of war i agree i think we could explain that what why it was this uh there are more there are more ins well there are actually more incense which we don't know about some we do know about but we don't know about a public place it were because they haven't been uh probably um um investigated and one of the reasons why and the MOD does cover itself in a very defensive attitude which is not surprising that's what there are only one you know this is rotten apples rotten apples but we certainly you would say it is the you would agree it is the nature of conflict it is the nature of war yeah it is in a way and you can also uh you could actually say that it was surprising it went more incense well there were more but there's not a lot lot more and and to some people say it was systemic but maybe it was Hispanic the question is the one question though could it some of this be avoided by a prep preparation um of of the invasion of Iraq? Angie yes i thought you were admirably sort of fair in giving all parties as a voice uh you do say uh quite rightly that this has got to be good theatre as well and that some of the editorial decisions have to take account of aesthetic reasons such as varying the tone and varying the pace and so on did you ever find that there were tensions in that edit in between different editorial decisions between fairness and objectivity on the one hand and between a cracking good drama on the other in a way i've got one title it's a journey it's as fair as possible but as a response we're doing this but also because you want to get the use of theatre as a as a as a vehicle for giving information out rather now Nick can the director would say no let's have one or two other episodes which should not know which show more on the face of it possibly trivial i would say but actually not trivial because they reveal they're very illuminating about people's characteristics episodes which themselves are uh don't actually not totally substantial in terms of revealing knowledge but important in revealing the characteristics of the people you're talking about david price change identity you need to restrict it to war but it's just part of armies and the incumbent sergeant majors and disciplinary corporals are not recruited in religious seminaries and i i served in the army myself and as a junior officer i was absolutely unable to stop brutal violence in the guardroom and there was nothing to be done about it and the company sergeant major was just more powerful than me richard yeah i think there's a culture there isn't there i mean the british army keep on saying after instance like deep cut an instant where for a young recruits were found dead possibly seriously probably seriously it's not clear yet and and these uh inquiries show that the um that there is this is it necessary do you have to have the original sergeant major the british iron would say yes we have to have discipline discipline discipline then come to the question of the emma is that we never buddy we never condone budding we fight budding it's at a conflict which can never be resolved there well we won't resolve it today because we've run out of time but thank you very much indeed to all my guests richard norton taylor's tactical questioning scenes from the baha musa inquiry is on at the triscoll theater in london from the beginning of june david price jones is treason of the heart and charade cooper coals his memoir of his time in afghanistan cables from kabool are published this month and you can hear angie hobs at the philosophy festival how the light gets in which i think is a learned current reference at the hayon why festival is coming weekend next week paul through salil shetty and charles janks traveling the world and putting it to rights but for now thank you and goodbye at sprouts our shelves are filled with new exciting and delicious discoveries whoo like a new oat milk that's gluten-free whoo and sustainable whoo this is that sprouts feeling at sprouts our wide open layout invites you in with healthy around every corner and tasty on every shelf so when you walk in you feel this is that sprouts feeling

Producer: Katy Hickman.