On the weekend I often try to find something a bit different for New Mandala fans seeking a provocative take on current affairs. Today my digital foraging took me far and wide, but I have settled on a comment attributed to General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff of the British Army.
Tom Griffin’s blog has the story:
One member of the audience asked why the British Army didn’t intervene in Burma or Zimbabwe.
In response, Dannatt suggested that Burma was “probably an area of the world beyond our acknowledged sphere of influence and beyond our capacity to do anything about.”
Seems like a realistic assessment to my eye. What do readers think? And for those with more than a passing issue in these issues the full text of Dannatt’s speech (but, unfortunately, not the Q and A that followed) is available here.
1 response so far ↓
1 Awzar Thi // Jul 21, 2008 at 9:49 am
Dannatt was born a hundred years too late. A century earlier and he would have been in there with his boots on. If not “sphere of influence” then “sphere of influenced”.
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