Actually, mine’s a La-Z-Boy, but if that’s the price some of us have to pay, I’m proud to be called an armchair general, believe me. I’ve still got the scars on my back from Iraq, so don’t tell me we’re going to sort Isis by playing nice with “precision missiles”, aka the terrorists’ favourite recruiting officer. I’m not making comparisons, but where would that level of pusillanimous cowardice have got us in 1939? Man up already. When the civilised world stands on the edge of an ever-widening lake of innocent blood, a handful of jets wafting the occasional Brimstone in the vague direction of a fanatical yet far-reaching death cult with unlimited access to genocidal weaponry is possibly the most catastrophically feeble response since Chamberlain’s pathetic piece of paper. I hate to embarrass our trembling leaders, but what part of Mao’s “The insurgent must swim in the people as the fish swims in the sea” do these flabby emasculates not understand?
OK, if they’d listened to people like me, we would have taken out Assad years ago, sorted Syria, job done. Where we are, we finally grow a pair, get British boots on the ground, give Isis a bloody nose, home by Christmas. What’s happened to this country that we’re running scared from a gang of gormless thugs with a knife drawer and a Twitter account? Sure, if you’re the kind of person who’d rather stand idly by than stop a massacre, go for it, but don’t come running to me when the barbarians are in Baghdad.
It’s obvious isn’t it? Say my glass of wine is Isis, I’ll just top it up with jihadists, and the asparagus is the Turkish border, we stealthily deploy our special forces, that’s the hollandaise – kapow! – take out the enemy’s command and control – blam! – reconcile warring factions, end of. That’s the great lesson of Call Of Duty: when a country faces an existential threat, its young must be prepared for blood sacrifice, and it’s time more of us had the balls to say so.
