Now this is a tough one. Yesterday, Malcolm Kendall-Smith was sentenced by a judge to 8 months imprisonment, plus was ordered to pay £20,000 defence costs in court. Why?
Because having served in Iraq on two previous occasions, Mr. Blair ordered the troops into Iraq again, amidst all sorts of controversy, and Lieutenant Kendall-Smith refused to go.
Now obviously, if you wear the Queen's colours, you cannot pick and choose when you present arms and fight. But it's still an interesting one.
What if he were an Israeli soldier who refused to fight in Palestine; well, then we may well applaud him. Or if he were a soldier in the US, who like the rest of the world, realised that the Vietnam war was a waste of money and lives, and was morally wrong. Or if he were an Argentinian soldier who refused to occupy the Falkland Islands, because he felt it was wrong. Then he'd be a hero.
Trouble is, if you blindly follow orders, and pursue a line of activity that you strongly disagree with .. and
then end up on the losing side, you've opened yourself up to charges of war crimes.
Kendall-Smith said that at the time, all the evidence suggested that it was an illegal war, because there was no documented Weapons of Mass Desruction, and Britain and the US had failed to get a UN resolution to support their plans. As such, he felt he would be committing a war crime, and refused to go.
Of course, we can't allow that to happen. Ill discipline in a fighting force is the start of the end, a situation where you wouldn't be able to rely on your comrades in a sticky patch; an untenable scenario.
But there's a peice of me that admires his bravery. He was prepared to be imprisoned to execute his moral belief that to fight would have been wrong. Top tip for all you military insurgents: if you're feeling 'mutinous', make sure you rebel against a cause that your masters believe in, and if not, make sure you're on the winning team when the dust settles.
This is brilliant. It's a video on the web, depicting a pub team made up of England World Cup heroes from the past. It's very funny, and it's amazing how trim some of them still are.
