These days we treat him with contempt and, when the band begins to play, don’t bother with the thanks. We try him on flimsy charges for war crimes. We send him to fight in a bitter, gruelling war unwanted by the British public — or the Iraqi public, come to that — then try to bang him up on the word of a bunch of lying, greedy marsh Arabs out to make a quick buck.

If I were a British private stationed in Basra right now and reading the details of the court martial of seven of my colleagues, I’d be tempted to say, “Bugger this for a game of soldiers” and desert.

It is most likely the government wanted these ludicrous prosecutions in order to assuage Iraqi opinion — clearly more important than the morale of the common soldier crouched behind some wall in Ferkah as the snipers’ bullets whiz around his head. More important, too, than natural justice and common sense.

The deficiencies of the case against the seven paratroopers accused of murdering an Iraqi teenager, as detailed by the judge advocate general, Jeff Blackett, were so copious that I do not have room to repeat them all here. But he did call much of the evidence against the soldiers “too inherently weak or vague for any sensible person to rely on it”. He stuck the boot into the Royal Military Police investigators whose evidence, he said, “could never reach the high standard of proof required”.

Of the prosecution witnesses — those marsh Arabs — he said they had colluded, exaggerated, lied. They spoke frequently of fasil or blood money — that’s compensation to you and me. They made numerous wholly specious claims and at least one of the women witnesses confessed to having told downright porkies right from the start.

As one of the defence counsel put it: “They followed a trail of dollars up the aircraft steps to come here.” I dare say some ghastly lawyer now will help them with an application for asylum. Perhaps they’ll end up pitching their tents somewhere on Romney Marsh.

These prosecutions were perhaps not simply a wish to assuage Iraqi opinion but arguably British opinion as well. The war against, or in, Iraq is, quite rightly, deeply unpopular — not least within the Labour party. Thus there is an even greater distaste than usual for the messy end of the business.

I cannot imagine such spurious prosecutions ever being brought during the Falklands war, for example. Public opinion would not have tolerated it.

Further, this war was not instigated for any of the usual, coldly pragmatic reasons — self-defence, a wish to swipe more territory or claim some back. Its aim, we are led to believe, was altruistic — to impose secular democracy and western standards upon people for whom, in the nicest possible way, such concepts are alien.

So our soldiers are expected to behave more like grief counsellors or health and safety executives than men of war. When cornered by a hostile and armed rabble, it is demanded of them that they attempt to take a consensual approach. Hey, come on, guys. We can work this thing out.

Not since the days of Lord Salisbury have we had a government so implacably at odds with the British working class. Salisbury had an excuse — it was 120 years ago, when life was a little different, and he was, after all, a Tory. Mr Blair, nominally, is not.

So quite why the bulk of the working class continues to vote for new Labour eludes me. The party has waged war upon our pastimes, our wish to get drunk every now and again and to smoke ourselves stupid while so doing, and even our diet. No British government has less understood, or still less cared about, the aspirations of the common British soldier. No British government has packed him off to fight in more wars in such a short space of time. No British government has brought more prosecutions against its own serving men for alleged transgressions in time of war.

None of this is intended to excuse the revolting excesses of, say, Abu Ghraib prison. But there is a world of difference between visible acts of torture and the perhaps peremptory and even brutal actions of frightened soldiers in the field.

We should be angry at the way our soldiers are being treated, both those of us who, like me, opposed this war and those who believe it just and necessary. You cannot cleanse warfare and make it a sanitised, agreeable thing. It is a dirty business at the best of times and in Iraq it is dirtier than usual. You should not prosecute soldiers who sometimes forget the niceties, like wilfully failing to check the wine list and instead ordering the house chablis.

Some good may yet come of this. Blackett’s scathing remarks will have reverberated within both government and the military authorities and perhaps the host of pending courts martial will be reappraised, in advance. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues: 30,000 Iraqi civilians dead, according to the latest estimates — but don’t wait up for the court martial.

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