It’s just that the critics of the war, sullen or overt, would be much more vilified if they were on the left attacking a right-wing government.It is legitimate for all the armchair infantry generals to insist on a ground war (Mr Blair repeats in his article that while this is not a “plan” all options are continually reviewed), though they should accept that, ground troops or not, bombing was always a necessary preliminary, just as it was in the Gulf. It is striking that the most savage British critics, particularly in the press, have tended to be on the right, including the usually jingoistic Daily Mail as well as some who can usually be relied upon, like the Spectator’s Bruce Anderson, to be loyal to the Tory leadership, more or less whoever it is. Moreover, while William Hague has firmly declared his backing for the Government, his senior spokesmen have not exactly been touring the studios in the past fortnight beating the drum for the British war effort Nor, necessarily, should they. It is certainly striking that the weightiest participants – the US, Britain, and, at least in respect of its Prime Minister and government rather than its President, France – have (just) left-of-centre administrations.

So does Germany, the participant most remarkable for its firmness – if only because of its long and self-imposed abstention from military conflict.Controversial Blair’s claim may be; baseless it surely isn’t. In passing, the Prime Minister remarks that the “usual barrage of criticism” is coming – “sometimes” from “people who… find it hard to come to terms with the fact that there is a new generation of leaders … who hail from the progressive side of politics but who are prepared to be as firm as any of our predecessors right or left in seeing this through”.This is a large – and controversial – claim: that it is because the governments pursuing the war are from the centre left, or as Mr Blair puts it “the progressive side of politics”, that they are being so strongly criticised. I can remember a British diplomat telling me after the war was over that he had resolved to resign on grounds of conscience if the number of deaths of British servicemen had exceeded the number of Falkland islanders.No, the explanation cannot be located in the justice or obviousness of the cause. An alternative suggestion, as it happens, is hinted at obliquely in the article written by Tony Blair which appears in today’s issue of Newsweek.

There were prominent members of the government who would have preferred the negotiated route proffered through the UN.Nor did it then seem unquestionably the case that it was worth risking the lives of British soldiers to maintain our historically much-disputed sovereignty over some islands on the other side of the world, just because the inhabitants were culturally and linguistically English (and not because they had any reason to expect the kind of “ethnic cleansing” that is happening in Kosovo). Because the Falklands operation was militarily successful, and credited with sealing Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1983, it seems in hindsight to have been impossible to challenge But it wasn’t like that at the time. Of course then, as now, elements of the left were publicly opposed to the war, and therefore, by extension, to the strongly supportive line taken by Michael Foot as leader of the Labour Party. What has changed, however, is the vigour and freedom with which politicians, distinguished and recently retired military men, and pundits who would describe themselves as anything but pacifists, believe it their national duty to savage not only the conduct but, in many cases, also the basic premiss on which the war in the Balkans is being conducted.The question is why opinion in general and establishment opinion in particular is so openly divided in a way it wasn’t during the Falklands war. We should be deeply thankful that this isn’t happening now.