For the benefit of perhaps my puzzled American readers let me give you the full lyric:
Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.
I think that is a fair summary of the, er, strategy of the US Commander-in-Chief. Troops in, troops out, troops up, troops down - er, but only for training purposes, you understand, even if all that training carried out at vast expense and risk over the past ten years proved to be totally useless when the Iraqi army threw down (or more likely sold!) its American arms and ran at the first sight of a nasty ISIS fighter who shouted 'Boo!' at them.
To be fair, I think the Yanks caught the 'Grand Old Duke of York' syndrome from us because we're at it, too. Today we hear that 'Dim Dave' is sending hundreds of British troops to Iraq to carry out yet more training. Quite why any Iraqi soldier would pay the slightest heed to a British army that performed so miserably during Iraq II beats me. I also heard the other day that despite being technically broke, 'Dim Dave' is paying a small fortune to build a Royal Navy base at Bahrein. Now I speak as one of the last, er, 'defenders' of Bahrein having spent nearly a year living in a tent at the end of runway #2 at the airport. It's true that my service was, er, less than distinguished - although, darlings, my tan at the end of it was superb! - and that the greatest enemy I faced were the sodding microbes that regularly gave me a dose of 'Delhi belly', but still, 'I did my bit'! Needless to say, shortly after I left, HMG withdrew from the Persian Gulf so all my efforts were in vain!
Now, determined to hang on for grim life to American coat-tails, they are set on spending a few billion quid to go back - just as they are reducing army numbers, RAF aircraft and the Royal navy, in desperation, is seriously considering refloating HMS Victory:
To be accurate, I gather that a great deal of this retraining exercise is aimed at the Peshmerga, the military wing of the Kurdish people. I know nothing about the Peshmerga but I am prepared to bet the deeds of the house that they are a bunch of hairy rapscallions who, when it suits them, will turn their our weapons on us. When it happens, 'the Grand Old Duke of York' in Washington will be 'pained, I tell you, pained' - well, actually he won't because he will have retired to the nearest golf course by then!
I am, slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that all our leaders, 'over there' and 'over here', are living on Planet Zog and smoking dope!
