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Opinion: Spare spared

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So much for our half-a-huzzah for Harry. When Britain’s redheaded prince was getting ready to ship to Basra a few months back—amid much handwringing about putting the royal life in jeopardy—the Times’ editorial board gave the pot-smokin’, Nazi-impersonatin’ young royal a cheer:

Nearly every British war features a version of this drama, in which cautious elders try to dissuade a young noble from putting himself in harm’s way but the young noble insists on serving his country without special treatment or advantage. This supposedly private drama of stoic courage inevitably receives extensive press coverage, and Harry’s case is no exception. But, in the end, it’s hard to gainsay the physical courage required to deploy to Iraq at all.

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Not so fast! The prince will not be serving in Iraq after all:

In a statement released on behalf of Prince Harry, the prince said he was ‘very disappointed’ but would not quit the army as a result.

I don’t know much about royal protocol or post-Sandhurst commitments, but was quitting the army an option?

General Sir Richard Dannatt says the deployment would have exposed the prince and soldiers serving with him to ‘a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable,’ noting that the apparent capture of three U.S. soldiers Saturday had influenced his decision. Then there’s this:

Abu Zaid, a brigade commander in Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army—the most powerful of the Shia militias—said they had been circulating pictures of the Prince taken from the internet to other insurgent groups. ‘We are awaiting the arrival of the young, handsome, spoilt prince with bated breath and we confidently expect he will come out into the open on the battlefield,’ he was quoted as saying.

Which just shows that the faulty intelligence isn’t all on our side: It’s the other prince who’s the handsome one. The decision makes sense, and there’s no getting around the potential for a PR and morale disaster if Abu Zaid got a chance to carry out his dastardly scheme. But from a historical perspective, this puts the danger of Shiite insurgents above that posed by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who were opposed in active service by various lords, princes, Mountbattens, and so on—such as the notorious bon vivant Prince George, Duke of Kent—and even the awesome power of the Argentine war machine, which collapsed like a house of cards before the heroics of Prince Andrew in the Falklands War. It’s good to know Harry’s out of danger, but this one is embarrassing no matter which way it breaks—a timely reminder that the real duty of royalty has never been military service so much as public humiliation.

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