The British Army has quite a tradition of glorious retreats, from Corunna in the Peninsular War against Napoleon’s armies to the “miracle” of Dunkirk against Hitler’s.

The retreat from Basra, all of which except for the airport has now been evacuated, has been bloodless — at least so far — and in Britain it has been hailed as a successful operation. People are so sickened by the barbarity of the terrorists that they prefer to forget the fact that wars are not won by retreats, however skilfully conducted, but by winning victories so decisive that the enemy loses heart.

Those who have been hostile to the Iraq war all along, however, have been given ammunition by the appearance of “Soldier,” the memoirs of General Sir Mike Jackson, the British commander of NATO’s Rapid Reaction Force during the war in Kosovo and chief of the general staff before and after the invasion of Iraq.

General Jackson is a brave soldier, who had a reputation for thoughtful opinions expressed in a forceful manner that commanded respect, not least from his American colleagues. But the harsh criticisms he now makes of America’s strategy in Iraq — which was endorsed at the time by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Mr. Jackson himself — are calculated to exploit present disenchantment with America. Even the Daily Telegraph, which has been serializing the autobiography this week, did not resist the temptation to pander to anti-Americanism. “Why America’s ‘global war on terrorism’ makes no sense” screamed the headline on Monday’s extract. General Jackson’s next extract, devoted to the debates inside NATO headquarters during the Kosovo campaign, was promoted on the front page as “The Day The Americans Almost Began World War III.”

The unsuspecting reader would assume that General Jackson shares the widespread prejudice against America in general and the U.S. government and military in particular. He or she might also assume that the general had been against the entire U.S. military response to September 11 and especially to the war in Iraq.

But all these assumptions would be mistaken. General Jackson was and is a hawk. True, he does not like the phrase “war on terror” because, he says, it “equates to a war on means, which makes little or no sense. Our objective — our end — must be the physical and intellectual defeat of Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to us. To this end, the means certainly include the use of armed force, but also, very importantly, engagement in the battle of ideas.”

Here, General Jackson is making a reasonable point — one with which President Bush might even agree. The term “war on terror” is indeed an unsatisfactory compromise, but it was chosen in order to avoid the impression that the West was mounting a crusade against Islam. Far from neglecting the battle of ideas, as General Jackson claims, Mr. Bush grasped its importance immediately after September 11, 2001, and has enlisted a wide range of intellectual warriors to assist him.

However, the general really does have a prejudice against those who wage the battle of ideas. He dismisses them as “neoconservative thinkers who viewed the world in aggressively ideological terms” and whom he blames for the protracted war in Iraq.

“In Iraq, the Americans had the naïve idea that the people would be so happy to be liberated that nothing else mattered; that once they had pushed over the statue of Saddam, democracy would flourish overnight,” the general goes on. “It’s a very ideological approach, and one which is intellectually bankrupt. This difference in doctrine between us and the Americans would be a recurrent difficulty in the years ahead.”

Does this critique — which sounds plausible to Britons who pride themselves on their empiricism and who loathe “ideology” — withstand scrutiny? Are there really two rival doctrines?

In reality, it is far from clear that the “mistakes” to which General Jackson points — disbanding Saddam’s army and “debaathification” — made much difference to a murderous insurgency that was indeed underestimated, for the simple reason that it is unprecedented.

That insurgency has been driven all along by jihadists from abroad, who have deliberately exacerbated sectarian conflicts, and by Iranian, Syrian, and Saudi-backed militias and terrorist groups. Their aims and methods have in some cases been unashamedly genocidal. And it is hard to see how the Coalition authorities could have prevented this Hydra-headed monster from emerging — except by much more brutal methods of their own, which Western public opinion would not stomach.

Saddam’s army was not really “disbanded” — it disintegrated. The decision to rebuild Iraq’s security and intelligence forces from scratch was a recognition of facts on the ground. Likewise, “debaathification” may have alienated Sunnis, but a failure to remove Saddam’s officials from power would have provoked the Shia and Kurdish populations on whose support the Coalition relied. Once democracy was introduced — as it was with remarkable speed under the circumstances — these Saddamites would have been ejected anyway, as they enjoyed no popular support. General Jackson concludes that, “we should not leave [Iraq] before it’s right to do so. Our withdrawal should not be defined by a date, but by conditions.” That sounds not so very different from Donald Rumsfeld’s dictum: that the Coalition forces should stay in Iraq for “as long as it takes and not a day longer.”

By exaggerating the significance of the disputes that took place between allies, as they do in all wars, General Jackson is making mischief in order to sell copies of his book. It is the British general, not the American neoconservatives, who is rewriting history in an “aggressively ideological” manner.