Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

However, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the the grossest examples of what presentism mean in practice. No one with any knowledge of the murky manoeuvres that carved what is now Iraq out of the defeated Ottoman Empire after the First World War could possibly have thought it a good idea to try, by force of arms, to turn that artificial, riven state into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East. No one who had studied the defeats inflicted on British forces in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century would willingly have dispatched troops, with no knowledge of the local languages and culture, to that harsh terrain with its warrior ethos. Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 66

Personally, I find it comforting that some people also base their opposition to Iraq and Afhganistan on  practical grounds rather than the absurdity of UN sanctioned international law.