The British army should learn from the Americans and forget the softly-softly approach, says jonathan foreman
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One of the sillier and less-informed tropes of the British media is the endlessly repeated conceit that while the Yanks have made a terrible hash of their bits of Iraq, our chaps have done a magnificent job in theirs. This is thanks to the British Army's traditional brilliance at counter-insurgency warfare, as witnessed by victories in such areas as Northern Ireland, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, and its traditional links with the Arab world.
Quite apart from the historical doubtfulness of some of those examples, if we are indeed so brilliant at counter-insurgency, why has the Governor of Basra just declared a state of emergency in his province?
You might also ask how it has come to be that the British Army is now virtually confined to its heavily defended barracks in Basra
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| If the British are so brilliant, why has the Governor of Basra declared a state of emergency? |
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with the city's streets effectively controlled by extremist militias and criminal gangs. The Americans, on the other hand, have somehow managed to retain genuine control of Sadr City, Baghdad's city-size Shia slum, and other cities where they face many more attacks.
The fact is that the British Army's much vaunted "softly-softly" approach - with its delicate rules of engagement developed in Northern Ireland - has too often been interpreted by the locals not as restraint but as cowardice, especially when this approach has meant turning a blind eye to punishment beatings and executions.
So all the self-congratulation about our tactical cleverness - such as not wearing sunglasses on patrol, saying "salaam" to passers-by - looks a bit hollow these days. Furthermore, it seems likely that decisions taken during the Mahdi rebellion in 2004 not to fight for key buildings, had the effect of convincing local thugs that the Brits lacked the stomach for combat.
The end result is the population has been abandoned to the terrifying ruthlessness 
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