CAMP DOGWOOD, Iraq, 6 December 2004 — The much-hyped conceit about Britain’s soft military touch in Iraq had a hard landing on a road south of Baghdad one November morning, when an Iraqi car accelerated toward a British checkpoint and a young gunner fired a blizzard of bullets through its windshield.
The soldiers from Scotland’s Black Watch regiment didn’t stick around to determine whether the dead driver was an aspiring suicide bomber or just a man impatient to get through the backup of traffic. But the myth might have died along with him.
In postwar Iraq, contrasting images have percolated through media coverage of the alliance: The martial Americans on one hand, looking to crush the insurgency through force, the world-weary British on the other, choosing accommodation over provocation. The implication was that something in their tactics or temperament made British soldiers better suited than Americans to cope with the insurgency here.
But the October deployment of the Black Watch to these badlands controlled by Sunni extremists provided the first chance to compare the two countries’ operating styles under the same level of danger.
Until the Black Watch moved north, the British military had been operating exclusively in southern Iraq, where the violence, while simmering, has not matched the mayhem in the American sector around Baghdad, the capital. The relative calm allowed the British to adopt a less bristling posture on patrol, to wear their soft regimental berets instead of Kevlar helmets and to keep their weapons lowered rather than peering at Iraqis through gun sights.
It also gave rise to a certain smugness among British officers and media, which cast the contrast as one between the “heavy-handed” Americans and the less hostile tactics of “the lads.” There were jokes over beers in Basra that, to an American, the concept of winning Iraqi hearts and minds meant one bullet to the heart, one to the head. And the British media even coined a phrase to describe the British style, dubbing the less robust approach “softly, softly.”
The Black Watch tried to bring that culture north with them when they merged operations with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit based south of Baghdad in a deployment that ended Saturday. The British began the assignment patrolling in their berets. They handed out leaflets in Arabic explaining they were a “Scottish” regiment in case Iraqis mistook them for Americans, and proclaimed they had come only to help build a “safe and free” Iraq. Insurgents responded with two suicide car bombings and a roadside bomb in the first week of operations, killing four British soldiers and gravely injuring two others.
The shooting of the Iraqi driver at the checkpoint came just an hour after the second car bomb had blown the legs off two of the Black Watch gunner’s colleagues. “After the suicide bombings against us, I went to an American soldier I know here and put my hands up. I said, ‘I confess, I was one of those who sat around in Basra criticizing your approach,’” said Black Watch Capt. Stuart MacAulay,
He was hardly alone. The self-perception of British superiority to the Americans took hold in the first days of occupation, feeding on outrage over the handful of British deaths by US friendly fire during the invasion.
The feisty British media did the rest, turning modest differences in style into a clash of military cultures.
Critics characterized American soldiers and Marines as testosterone-fueled products of a congenitally xenophobic culture, unable or unwilling to absorb the complexities of the country they had invaded.
The British, by comparison, were portrayed as scarred veterans of an imperial history that showed the futility of trying to suppress national uprisings. In particular, the bruising national trauma of fighting a 30-year war against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland had taught them that paramilitary groups couldn’t be crushed by force alone.
In Iraq, the words “Northern Ireland” became code for the British conviction that the American approach was doomed to fail.
To American soldiers here, the more laconic British style and the boasting that goes with it are founded on nothing more than the good fortune of being based in southern Iraq, dominated by Shiite Muslims who hated Saddam Hussein. Come to the Sunni Triangle, frustrated US troops would tell their British counterparts with an edge in their voice, and you’ll see the real Iraq.
In October, the British did, and found themselves on a steep learning curve.
The record shows they have hardly behaved like peacekeepers in Iraq. When Shiite extremists in British-controlled Maysan province rioted this summer, British troops responded with a barrage of fire. In August, soldiers from the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment fired 100,000 rounds of ammunition during battles that left several hundred Iraqis dead, according to British defense estimates.
