Greece and Rome in Iraq

Who’s good at small wars?

The answer is still debated, but the question endures because it goes to the heart of Atlantic relations and British identity.

On the even of a trade visit to the US, Britain’s Prince Andrew complained that the Americans don’t seek the advice of Britain in conducting campaigns against guerrillas, militias, uprisings, insurgencies, etc. If only today’s Rome, the uncouth Yanks with their addiction to heavy firepower and coercion, had listened to less powerful but wiser Greece (Britain), Iraq may not have imploded.

Its novel for a royal to mention these issues publicly at all, let alone before a trade mission. But his comments tell us a lot.

When the British entered Basra in 2003 and looked to pacify southern Iraq, soldiers suggested to reporters in May 2003 that
the U.S. military should “look to them for a lesson or two.” As a British sergeant told the Christian Science Monitor: “We are trained for every inevitability and we do this better than the Americans.” According to other unnamed British military officials, America had “a poor record” at keeping the peace while Basra only reinforced the assertion that the British maintain “the best urban peacekeeping force in the world.”

Not only British journalists and soldiers made this claim – Americans also made it. Major-General Robert Scales, testifying before Congress in 2004, argued that Americans should look to Charles Gordon, T.E. Lawrence and the effort in Basra as models for inspiration in the art of skilled soldier-diplomacy. Never mind that an insurgency raged after Charles Gordon, that Lawrence developed contempt towards Arabs from his familiarity with them. Etched into Atlantic discourse is the notion that the British ran a quarter of the globe better than the unschooled descendants of the mutinous thirteen colonies.

This is an argument about a lot of things. About history: the British fought many insurgencies. So too did America, as Max Boot shows. American has a whole heritage of small wars, won and lost, it could draw on. But Britain prides itself on a depth of experience and inherited wisdom. One only has to start talking about COIN and the reverent names of Malaya and Templer are summoned.

Its also an argument about Britain’s place in the world. More bluntly, about the eclipse of British global power. Its empire lost, its armed forces shrunk, and its strategic role and identity ambiguous, the complex business of patrolling frontiers overseas has become a site through which Britons (and Americans) articulate a relationship between the old hegemon and the new.

There are, in fact, good reasons to doubt whether anyone really has a natural expertise at counter-insurgency. Who is intuitively good at eating soup with a knife?

Malaya, a campaign that still took twelve years, was blessed with unusually ideal preconditions: geographic isolation, an easily patrollable coastline, an insurgency made up of an ethnic Chinese minority who were deeply hated by the rest of the population, an insurgency deprived of much external support, and a permissive environment where the British could relocate whole populations. The lesson seems to be, if anything, that COIN is very difficult even in close to best-case scenarios.

Fast-forward to today. If Basra was supposed to reflect Britain’s unique acumen, here’s what the new Iraqi police chief had to say about the place he inherited from British occupation:

“They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world”

Now in my limited experience, the UK does have some pretty damned impressive officers. The ones I know get embarrassed by others’ smug talk of COIN mastery and the legendary ‘light touch.’ But their perspective can be lost in the white noise of public debate, where sober analysis is spoilt by the quest for prestige by an ex-empire.

But there is a real danger in self-congratulatory history. It is precisely when a power thinks it is superb at doing things that things seem to go wrong. At a time when the US under Petraeus is making quantum leaps in its COIN capacity, the British also need to be in a state of continual revision. As Basra collapses into near-anarchy, AQI are being severely damaged by the US-assisted realignment of factions in northern Iraq.

Second, smug identity makes it difficult to listen to criticism: from President Karzai, from Secretary of Defence Gates, from Afghans aghast at the counter-narcotics operation that burns their economy down and leaves a dispossessed agrarian class feeding Taliban ranks.

If the Brits are to use one of their genuinely historical gifts, the flair for improvisation, they first must acknowledge a bitter truth: Basra has been a bad result. As has Musa Qala. Never mind formulating a theory of victory. What they need first is a theory of defeat.

Tags: COIN and culture