As the storied Black Watch Regiment rolled north to take up position near Baghdad, I blogged about the British hope to replace the Americans’ heavy-handed approach towards the insurgents with a softer, gentler approach. Once they reached their destination, the soldiers of the Black Watch met a different kind of enemy than they had faced around Basra.
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.
The troops of the regiment also met cold, hard reality about American tactics.
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 gunner’s colleagues.
“The threat here is at the other end of the spectrum from what we faced in Basra,” said Black Watch Capt. Stuart MacAulay, sitting on the edge of a bunker at Camp Dogwood. “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.’ And I’m embarrassed that I criticized American tactics without ever being here and without having met them.”
People lie all the time, especially in sentences that begin with the phrase “I hate to say I told you so, but ….” In this case, I cannot say I told you so. I doubted, but held out enough hope that I restrained.
I should’ve known better. Our British allies certainly know better now. The Islamists and Saddamists know only one language. Luckily, it is one in which our weapons are already fluent.