Memorandum from Dr Rod Thornton, Joint
Services Command College
BRITISH COUNTER-INSURGENCY
OPERATIONS IN
IRAQ
While the British Army may have a rich history
and varied experience of conducting counter-insurgency operations,
its current mission in Iraq has been uniquely difficult. On the
whole, however, the Army (and the Royal Marines) has performed
very well in trying circumstances. The aim of this paper is to
delve into some history in order to contextualize current British
Army operations in Iraq and to point out how the difficulties
encountered have been dealt with.
The first point to make is that the Army went
into Iraq "cold" in counter-insurgency terms. It did
not have all the advantages that were apparent for much of the
Army's imperial policing history. For such counter-insurgency
campaigns as were conducted took place in regions where British
influence was strong. Wherever one looks in terms of the Army's
counter-insurgency experiencefrom Cyprus to Malaya and
from Palestine to the Naga Hillsthere would be an extant
police force and public administrations run by fellow-countrymen.
There would be people who knew how to run the countries and how
best to deal with the indigenous populations. Intelligence would
be available, there would be a high degree of cultural awareness,
and there would be many people who spoke the local languages.
In essence, all the Army had to do was to use its military muscle
in aid of a civil power who would know how to target such muscle.
Hence, British counter-insurgency operations normally ended in
success (with the obvious exceptions of Palestine and Aden for
their own particular reasons).
Ironically, perhaps the only previous occasion
when the British Army has been called on to fight an insurgency
in a country with which it lacked familiarity was in Iraq itself
in 1920. But even in this case there were many Army and Political
Officers who were familiar with both the Arab culture and language.
Such cultural awareness contributed greatly to the eventual quelling
of that particular insurgency. The Army was also well served by
its attempts to keep in place as much of the old Ottoman civil
structures as it could and undermined any opposition to the British
by employing "divide and rule" techniques that concentrated
on tribal differences. Moreover, the way the Army dealt with the
insurgency then was helped immeasurably by the general impression
given that whatever the rebels did the British, as a great power,
would prevail. The rebels, short as they were of weapons and ammunition,
realised that they could not match an implacable foe who could
simply bring in from abroad more and more men and materiel. In
1920 the insurgents buckled in the face of overwhelming British
power. It is also noteworthy that British operations in Iraq were
given legitimacy by a League of Nations mandate.
The British Army has been recently asked to
go back into Iraq but this time lacking all the positives that
were available in 1920. The Army now has a very limited pool of
Arab speakers and culturally aware personnel. Officers could not
maintain the old civilian structures since these were Ba'athist
and the whole point of the exercise (as expressed ultimately)
was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his power structures. The
Army could not try "divide and rule" amongst the tribes
because it had to be seen as a neutral and impartial peacekeeper.
The Army was faced by determined factions who, unlike their 1920s
brethren, are not short of arms and ammunition. The Army was also
denied the sense of superiority that so undermined the 1920s insurgency.
One of the great tools used by counter-insurgency forces in the
past is the message that "we are more powerful than you and
we will outlast you". Such a message brings indigenous people
to your side and away from that of the rebel because they can
see which way the wind is blowing and where the future lies. But
with Coalition governments pointing out that troops would be withdrawn
as soon as possible it becomes very difficult for the population
to throw in their lot and provide assistance to foreigners who
may be here today, but gone tomorrow (the problem in Aden in 1967).
Finally, unlike 1920, the Army has no legal authority to take
action in Iraq. Soldiers feel they are operating in a legal vacuum.
Thus many of the tools that were available to deal with the insurgency
in 1920 are now denied to the Army. And yet despite all this,
as one American analyst put it, the British Army, compared to
the Americans, has achieved a "relative success" around
Basra.[6]
Such a success is down to a professionalism
gained from the experience of many decades of counter-insurgency
warfare (and not just from Northern Ireland). This professionalism
is based on two fundamental principles that the British Army has
been using for the past 150 years: pragmatism and minimum force.
The pragmatism is basically a result of the fact that the Army
has always been smallc 200,000 for most of imperial historywhile
its main charge throughout that time was to control up to one
third of humanity. Clearly with such an onerous policing role,
nuance had to be employed and compromises had to be made.
Thus, historically, whatever force multipliers
the Army could make use of it did. These would range from a variety
of methods for lowering tension to using force in very focused
ways that leveraged what was available. Thus officers would, for
example, negotiate with insurgent opponents whenever they could,
regardless of their political hue. They would also invest effort
into "turning" rather than killing individual opponents
simply because the mathematics of such an approach worked in their
favour. They also sought intelligence voraciously. Good intelligence
allowed for the targeting of limited force in the right areas
against the right people. This intelligence could come from the
very top of insurgent organizations or be picked up from the very
bottom by soldiers on patrol. Indeed, patrolling on foot, while
principally having a deterrent effect, also allowed the Army to
exhibit a friendly and unthreatening posture. Such "coal
face" interactions acted as the sharp end of a `hearts and
minds' policy and encouraged local people to volunteer intelligence
about the insurgents.[7]
Good intelligence allowed the principle of minimum
force to be applied. With a lack of numbers, the Army has always
known it could never kill all of its insurgent opponents. Thus
it concentrated on killing those that mattered while avoiding
killing those that did not and the innocent. Through such an approach
overall consent could be maintained within indigenous communities.
Throughout the Army's counter-insurgency endeavours, if power
was seen to be used with responsibility then it helped to get
the general populace on the side of the Army and government. After
all, for the British, counter-insurgency was not so much a battle
to eliminate opponents, but rather a "battle for men's minds",
as Gen. Frank Kitson once put it. This battle was a zero-sum game.
The more the people were drawn towards the government side the
more support they gave it passively in that they stayed out of
hostilities and the more support they gave actively in the form
of intelligence; while, on the other hand, the less support they
gave the insurgents in terms of shelter and succour. Thus the
Army, trying very hard to maintain consent, has always avoided
the use of heavy weapons that brought about casualties indiscriminately.
Thomas Mockaitis summed this attitude up in terms of the use of
airpower, for instance, throughout later imperial policing duties:
"significantly", he observed, "the British were
willing to forego the military advantages of the aeroplane in
order to preserve the principal of minimum force".[8]
But force has to be used. There is here an age-old
formula noted by Maj-Gen. Sir Charles Gwynn in his seminal pamphlet
of the 1930s, Imperial Policing. "Excessive severity",
he wrote, "may antagonise the neutral or loyal element, add
to the number of rebels, and leave a lasting feeling of resentment
and bitterness. On the other hand, the power and resolution of
the government forces must be displayed".[9]
Respect had to be gained. Obviously, though, very careful thought
has to go into the displaying of "power and resolution";
especially when the army is a small one. Ill-thought through offensive
action, in the British book, risked making the situation worse,
not better. As an example, Lt-Gen. Alymer Haldane, the commander
of British forces in Iraq in 1920 stressed the political consequences
of outright failure. "Regrettable incidents", he wrote,
"or failure to complete what one sets out to do have political
effects out of all proportion to their military importance . .
.`Legitimate gambles' are not to be thought of; a sound straightforward
course of action should be followed, even though promising less
brilliant results".[10]
Historically, the Army has thus been careful about its use of
force both because of the effect it may have in terms of a loss
of consent and, if it does not achieve results, in the loss of
that vital component of control, respect. In counter-insurgency
terms, this has always been a cautious Army.
There is also another point to remember about
the British use of minimum force: it is part of the British liberal
tradition. The same early 19th-century liberal Protestant philosophies
that led to the ending of the Slave Trade, when combined with
the Romanticism then prevalent in society, created in Britain
an Army suffused with what came to be called "Victorian values".
Officers were looked upon as paragons of virtue who were in the
vanguard of the spreading of Britain's enlightened imperial message
to all corners of a dark world. And, as such, these officers had
to avoid undue loss of life. Hence the opprobrium heaped on the
Army, unique in Britain, after incidents when it did misbehave;
such as after the Indian Mutiny (1857), Amritsar (1919) and Bloody
Sunday (1972). Thus restraint has always been a watchword for
British forces certainly because it was pragmatic, but also because
it was expected. As one author put it, throughout British imperial
history, "If troops were called out to preserve or restore
order, their officers went into action guided only by a forcible
but indistinct sense of social constraint".[11]
Thus the restraintas compared with US forcesso apparent
in Iraq is not the result of "training" (as Lord Gardner
and others would aver),[12]
it is the result of a general British approach and has been apparent
for many years in both conventional conflict (Second World War
and Korean War) and insurgencies. One American journalist many
years ago summed it up: when commenting on the restraint exhibited
by British troops in Palestine in the 1940s, she averred that
"Our boys could never do it".[13]
Indeed, in our own era, one only has to consider the kind of rhetoric
used by American leadersboth political and militarywhich
is so different from our own, to understand the differences in
the levels of restraint expected from troops on the ground.[14]
However, it was the abjuring of this general
British policy of restraint (as usual when dealing with the Irish)
that caused problems in the early years of "The Troubles"
in Northern Ireland. Here was another example of the Army going
in "cold" when it was dispatched there in force in 1969.
The Province lacked a functioning police force and the Army took
over that role. Thrown in at the deep end, the Army, egged on
by an equally out-of-its-depth government in Westminster, responded
too aggressively. Officers tried to get around problems by "cracking
down". This appeared in its most egregious form with Bloody
Sunday in 1972, but was also evident in the number of arbitrary
arrests (Internment, 1971-74) and in sweep operations that took
in house searches targeted only at Catholic areas. The gains made
in weapons seizures were greatly outweighed by the antipathy generated
in Catholic communities. Consent was lost and the insurgency worsened
until the Army toned down its approach and "police primacy"
was restored in 1977. The lesson was that the Army's use of harsh
measures early on created a situation that took many years to
rectify in order to engender a workable level of consent in the
Province.
When the Army came to operations in Iraq, therefore,
it displayed its characteristic caution. During the war itself,
when the Army was faced with forcing its way into Basra, it held
back. This was an act criticised by US officers at the time, but
it allowed the Army, after negotiations, to eventually enter a
city that was intact and where there had been few casualties.[15]
Thus there was less local hostility and more consent once troops
moved in. Such consent is vital if, as was the case, the Army
had to become the police force once it entered Basra and other
towns. The level of consent allowed troops to carry through their
usual measuressuch as foot-patrolling. In a consensual
environment they can do this without the usual protection of body
armour and helmets. Such insouciance creates the impression that
everything is normal, that the threat is diminished and everyone
can go about their normal lives. It also reduces the sense of
distance between soldier and civilian and makes soldiers seem
more accessible to the local populations. It is a technique the
Americans try to utilise but their sense of `force protection'
normally militates against it.[16]
The British philosophy has always been that physical barriers
prevent soldiers from picking up the "on the street"
intelligence that can protect them from attack. In essence, the
people protect them. The American philosophy is that physical
barriers are necessary to provide protection from the people.
What has been noteworthy is that British forces in Iraq have not
tried to force the pace of intelligence gathering. There has always
been, in historical terms, the temptation, when moving into an
intelligence-poor environment, to "encourage" the flow
of information through the harsh interrogating of people picked
up on the street. This was tried in Northern Ireland and proved
counter-productive. The Army seems to have learnt its lesson.
The British Army's caution stands in contrast
to American actions. US warfighting at whatever level is based
on the principle of using lots of force so that the job is over
with quickly and peace, the natural order of things, can return.
The use of such force in the war itself left a legacy of bitterness
that made their later counter-insurgency task that much more difficult.
They had lost the "battle for men's minds" very early
on with their aggressive pushes north. Even after the war was
"over" there are examples of the unwise use of force
by US troops. For instance, one may be able to trace all the subsequent
problems the Americans had in Fallujah to a particular incident
where US forces displayed a singular lack of restraint. Just after
the war itself had finished and when there seemed to be no opposition
in Fallujah, US Marines opened fire on a crowd outside their barracks
who were peacefully protesting over a fairly trivial local matter.
The fact that many unarmed people were killed can be said to have
turned the whole of Fallujah against US forces. Down the line
and months later US forces had to move into Fallujah to root out
the insurgents who had set up base there. The destruction of that
city in the process is redolent of an attitude during the Vietnam
War. To paraphrase an officer from that time, "we had to
destroy the city in order to save it".
This is what British troops conspicuously avoided
doing: restraint led to the establishment of a workable degree
of consent. And British officers have been determined to keep
it that way. The general pace of British counter-insurgency operations
has again caused friction with American senior officers (whose
orders British officers should have been following) in August
last year. When US forces moved into the holy city of Najaf to
attack Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, Shia forces in the UK zone launched
attacks in sympathy. British forces were besieged in bases in
both Amara and Basra. These battles were of much greater intensity
than anything experienced during the war itself. But what was
different for the British was that they basically acted as "Aunt
Sally's" and took all the militia could throw at them without
resorting to indiscriminate weaponry such as artillery, fast-jet
air strikes or helicopter gunships. Innocent casualties were avoided
so that, at the end of the "rebellion", while many fighters
might be dead, overall consent still existed among the local Shia
population because "collateral" damage was minimal.[17]
Negotiations were also entered into with rebel leaders (against
US orders) to help in the reduction of tension. Moreover, to keep
the fighting out of the headlines where it might prove inflammatory,
the press of any hue was prevented by the Army from operating
in the areas in question. This kept the problem bottled up and
local from where it could be sorted out locally.
There was an obvious downside to this approach.
Here were young, keen British soldiers being involved in some
of the biggest battles since the Korean War and yet they were
getting no publicity. This severely effected soldiers' morale.
Risking death every day and getting no thanks for it in the UK
is the epitome of a "thankless task". And while these
soldiers could act as Aunt Sally's they were also capable of focused
aggression; using bayonets, for instance, rather than helicopter
gunships.[18]
As one analyst put it, "the British approach requires considerable
bravery since it doesn't involve the precautionary measure of
killing anything that might be a threat".[19]
What also needs to be appreciated is the task
the Army is having to carry out in an extraordinary legal vacuum.
If you are sent in by political masters to remove a regime then,
of course, British soldiers have to become the new regime. They
have to maintain order and become the police force; but a police
force that has to work within the constraints of English Common
Law while having no back-up in terms of the availability of courts
and prisons. This is an invidious position to be in. Restraint
has to be used because there seems to be no legitimacy for the
Army's actions at all, let alone overt and aggressive counter-insurgent
activity. Added to this is the fact that there are elements of
the British press corps who, unhappy with the invasion of Iraq
in the first place, are looking for any act of malfeasance by
overstretched soldiers to pounce on.
British forces have been successful in Iraq.
They have done well in a difficult environment. They have been
tough but measured in their actions. They have used the experience
gained from many decades of counter-insurgency work that has been
passed on from generation to generation within the Army's regimental
structures. They may have moved slowly and cautiously on occasions
but this has been to everyone's benefit; not least the innocent
Iraqis who may have been caught up in any unrestrained use of
force.
King's College London
February 2005
6 Robert Scales, "Culture-Centric Warfare",
Proceedings, Vol 130, No 10 (October 2004) p 35. Back
7
As Scales goes on, "Great Britain's relative success in
Basra owes in no small measure to the self-assurance and comfort
with foreign culture derived from centuries of practicing the
art of soldier diplomacy and liaison". Ibid, p 35. Back
8
Thomas Mockaitis, British Counter Insurgency, (London: Macmillan,
1990) p 35. Back
9
Charles Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London: War Office, 1934) p
5. Back
10
Lt-Gen. Sir Aylmer Haldane, The Insurrection in Mesopotamia,
1920 (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922) pp 334-335. Back
11
Lawrence James, Imperial Rearguard: Wars of Empire, 1919-1985
(London: Brassey's, 1988) p 43. Back
12
"Letters to the Editor", "Deteriorating Situation
in Iraq", Professor Sir Timothy Garden, et al, The
Times (19 April 2004). Back
13
Quoted by Bernard Fergusson, The Trumpet in the Hall (L: Secker
and Warburg, 1970) p223. Back
14
Two examples may colour this characterisation. After US troops
were killed in Somalia in the early 1990s on a peacekeeping mission,
even the great liberal, President Bill Clinton, is quoted as saying,
"When people kill us they should be killed in greater numbers".
Quoted in George Stephanopolous, All Too Human (NY: Little Brown
and Co, 1999) p 214. Also Lt-Gen. James Mattis, who led US Marines
into Baghdad, has said recently that, "It's fun to shoot
some people". Esther Schrader, "General Draws Fire For
Saying `It's Fun to Shoot' the Enemy", Los Angeles Times
(4 February 2005). Back
15
As one US general quoted in the Washington Post put it,
"My impression is that they [the British] are much more sensitive
to the fact that the fight is about the population in the cities,
not the enemy forces in the city . . . Americans tend to see the
fight as a medieval clash of the titans, with the population on
the sidelines, while the British view it as a fight between two
sides for the support of the people". Vernon Loeb and Thomas
E Ricks, Washington Post (9 April 2003). Back
16
"The combat ethos of American troops, and their stern rules
about `force protection' . . . casts them, in the eyes of local
civilians, as haughty conquerors". Joseph Fitchett, International
Herald Tribune (9 April 2003) p 3. Back
17
Even the killing of insurgents was kept to a minimum to retain
as much consent as possible. As Lt-Col John Donnelly, CO of 1
CHESHIRES put it, "If there's a man on a corner with an RPG,
I can shoot him [but] someone else will just take his place".
The point made is that killing achieves nothing. Jason Burke,
"British Tread Softly to Win the Peace", The Observer
(5 September 2004) p 23. This sentiment was noted by an American
reporter: "American troops killed as many as 1,000 insurgents
in Falluja and seized stocks of weapons and ammunition. But neither
guns nor dedicated fighters are scarce in Iraq". Daryl Press,
Benjamin Valentino, "A Victory, But Little Is Gained"',
New York Times (17 November 2004). Back
18
"British Troops Kill 20 in Bayonet Clash", Sunday
Times (16 May 2004). Back
19
Michael Gordon, "Five Ways to Take a City", The New
York Times (8 April 2003). Back
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