Will the British attempt to conduct counter-insurgency (COIN) again after their Iraq War debacle?
The British realized something was wrong with their Iraq COIN approach in early 2008:
Monday, March 24, 2008, marked five years to the month after the British army arrived in Iraq, preaching to the Americans their apparent expertise in counterinsurgency operations and understanding of the manifold ways of, in the historical British upper-class vernacular, “the Arab.” This is the story of how that complacency—the claimed legacy of imperial policing and Belfast; of Greece-to-your-Rome and barely disguised Anglo-American contempt—became apparent.
The British army committed that bafflingly common 21st-century failing: It exuded superiority toward an exterior entity, then felt genuine surprise when that mean-spiritedness did not generate admiration and fellow feeling in return.
And as the British army in Basra, southern Iraq, experienced what some observers would later describe as the greatest British military disaster since Suez in 1956, or the fall of Singapore in 1942—though others dispute the drama of those comparisons—the institution itself would, on a wider level, start to engage in a wholesale (and needed) program of reform.
The failure of the British to leave a better Basra for the Iraqis is all too clear after round three. So don't expect Basra to be repaired in ten days when the British helped build what the Iraqis face now over Britain's nearly four years of control. (And I say this as a friend of Britain who values Britain's friendship and help. But too many [people] were willing to belittle our fight in the center these last five years by pointing to the so-called success of the "softly-softly" British approach, which in retrospect only allowed cooperative Shia thugs to run the streets to allow the British a decent interval to retreat.)
The British like to complain of our cowboy pacification efforts in the Sunni triangle and point to their quiet Shia zone as the example we should follow.
Well, after two July attacks on British mass transit that show us how the British cleverly created an enemy within, we also know that the British have been sophisticated enough to turn Basra into a budding Londonistan. They've allowed the security services there be infiltrated by Islamists.
And the British apparently compounded that hands-off light military approach with an attitude of "Sod off you bloody wogs!"
Basra 2008 was ugly but it was a victory, albeit without style points. The initial article reminds us of that. But don't forget this fact, too:
A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from defeat.
The details in the Atlantic article certainly highlight the ugliness of the campaign. And the comparisons to Suez or Singapore are indeed highly overwrought.
But what is Britain's lesson from their record? Is it to reinvigorate counter-insurgency practice? We aren't told in the article which simply focuses on Basra.
If COIN has been restored to the British kit, it is certainly just something for an advisory role. The British army is now a expeditionary force part of a largely off-shore global role that does not seem to anticipate extended conventional warfare.
