Britain: The Good Occupiers

Britain's Sunday Telegraph had an interesting story yesterday about a trooper in the elite SAS's counter-terrorism team who refused to return to Iraq. What makes the story notable is his primary rationale -- that the war was immoral because of the counterinsurgency tactics being used by American soldiers. According to Ben Griffin, "I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. I knew . . . that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population. And if you don't win the hearts and minds of the people, you can't win the war." Griffin's words provide a powerful critique of events on the ground, but in a sense they also play into a particular British image of the war -- and of America's sole responsibility for the occupation's failure.

Max Hastings, in the same Telegraph, writes that a "fatal divide" separates the brutality of American behavior from British legality, and that the central mistake of the Brits was to imagine that with so small a military force in Iraq they could actually check American aggression. A soldier like Griffin isn't expected to question the ends of British war policy. Still, this tactical critique does allow Hastings and others to repeat the mantra of liberal hawks in the U.S. -- the cause was just, but the execution was poor.

It also gives Hastings a chance to assert once more that the Brits are somehow better, gentler, more friendly to hearts and minds, and if only they had been in charge all would be well. While describing the great training ground in counterinsurgency tactics that was Northern Ireland, he allows himself to admit that "things happened in Kenya" that would have resulted in an "orgy of war crimes trials." Perhaps, his comment "things happened" was referencing the 1.5 million Kikuyus (the entire ethnic popoulation) who were forced into concentration camps during the Mau Mau uprising, where rampant disease, slave labor, and brutal torture were commonplace. Britain's past colonial history may offer plenty of experiences in wars of occupation, but they are hardly worth emulating.

More importantly, the continual focus on tactics and legality -- while laudable among soldiers -- cannot be the basis of meaningful critique. It's not which army is in charge that makes the war illegitimate, it's the fundamental goals -- the very idea of "hearts and minds" campaigns, with its presumption that "we" somehow know better how to structure political and social life in foreign lands. Breaking the law can be immoral, but even lawful wars are unjust. Those like Hastings need to abandon their moral highground, because in castigating Americans he and others fail to address Britain's own complicity in this war, let alone own up to its past.