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Lori Allen is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Vincent A. Brown is a Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. Ajantha Subramanian is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies...
...Basra in 2003 unhelmeted while their U.S. counterparts kept a wary distance from the Iraqis they had liberated in those heady early days of the Iraq war. And at first, it did seem that Britain, very much the junior partner in terms of numbers and resources, could teach the Americans a thing or two about how to deal with the manifold challenges of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. "Great Britain's relative success in Basra is due in no small measure to the self-assurance and comfort with foreign culture derived from centuries of practicing the art of soldier diplomacy...
...there's something to be said for the American way. In 2008, after thinly spread British forces had effectively lost control of Basra to Shi'ite militias, the Iraqi army turned to the U.S. for support to drive out the insurgents. The British, though nominally heading up the coalition forces in the region, played a subsidiary role and, according to some reports, only found out about the operation once it was under...
...British soldiers can certainly be overconfident. But John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, believes the real roots of British humiliations in Iraq lie in London. "If the politicians back home are not completely committed to this thing, if they have not leveled with the people on the likely costs of the war, then you're putting an unsupportable burden on the army in the field in a counterinsurgency campaign," says Nagl. "And so as you look at explanations as to why the British army performed better in Malaya than Iraq, one of the questions...
...Nagl, a former U.S. Army officer, credits Britons with providing valuable expertise to their American colleagues in Iraq. "Much of what the American Army ended up doing in Iraq under General Petraeus was as a result of lessons learned largely from the British," says Nagl, who helped Petraeus revise the U.S. counterinsurgency manual. "My own evaluation of how the British army adapted to the demands of counter-insurgency in Malaya had some role in influencing how we thought about the importance of building an adaptive learning organization." (Read a TIME cover story on Petraeus...