Word: britain
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...confidence that comes with Britain's heritage helps explain the insouciance with which Brits strolled into 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...
...Such assertions cut little ice with 60% of his compatriots who, according to a survey for the National Army Museum, believe Britain should never have gone into Iraq. The real value of the inquiry may lie in the detailed testimonies provided by witnesses from politics, civil service and the military that are forming a kind of virtual manual of how to not to run such operations. General Frederick Viggers, Britain's senior military representative in Iraq in 2003, told the inquiry that a lack of expertise in Whitehall was responsible for - and continues to create - problems on the ground...
...Read: "As Britain Leaves, Basra Dares to Dream of Peace...
...owning quite a lot of the other organizations and lines of development on the social, economic, political and development front, how do you then start to really fill the vacuum with positive things? That's the challenge we face," Salmon says. The reflexive assumption of authority that came with Britain's colonial power has no place in the messy conflicts of the 21st century. Says Nagl: "One of the keys to learning is to recognize that you don't know everything...
...Britain has also begun to examine questions of its culpability for civilian deaths. A second public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old receptionist killed in British custody in September 2003, has heard that internal warnings about the treatment of prisoners were ignored. "The procedure for detention and collection of evidence can only be described as a shambles," wrote Lieut. Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the army's senior legal officer in Iraq, in a memo written only months before Mousa's death. A further inquiry has started to examine claims that up to 20 Iraqi detainees were...