A flyover of BAE Hawk fighter aircraft. Flickr/PJR. Some rights reserved.After killing fourteen unarmed civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in September 2007, four ex-Blackwater security guards were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on April 13: one to a life sentence, the other three thirty years. The Nisour Square massacre was one of a long list of scandals involving private contractors in Iraq, unique in the sense that there has been some semblance of accountability and legal process. Blackwater – since re-branded as Academi – has been seen by many as the ultimate expression of the blurred lines between war and profiteering; of the excesses of American military power; and the “military-industrial complex” which Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against when departing office in 1960.
In Britain, while we tend to accept our role as the junior partner in the “special relationship” with the United States, we frame ourselves as a more mature, less “cowboy-like” international power. In Iraq, for example, “the British model of counter-insurgency” – allegedly tried and tested in Northern Ireland – was frequently held up as “best practice”. A 2007 conference at the Royal United Services Institute – “‘Hearts and Minds’: British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq” – was attended by academics and generals, where it was argued that “in Iraq the British Army has used ‘minimum force’ and operated among the people rather than in armoured vehicles, from direct experience of urban warfare in Northern Ireland.”
Many of us who are familiar with the history of British conduct in Northern Ireland or Iraq would no doubt question this assessment (neither this, nor this seem to fit the category of “minimum force”), but the promotional image is clear: Britain can bring its experience and wisdom to complex conflicts, providing a useful professionalism often lacking in its younger, richer and more powerful partner.
