A SENIOR officer in the British Army has published a damning indictment of American military conduct in Iraq, voicing publicly the private views of many of his peers.

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin- Foster, former deputy commander of the coalition programme to train the Iraqi military, accuses the Americans of cultural insensitivity amounting to institutional racism in dealing with the Iraqis.

He praises the US military’s “unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion, commitment and determination”, but says its failure to adapt its tactics has “exacerbated the task it now faces by alienating significant sections of the population”.

His “litany of criticisms”, published in an article in the US Army’s house magazine Military Review, has underlined the divisions over strategy and policy that have strained relations between the US military and its chief coalition ally in Iraq. This week Paul Bremer, the former US Administrator in Iraq, accused the British of being “weak-kneed” over plans to arrest Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Islamic cleric.

The brigadier’s article generated an angry response, with Colonel Kevin Benson, commander of the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, telling The Washington Post: “I think he’s an insufferable British snob.”

The Ministry of Defence emphasised that the article represented Brigadier Aylwin-Foster’s private opinion and was not the view of “the UK Government, the MoD or the military”. But The Washington Post quoted the brigadier as saying in an e-mail: “The Brits approve, those that have read it.”

The brigadier, of the Royal Tank Regiment, wrote that the US military in Baghdad is “weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on”. Many personnel struggled to appreciate the “nuances” of the new postwar environment.

The Americans were also imbued with “moral righteousness combined with an emotivity that was rarely far from the surface, and in extremis manifested as deep indignation or outrage that could serve to distort collective military judgment”.

An egregious example occurred in April 2004 when insurgents mutilated four US contractors in Fallujah. This act was described as “almost certainly a come-on” to the Americans and it succeeded. The US military was so affronted “they became set on the total destruction of the enemy”.

US rules of engagement were “more lenient” than other nations, “thus encouraging escalation”, Brigadier Aylwin-Foster writes. But in counter-insurgency campaigns, “the quick solution is often the wrong case”.

He does concede that the US Army was instrumental in a string of tactical and operational successes through the second half of 2004 “so any blanket verdict would be grossly misleading”.

General Sir Roger Wheeler, Chief of the General Staff from 1997 to 2000, said that the brigadier’s views were shared by other British commanders. “The US military do find it difficult to adapt to different cultural situations, as we saw also in Bosnia and Kosovo,” he said.

The most senior British officer to hint at the differences between the US and Britain in Iraq was General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the Army, who told MPs in 2004: “We must be able to fight with the Americans but we don’t have to fight as the Americans.” He said it was “a fact of life” that Britain’s military doctrine was different from that of the US.

Major General Charles Swannack Jr, commander of the US 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq during two tours of duty in 2003 and 2004, admitted to The Times that US troops lacked cultural sensitivity but insisted that the brigadier’s assessments were harsh.

He said: “Our Army has realised for 20 years that we do have shortcomings in this very difficult area of fighting insurgencies and we have developed training programmes to develop the army in this field. I personally dispute his critique of American forces being so offensively minded.”

THE BRIGADIER'S TRENCHANT VIEWS

“At times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism”

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