Mein Vater würde sich im Grab umdrehen wenn er über die amateurhaft anmutenden Verwirrungen der britischen Armee im Irak von heute lesen würde.

Als junger, 1935 aus Berlin nach Palästina ausgewanderter Kibbuznik, hatte er sich bereits 1939 freiwillig zur britischen Armee gemeldet, da er mit Hitler “noch ein Hühnchen zu rupfen hatte.”

Unter der Führung General Montgomerys nahm er 1942 als Royal Engineer an den Kämpfen in Nordafrika teil, die den deutschen Vorstoß nach Ägypten stoppen und Rommels Truppen schliesslich ganz aus Nordafrika vertreiben konnten.

65 Jahre später kämpfen britische Soldaten erneut gegen den Terror eines faschistischen Todeskultes im Nahen Osten. Diesmal jedoch mit weniger Überzeugung, Courage und militärischem Geschick - obwohl die Herausforderung und die Bedrohung wesentlich geringer ist als damals.

Einem Bericht des Sunday Telegraphs zufolge, scheint die britische Armee im Irak nur noch ein Schatten ihrer selbst zu sein:

When America’s top commanders in Iraq held a conference with their British counterparts recently, Major General Jonathan Shaw - Britain’s senior officer in Basra - was quick to share his views on how best to conduct counter-insurgency operations.

For much of the last four years, the Americans in the room would have listened carefully, used to deferring to their British colleagues’ long experience in Northern Ireland. This time, however, eyes that would once have been attentive simply rolled.

Few were in the mood for a lecture about British superiority, when they fear that Downing Street’s planned pull-out from Basra will squander any progress from their own hard-fought “troop surge” strategy elsewhere.

“It’s insufferable for Christ’s sake,” said one senior figure closely involved in US military planning. “He comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counter-insurgency. The guys were just rolling their eyeballs. The notorious Northern Ireland came up again. It’s pretty frustrating. It would be okay if he was best in class, but now he’s worst in class. Everybody else’s area is getting better and his is getting worse.”

The meeting, called by General David Petraeus, the senior US officer who has the task of managing the surge, is emblematic of what is fast becoming a minor crisis in Anglo-American military relations.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s government has tried to depict a quiet process of handover to Iraqi troops in Basra, which will see the remaining forces in the city withdraw to the airport in November.

What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to “cut and run”, leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by “the political situation at home in the UK”.

A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time - more than a year - they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.

“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/19/wiraq119.xml