This has long been a view held in the UK that American soldiers are only effective on celluloid. Therefore, they lost the war in Vietnam, but thankfully Sylvester Stallone was able to go back and win it single-handedly and luckily the film crews were there to capture it all on camera.
Here an ex- platoon commander who fought against the American-sponsored Irish terrorists in Northern Ireland gives a pretty damning appraisal of the average US soldier. Do you think that war films glamourising US marines are covering up basic inadequacies? Are US troops really pansies as this respected British commander seems to be hinting at?
Mind games: The weapons of mass destruction
by Oliver James
For centuries wars have been fought as much inside people’s minds as on the battlefield. As predictions of a swift allied victory in Iraq are confounded, a psychologist analyses the effect on British and American troops, on the Iraqis and on the British people
POLITICIANS, ESPECIALLY George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, have repeatedly implied that this war was going to be easier than it has been. Eight days ago we were being encouraged to believe that it would probably be won in weeks, maybe even days.
Whole divisions of the Iraqi regular army would probably surrender en masse, key figures in their command structure would be shocked and awed into changing sides — that is, those who hadn’t already been persuaded to surrender after being contacted on their mobile phones. Ultimate victory was certain and, especially in the southern territories, the oppressed citizens would welcome an army of liberation rather than a colonising expeditionary force unfurling the Stars and Stripes over conquered towns.
None of this has happened. There has been resistance when easy victory was expected, there have been ambushes, and, as always in war, there have been cruel, accidental deaths.
This is, of course, the essence of war, where nothing ever goes to plan. But it will have affected different groups of people in different ways. Soldiers, Iraqi citizens and we, the viewers — for that is all we are — will all have vastly different reactions to the events of the past week.
Andy Arkell, who was an Army platoon commander in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, says the unexpected resistance will have had no effect on British troops. “We had no interest whatever in these kinds of narratives of what might or might not happen so we could not be disappointed. The troops will be living in a completely different time narrative from the rest of us, taking each day according to a very tight set of co-ordinating instructions with precise orders as to how to deal with any of many possible scenarios. They will have very few illusions.”
**Many soldiers will actually be pleased that the Iraqis are putting up a fight. Arkell says: “When you’re 22, as I was when I saw action, it’s your wettest dream. Being blooded is what you joined up for. My six months in Northern Ireland was the best time of my life, a wargasm. **The military is largely uninterested in politics, we really are just doing our job, usually with tremendous enjoyment, pride and clarity.”
**That, however, is the Brits: the fierce Iraqi resistance may have come as more of a shock to American soldiers who need to believe in a glory fantasy, a cultural narrative in which they are the knights in shining armour. Fired up by their leaders’ hysterical chauvinism and encouraged to believe in their invincible power, their confidence may have been badly dented. Accustomed to wars such as those in Afghanistan or Bosnia, where they are primarily used to clear up after the air force has shocked, awed and flattened the enemy, they may not be so well prepared for actual combat. **
Their serotonin levels will have been lowered, making them more impulsive, aggressive and depressive. Their cortisol levels, the fight-flight hormone, will have rocketed, jamming them into a permanent state of anxiety.
Based on his experience of joint exercises, Arkell believes there is a real difference in the American troops’ mental approach. “If you are going to plunge your bayonet into someone’s gut or empty a gun into them from six feet, you need to feel really good about it, that you are a good boy doing the right thing.
“The Americans seem to need to think of themselves as highly glamorised, feel the need for a richer and more morally black and white justification. When I was in the British Army it was much more a case of ‘point and shoot’. Insofar as justification was consciously considered, it was apolitical, about protecting your mates and surviving.”
Another problem for the Americans is the ambiguity of many of the scenarios confronting the coalition forces. This is a war in which Iraqis in civilian clothing could be killers, while those in enemy uniform could be desperate to surrender. British troops are used to that ambiguity in Northern Ireland; the Americans are not. **In any case, again from Arkell’s experience on exercises, the Americans are “not what you would call warriors. They were very long on externals, with excellent kit, like uniforms, body armour and weapons, and they loved demonstrative battle cries — lots of ‘Yes Sah’ and marching chants.
“But when night fell you sensed that all they wanted to do was fire up the barbecue and tuck into their rations — not 24-hour soldiers. By contrast, perhaps because of our feudal society, the Brits are more likely to expect to have boots that leak and to think their officers are idiots, but they are maybe better at just getting on with it.” **
The citizens of Iraq themselves must have complex and diverse responses to their soldiers’ strong resistance. There can be few who do not want to see the back of Saddam, but equally few wish to become an American satellite state.
The different political and cultural subgroups all have their own agendas and wishes for the post-Saddam Iraq, but in the meantime there is a danger of a visceral, primitive national unity against an invader, a sense of a shared enemy.
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of a revolutionary Iraqi Islamic group, says that “coalition forces are welcome in Iraq as long as they help the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam’s dictatorship, but Iraqis will resist if they seek to occupy or colonise our country”.
But perhaps most interesting of all is our reaction here in Britain. Arkell says: “Civilians live in a La-La land, a totally malleable marshmallow world of expectations that are manipulated by the authorities. They do not know what war is, what it should be like. They are fed narratives and invent ones that they can stomach. If the information about progress changes, the script can be changed according to what you want to believe.”
There is abundant scientific evidence to back this up. Studies show that most people live in a bubble of rose-tinted positive illusions, believing themselves to be more popular than they really are or less likely to be victims of misfortune than is statistically the case. Depending on our personal beliefs, we will select from the news reports to create the story we want to tell ourselves about the war. This will depend on our primary identifications with the participants.
At a gut level, many peaceniks may be secretly pleased to hear of the Iraqi resistance. Identifying with the Iraqi citizens as placed at risk by the Americans, they may dress their glee up to themselves as “I told you so”. Warmongers, who identify with the soldiers and have a sense of moral justification, may also be secretly pleased. They may have wanted to see some blood, to be glad that the war will not be a pushover.
For most of us, however, the war is probably experienced as “virtual”, no more real than a movie. The occasional dead body or painful human story may burst this bubble, but it soon reinflates and the news becomes like fiction again.
The fundamental problem is that, as far as one can tell, very few people in this country believe that Saddam poses any sort of direct threat. We accept that he has weapons of mass destruction, but we have no reason to believe he intends to use them on us. There has been no evidence that he is linked to al-Qaeda — on the contrary, they have tried to assassinate him twice. Worst of all, when pressed, both Blair and Bush were forced to move the grounds for attack from the threat Saddam poses to the need to get rid of a vile dictator for the sake of his citizens.
If Saddam were Osama bin Laden it would be a very different matter. But as things stand, most of us probably observe this war with a certain fascination at the way it is being represented by politicians and the media, rather than as a real spilling of blood and guts. While I have little time for the phrase, the fact that the Iraqis are putting up a fight is resulting in a lot of “post-modern analysis”: sitting in our armchairs, we are intrigued by the different ways in which events are being represented to us rather than by the events themselves.
From the safety of our bubble of positive illusions, I suspect that whatever we may say to others, most of us imagine: “It’ll probably be alright, and at the end of the day it’s better that the second largest puddle of oil in the world is controlled by our side rather than an unpredictable dictator.”
Now what ,no cheering crowds no red carpet no shower of roses.. dang! how will these delicate gals deal with that brutal bad ugly Saddam Inssain.. 
