LONDON, March 21 (UPI) -- Lt. Col. Tim Collins of the Royal Irish Regiment is already a British media star. An unwitting star, perhaps, but the kind of man the nation wants to think is their heroic answer to the gung-ho, America-first superpower abilities of the U.S. forces thrusting their way into Iraq.
Collins, commander of the RIR's 1st Battalion, made his entrance to the voracious British media Thursday via a 'cool' photograph of him standing in the Kuwaiti desert wearing Ray-Ban-type sunglasses, cropped hair and puffing on a small cigar. He completed the picture by giving a brilliant, low-key eve-of-battle speech to his troops that stood in massive contract to the Hoo-Hah! style of a U.S. admiral to his U.S. Marines at the same time.
Within a few hours the two allies would be fighting as brother-in-arms, as they had done since World War I, and indeed would soon be the first to die together in a helicopter accident that killed eight British Marines and four Americans. But what Collins told his troops was uniquely British, in a style that echoed Shakespeare's Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt.
"The enemy should be in no doubt that we are bringing about his rightful destruction," Collins told his assembled troops, according to a pooled report by Sarah Oliver of the Daily Telegraph. "There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of hell for (Iraqi leader) Saddam (Hussein). He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. As they die they will know that their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity."
Wearing a big curved bladed kukri knife from the Nepali Gurkha company of his battalion, Collins also spoke of some of those among him who may not see the end of the campaign but will be "put in their sleeping bags and sent home. There will be no time for sorrow." And he explained in biblical terms his men's moral duties in the country they came to liberate, not conquer.
"I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts," he said. "I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they can go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please."
He spoke of the shame to the regiment and the nation of over-enthusiasm in killing, and warned that they were entering a deeply historic land -- the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.
"You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing. Don't treat them as refugees for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor. In years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.
"If there are casualties of war, then remember that when they woke up in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves. ... As for ourselves, let's bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now is north."
British military commanders rarely talk like this, especially at a time of deep division about the rightness of this war at home.
Traditionally, British commanders say things like: "Well, chaps, this is it. We jolly well have to pull our socks up and get going on this one." Daily Telegraph columnist William Deedes, whose first foreign report for that paper was of the Abysinnia War in 1936, wrote Friday that British commanders rarely if ever talked of death, and breaking that specter broke a long military tradition.
But Collins is the new face of the British military: age 42, born and raised in Belfast, married with four children, a man with "a gift of the gab" according to a fellow officer. Despite a family history in the British Army dating to 1857, Collins is thoroughly modern, with a toughness honed as a member of the legendary SAS (Special Air Service). He has turned the Northern Ireland-based Royal Irish Regiment -- 40 percent of them Catholics from the Irish Republic -- into a 'special operations capable' infantry battalion that works closely alongside two battalions of the famed Red Beret Parachute Regiment.
Hours after he spoke the RIR went into action with 16 Air Assault Brigade, seizing oil wells in the Basra area before the Iraqis could blow them up. Friday, Adm. Michael Boyce, chief of the Defense Staff, said only seven oil heads had been set on fire by the Iraqis out of hundreds that remained intact.
Collins and the Royal Irish are part of the reason why, for all their relatively small size, the British military punches well above its weight of 45,000 troops in the Gulf, compared to 250,000 U.S. troops. While the U.S. Marine Corps alone outnumbers the size and power of the entire British Army, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks appears to have had no problem in assigning British forces lead roles in the opening phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Or in placing 2,000 U.S. Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force under direct British command, the first time since World War II.
Indeed, half of the armored strength of the 1st MEF is provided by 120 Challenger II tanks of the British Desert Rats 7th Armored Brigade. Covered by the tanks and by British artillery, the U.S. Marines entered the port of Umm Qasr and took it after a fight.
It was a British commander, echoing the sentiments of Collins, that ordered the Marines to remove their victorious Stars and Stripes and Marine Corps flags from atop their seized objective. Britain, of course, has been here before, not only as League of Nations mandated rulers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, but as a principal builder of Iraq's civil service and military infrastructure. Indeed, the old port of Umm Qasr was built by the British and so were such airfields as Shaibah and Habbaniyah, soon to be re-occupied by the allies.
In 2003 the British know they can only be No. 2 to the American superpower, and have to struggle to keep up technologically. In their rush to Kuwait they revealed their deficiencies in logistics such as boots, desert uniforms and even food supplies, compared to the laid-on showers and Burger Kings for the U.S. Army.
Smart U.S. commanders know, however, that they underestimate British forces at their peril. Franks has particularly involved the British SAS and SBS (Special Boat Squadron) in major special operations that so far are only slowly coming to light.
Now that battle has been joined, the fact that the British Army can still keep producing the likes of Collins is reminder enough to the British public that the British military is probably still its best international asset, and the only one that the United States can still completely trust.
