LONDON, March 31 (UPI) -- Is it time Americans learned to play soccer or cricket if they have any hope of winning the war in Iraq without destroying the place and causing mass casualties?
Do they need to learn sports where they sometimes go backwards to go forwards -- as in soccer - and even bat a ball about for five days and be satisfied with a drawn result -- as can happen in Test Match cricket?
These questions are being asked in Britain because British troops are using long-developed "carrot and stick," "hearts and minds" tactics to subdue and win over southern Iraq, while American troops appear to have hardened their tactics with more firepower aimed to keep Iraqis as far away from them as possible.
In an article in Monday's Guardian newspaper, distinguished Yale University historian Paul Kennedy stuck his head over the American nationalistic parapet to argue that a deep-rooted sense of impatience in American popular culture has created an unrealistic expectation that war with Iraq would result in a swift victory.
"Above all," he wrote, "there is the impatient character of the American sports culture, which is so ingrained and taken for granted that few citizens appreciate how it looks from the outside -- the quasi-military language, the impatience with low scoring, the stress upon offensive play, the sheer overwhelming size and power of most basketball and football players, the commercially driven system of frequent 'time-outs' which heightens the atmosphere of urgency and racing against the clock.
"Were one to suggest (tongue in cheek, I know) that all basketball and football games were banned for a month, and sports fans invited instead to watch television chess matches, or darts, or snooker or -- heaven forfend -- recordings of an Australian-India cricket test match, we would probably have another American revolution. Our psychological need for swift and decisive actions would have been denied us, and that is intolerable."
For the British, fighting and dying together with Americans in Iraq, the sports-driven cultural gap is the single most divisive issue between them. It is not language, for most young Britons were weaned on American movies and music, and even young Alabama soldiers quickly pick up the British lingo.
But forced by their governments to while away the hours together before battle, the two allies find they cannot appreciate each other's national sports. American soldiers pick up an oval ball and throw long passes to each other; the British kick a soccer ball. Given a stick and a ball, the Americans mark out a baseball field; the British, a cricket pitch.
The military impact of the difference is considerable.
"In the Cold War we used to joke whether our war plan against the Russians was going to look like gridiron football -- big muscles and set offenses to take territory, or like British rugby -- with scrums and flow and individual flexibility," Professor Michael Clarke, director of defense studies at King's College, London, told United Press International.
"What you have got in Iraq is the United States tasking on the combat difficult job of assertive aggression against Saddam's main military forces, while the British have got more focus on a Bosnia-type job around Basra. It's working out, though, that the Americans need to slip as much into the latter mode if they hope to get the local population on their side and not get attacked on their supply lines."
Whether U.S. troops can culturally make that switch, however, is doubtful in British opinion. Neither Clarke nor Adm. Richard Cobbold, director of the Royal United Services Institute defense think tank, said the United States had the long British experience of dealing with foreign civilian populations.
"We learned an enormous amount of patience and discipline for 30 years in Northern Ireland," said Cobbold. "It took us 12 years to beat the communists in Malaya (the United States was generally unsuccessful in adapting British methods there to Vietnam). I don't know if it is their sports that make Americans so or whether it is their frontier heritage and national experience that produces their sports."
Significantly, military doctrine -- or developed procedures of warfare -- was only established in the British military about 20 years ago.
Flexibility was and still is the most important military requirement, with the British army in particular built around its non-commissioned officers rather than the doctrine-trained officers of the U.S. military.
Thus, British officials are aghast at new first-hand reports from U.S. "grunt" Marines that they intend to revenge the deaths and capture of their fellow Marines by regarding all Iraqis as the enemy, to be shot at the first whiff of doubt.
British officers said such attitudes in the ranks would be quickly dealt with in the British military by NCOs.
But with experience of U.S. forces in Bosnia and Kosovo -- where U.S. patrols rarely removed their helmets, walked the streets or talked to the locals -- the British fear their work in winning the trust of Iraqi civilians in the south may be lost by the harsh U.S. attitude elsewhere in Iraq.
Significantly, according to Clarke, the first British soldier to be killed in Iraq was shot when he got out of his tank to placate an angry crowd gathering around it. In a similar situation with a U.S. tank, the commander closed his hatch and drove through the crowd, injuring several people.
With widely publicized reports from wounded British soldiers Monday that the pilot of an American A-10 tankbuster aircraft acted as a "cowboy" in strafing their vehicles and killing two of their colleagues, and should be tried for manslaughter -- the latest in several "friendly fire" incidents that cost the lives of British troops -- a resentful mood appears to be developing about U.S. forces.
If the Americans were Aussies, or Italians -- or even French -- Central Command could perhaps draw the two allies closer together in their down time with games of soccer. But the only international sport considered possible once Baghdad or Basra has fallen is a British-organized game with Iraqis, as the British did to great fanfare in Kabul in February 2001.
Indeed, if Central Command was truly serious about liberating Iraq, according to British officials, they would hold out the prospect of high quality international games for soccer-mad Iraq. Saddam has recognized the political power of soccer and has appointed his son Uday as head of Iraq's football federation (reportedly torturing at least two players for not playing well enough in certain international games).
"Uday ought to be reason enough for the Americans to whip up a soccer team to play Iraq," said one official at the Ministry of Defense in London. But with second thoughts, he asked: "What if they got to be really good at international soccer? Oh, dear."
