War and peace

The army's arrival was cheered as a liberation, but soon its patrols were searching neighborhood houses and detaining local youths. Then, a protest march turned bloody as army paratroopers shot dead 13 of the demonstrators. Iraq in 2003? No, Northern Ireland on January 30, 1972. Since that Bloody Sunday, British troops have been stuck in Belfast at an enormous cost in lives and money.

The long and painful experience in Ireland has given the British army much expertise in the delicate task of peacekeeping-and some of that expertise has been transferred to the U.S. military as its combat units in Iraq recast themselves as peacekeepers. In this new mission, troops are dealing with everything from looters and supplicants to electricity breakdowns and thirsty children crying for water.

The difficulty of this transition was highlighted in Falluja, a town west of Baghdad, where U.S. soldiers said they were fired upon in late April while facing a group of demonstrators. The U.S. troops fired back with their automatic weapons, killing at least 13 people, including two children, and injuring many more, according to local Iraqis. The U.S. soldiers, who had earlier tried to disperse the demonstrators with smoke and loudspeakers, insisted they acted in self-defense.

"We went [to Iraq] to fight a war, and now we're changing [to peacekeeping] ... that's extremely difficult to do," said Jim Lasswell, a leading urban warfare experimenter at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va. The keys to this transformation, he said, are the mid- and low-level officers, who, although well trained, frequently dislike peacekeeping missions. "We found a lot of resentment and pushback" from officers, Lasswell said.

Nevertheless, both U.S. soldiers and marines in recent years have received extensive training in peacekeeping, and many have gained real-world experience in such places as Kosovo and Haiti. In Falluja, roughly half of the 150 U.S. soldiers had served in Kosovo, Army 2nd Lt. Devin Woods told an Associated Press reporter on the scene. Without that training, experts say, the death toll could have been higher in Falluja. Sgt. Nkosi Campbell, another soldier in the unit in Falluja, said that his troops held their fire until approval was given to shoot back at gunmen.

U.S. Marine units, meanwhile, are moving to help secure southern Iraq. The Marine peacekeeping training, said Lasswell, benefited greatly from the British army's experience in Ireland. It "was a huge case study.... It was very good for us," he said.

Still, the circumstances in Iraq are far different from those in Northern Ireland, whose residents shared the same culture, language, citizenship, and laws as the British soldiers among them. Despite the common heritage, it still took more than 10 years for the British army to learn to distance itself from the warring parties, to work hand-in-glove with the local police forces, and to minimize protest-creating errors.

In Iraq, in contrast, American troops are dealing with a culture completely new to them. Nevertheless, some lessons from Northern Ireland should stand U.S. troops in good stead. For example, "the avoidance of spectacular, grievance-generating gestures is crucial," said Richard English, a professor of politics at Queen's University, Belfast. Because of the Bloody Sunday shooting and other events, "Northern Ireland descended deeper than was necessary into chaos." Overall, "the less violence the army comes to be associated with, the better," English said. Good intelligence-gathering-especially from local sources-greatly aids a softer approach, he said.

There are also a variety of more mundane lessons, many of which have found their way into the U.S. military's tactical manuals. For example, U.S. troops should meet with residents and chat with bystanders when out on patrol, partly because such meetings reduce potential disputes, but also because they can provide tips about possible ambushes, Lasswell said. In Northern Ireland, British troops initially treated Catholic youths very roughly, and this treatment created immediate grievances that spurred the IRA's growth from a very small number of activists, said Ed Moloney, author of A Secret History of the IRA.

U.S. forces should also work with residents to create militias and strong local governments that can take over security duties, said Lasswell. These tactics are standard elements of the Marines' civil-action platoons, and they will help the Marines accelerate the transfer of authority, he said. U.S. Army Special Forces are working in a similar fashion in other towns, such as Abu Ghayrib, a suburb of Baghdad, where U.S. soldiers helped to run an election that created a city council for the town's 1 million residents.

Few experts expect the task to go easily or swiftly, and many expect additional errors, perhaps even more shootings as occurred in Falluja. Indeed, that incident was followed two days later by the shootings of two more demonstrators. But the lessons have been learned from past campaigns, the training has been completed, and the troops will do as they are asked, Lasswell said. If the military is not performing well, he continued, the first people to be questioned should be the uniformed leadership.