I sometimes find myself agreeing with Steven Den Beste’s articles but sorry Steven, this is one of the dumbest pieces you have written in a while.
When he is right, he is sometimes very right and when he is wrong, he does tend to descend into crude history-by-Hollywood-stereotype. The picture he displays of two Royal Marines sparing with boxing gloves and an automatic weapon toting US soldier in the background is indeed symbolic… of the fact Steven does not know the slightest thing about modern British attitudes to war, British military culture or British military history.
The symbolism isn’t fair to the two Europeans [by which the ‘Canadian’ Den Beste means British] in the picture. They are members of the Royal Marines who just arrived there, and if they were to go into real combat they’d be armed similar to how the American is. But in a larger sense, it seems to epitomize the difference now in approaches that Europe and the United States want to take to the war: Europe is trying to fight it according to Marquis of Queensbury rules (i.e. “International law”, UN resolutions, and all the rest) because honor is the most important thing; the United States, on the other hand, is fighting to win.
People would think Britain had not won a war in the last 100 years if they got their history by reading what Steven writes, let alone in 1982. The Germans, Austrians, Argentines, Malays, Indonesians, Kenyans, Irish, Italians, French, Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Afghans etc. etc. etc. probably have a rather different take on British military culture. There is a reason Britain won in Malaya during The Emergency and the US lost in Vietnam under similar conditions. Marquis of Queensbury? Get real.
Here is a picture I think rather better sums up Britain’s ‘Red and Green War Machine’
Update:
Note to Steven: Britain, an island off the European coast, may be part of the European Union at the moment, but the EU is not a military alliance in any meaningful way. Any reading of British or European newspapers should make it obvious there is considerable acceptance of the British/European distinction, even by those who lament the fact. Thus your remarks are at best misleading. To describe the British troops in the picture as ‘European’, given that they are there under British, not ‘European’ auspices, does rather suggest you think there is no difference between the military or political cultures of mainland Europe and Britain. This is not just incorrect but pretty obviously so.
