America should look to its own before firing off at our colonels

One of the striking aspects of the Tim Collins affair is the way in which national stereotypes have been confused. On one side you have the colonel himself, by all accounts a brash, energetic man, bringing tough justice to a dangerous and lawless world. Just the sort of type, in short, that Americans are supposed to admire.

On the other you have his accuser, a part-time traffic cop and counsellor who is also a civil affairs officer in the US Army reserve. This rear-echelon Milquetoast, by turning on his boss, would appear to suffer those failings of deviousness and disloyalty that many in America now attribute to Europeans.

It comes down to the sheriff versus the social worker and at the moment, at least, the sheriff is having the worst of it. This situation, if justice prevails, will not last long. But in the meantime damage has been done: to Col Collins, his reputation and career prospects, to the hitherto-shining record of the British Army in southern Iraq and to the relationship between the UK military and its muscle-bound allies.

The incident is another example of how all the parties in the Iraq conflict have failed to stick to the script. The events that provoked it are in themselves of minuscule importance. Putting the worst interpretation on the most serious allegation, it amounts to a senior officer clouting a notorious and hated Ba'ath party official to encourage him to remember where he had hidden his weapons - weapons that it now appears may have been intended to murder a local man who had been helping the British to bring peace and stability to the area.

The matter might have gone unnoticed had it not been for the famous speech. Col Collins may now be regretting the flight of - apparently impromptu - eloquence that propelled him from obscurity on to the world stage. He should not.

Collins gave voice to what a lot of us felt about the justice of the war but found it hard to articulate. He said what George W Bush and Tony Blair should have said as they tried to justify their actions, instead of harping on about weapons of mass destruction. No wonder the White House had it framed.

Once his words had echoed round the globe, however, Col Collins could expect trouble. Every subsequent action was bound to be measured against the sentiments contained in the address.

The colonel's personality ensured that those serving with him would be in for a lively time. He is clearly a complex man. He seems engaged with equal vigour in the temporal and spiritual world, reading Machiavelli alongside the Bible. His evident humanity is combined with a quick temper and a rough tongue.

Like many a successful commander before him, he is a bit of a showman - which can carry a sharp double edge when things go wrong. At first sight his character bears some resemblance to another famously volatile Ulster soldier, "Paddy" Mayne, the much-decorated joint founder of the SAS whose name adorned the Royal Irish Regiment's base camp in Kuwait.

Col Collins must have known he would be under the spotlight, all the more so as his campaign in southern Iraq was conducted in front of a media audience - the embedded journalists who accompanied the unit from the outset. They included a team from Abu Dhabi television.

As well as the obvious propaganda advantages of having news teams present, the journalists were there so that the Allies could claim their operations had been carried out in a spirit of transparency in front of independent witnesses. In these circumstances it seems unlikely that Col Collins would be on anything but his best behaviour. He thought he was doing right and those observing him appear to concur.

Although none of the journalists witnessed the key incident, they have since come forward to declare that, observed at the close quarters that embedded life engenders, they found him to be an honest and effective soldier who strove to live up to the aims and ideals he laid out on the eve of battle.

The accusations came from a brother officer, Re Biastre, the small-town school guidance counsellor, part-time traffic policeman and major in the reserve who was sent to Iraq to do civil-military liaison work. His 2,390-word report detonated the inquiry.

The decision to come forward appears to have less to do with shock at Col Collins's behaviour than with an incident in which he was forced to stand to attention for 45 minutes for ignoring the colonel's rule against distributing sweets to local children.

Put thus, it seems that Mr Biastre is a generous soul and the colonel a flinty-hearted bastard. In fact to anyone who was in southern Iraq in the early days and saw children darting in front of military vehicles, yelling with feral intensity for bonbons, the colonel's edict made excellent sense. It reduced the risk of tragic accidents and preserved local dignity.

Mr Biastre's testimony mixes whining about anti-Americanism among British forces with claims of brutality against civilians, all based on hearsay. No doubt the sensitive major did pick up some bad vibes from his Allied comrades. The British military has been consistently critical of the American way of doing things since at least the Second World War, yet the two sides rub along well enough when they have to.

The claims of misconduct towards non-combatants, though, seem outrageous, particularly when coming from an American. Nobody who witnessed the behaviour of the two Allied forces in southern Iraq can have failed to notice the enormous dissimilarity of their approach towards the people they had come to liberate.

Our soldiers, as soon as circumstances allowed, regarded the local population with rough sympathy, helping them and generally treating them as fellow members of the human race. They stripped off their body armour and helmets as quickly as they could to make themselves less threatening.

The Americans still bristle with weapons and look like martial Teletubbies, swaddled in layers of kit. They seem frightened of everything and everyone and their overwhelming concern is staying alive. To them, every Iraqi is a potential enemy, an attitude that is reinforced by the endlessly instilled doctrine of the primacy of Force Protection.

This mindset has produced a catalogue of deadly blunders. American troops have shot and killed civilians who failed to understand the confusing signals operated by soldiers at checkpoints, fired recklessly into crowds of demonstrators and used batons to beat back crowds of old people trying to claim their pensions.

If military investigators are keen to comb over the conduct of the Allied forces during the Iraqi war there is no shortage of incidents involving American soldiers that demand examination. The alleged activities of Col Collins come a very long way down the list, and seem a peculiar place to start.

...in mine he would be escorted to the rear under guard, with appropriate charges, to occupy the Lt Calley memorial suite at Ft Leavenworth

Absolutely. I cannot fathom an officer at that level disobeying an order so boldly, in a combat zone no less. I mentioned NJP at the very least, since that's what an enlisted man would get. An officer, I suppose is a different story. In a position of higher authority and responsibility, the punishment should similarly be more severe. If he is not punished, I still believe he will be passed over the next few times and thus have to leave the Army reserves. I've seen a few sub-par Navy officers suffer such a fate (and few good ones too).

The American, Re Biastre, was was placed under Collins' command by his own American commanders.

Collins evidently thought he could get away with being insubordinate, which turned out not to be true.

Collins apparently has the liberal-disease of thinking that anything he does, no matter how outrageous, is compassionate and moral, and anyone who disagrees with him is evil. He also sounds like a vindictive prick.

Now as to the latter part of this 'conservative' Telegraph article....they just couldn't pass up the opportunity to sneer at the American troops, could they? The Telegraph is a bunch of pricks, too.

If the Telegraph is anything to go by, Collins probably did hear a lot of nasty anti-Americanism from the Brits. That, however, is NO justification for ANY of his behavior.

I hope Collins ends up in the pokey for insubordination and filing false charges.

Did you read the whole article?

This goes far beyond any issue with some flaky major. Frankly this writer pisses me off. Could it be that several American soldiers were blown up by a car bomb at one of these checkpoints? Had this happened at a British checkpoint things would have been different for them. Also the British took towns in southern Iraq that were no friend of Saddam's. We had tougher areas to deal with like his hometown. This crap spewing from this guy's writing makes me question the honesty of all the British reporting regarding the Col Collins incident. Who knows what the truth really is.

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