“Insufferable British snobs”
From this morning’s Guardian:
A senior British officer (Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster) has criticised the US army for its conduct in Iraq, accusing it of institutional racism, moral righteousness, misplaced optimism, and of being ill-suited to engage in counter-insurgency operations.
This was printed in a US Army mag called the Military Review, which I’ve never heard of, but is probably a must-read if you’re a certain type of person. Responding to these claims, one of those person-types, Colonel Kevin Benson, director of the US army’s school of advanced military studies, called the Brigadier, “an insufferable British snob”.
This got me to thinking about what goes through a US Army jock’s head, metal plate and all, when he calls some Brit critical of his boys an “Insufferable British Snob”. There is some insight in his subsequent comment, that he had made the comment “in the heat of the moment”. Probably has Rumsfeld writing his lines.
Here we have the same guys who got off on locker room towel fights (ahh, ‘boys being boys’) when I was in high school, learning conflict resolution mechanisms that later transformed into a New American Century way of doing things, turning the world into a safe place for flat-footed, ham-handed, pig-headed and mostly boring Americans who think, with great conviction, they are doing the right thing.
In fact, that was all the Brig was really saying.
