Back in September 2006 we wrote about the Queen’s Royal Hussars turning in their Challenger tanks and Warrior armored cars for armed Land Rovers. Their plan was to abandon their base, which was a mortar magnet, and move out into the salt marshes along the Iraq/Iran border. The story came from the Guardian and is no longer available online.

British troops quit Iraq base, adopt WWII tactics

BAGHDAD, Aug 24 (Reuters) - British troops abandoned their base in Iraq's southern Maysan province on Thursday, which has been under almost nightly attack, and prepared to head deep into the marshlands along the Iranian border to hunt gun smugglers.

Soldiers of the Queen's Royal Hussars are to adopt tactics first pioneered by the famed Long Range Desert Group, a roving special forces unit that fought Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's German Afrika Korps in North Africa during World War Two.

Well, that sounds exciting. Stripped down Jeeps armed with machine guns rocketing around the sand dunes, machine-gunning German Iranian smuggler convoys and blowing up airplanes. Although you might not rocket around salt marshes.

"We are repositioning our forces to focus on border areas and deal with reports of smuggling of weapons and improvised explosive devices from across the border," British military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge told Reuters.

"We are going to do what the Long Range Desert Group did in North Africa. We will live in the desert. We will be mobile and able to strike when we want. We will have surprise on our side," he said.

There have been some indications that there isn’t much US and Brits do in Iraq that surprises al-Quaeda/Shiite militias/insurgents/dead-enders/Iranian gun smugglers, but let’s give it a try because we haven’t done anything right so far in Iraq.

The Brits put in two months of effort investigating the Likudnik theory fantasy of Iranian gun smuggling. WaPo reported in October:

ON THE IRAQ-IRAN BORDER -- Since late August, British commandos in the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the desert in the start of what British officers said would be months of patrols aimed at finding the illicit weapons trafficking from Iran, or any sign of it.

There's just one thing.

"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp near the border. "And I intend to prove it."

Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.

"I have not myself seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.

Oooops.

Someone needs to contact Mr Cheney’s intelligence forgery office and tell them there’s a problem. It seems the Iranians are not cooperating with his scheme to invent a new casus belli.

"It's a question of intelligence versus evidence," Labouchere's commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade, said last month at his base in the southern region's capital, Basra. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's own eyes. These are serious consequences, aren't they?"

They are. Allegations that Iran or its agents are providing military support for Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias and other armed groups is one of the most contentious issues raising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Most gravely, U.S. generals and diplomats accuse Iran of providing infrared triggers for special explosives that are capable of piercing heavy armor.

Evidence of Iranian armed intervention in Iraq is "irrefutable," one U.S. commander in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, told Pentagon reporters in August. The lead U.S. military spokesman in Iraq renews the allegation almost weekly in Baghdad.

Iraq's remote Maysan province is "a funnel for Iranian munitions," said Wayne White, who led the State Department's Iraq intelligence team during the war and now is an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. White said that in the first year of the occupation a well-placed friend had seen "considerable physical evidence of it, and just about everyone in al-Amarah knew about it." Al-Amarah is the commonly used name of Maysan province.

Here in Maysan, Jasim Alawa Salum, an Iraqi father of 10 whose home is in a warren of thatched farmhouses near the border, agreed. "All troubles come from Iran," he said, bending his head to show a wound from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

But Maj. Dominic Roberts of the Queen's Dragoons said: "We have found no credible evidence to suggest there is weapons smuggling across the border."

Brigadier Everard’s comment about “intelligence versus evidence” is noteworthy. Intelligent people don’t believe Likudnik “evidence.”

A tip of the too-small Kevlar helmet to Sean-Paul Kelley from The Agonist.