The Decent Thing; America's tough tactics have miffed the British, who have a softer postconflict style.

Byline: Stryker McGuire and Rod Nordland, With Eric Pape in Paris

The meeting took place late last year, before the grotesque images out of Abu Ghraib. U.S. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the general in charge of the now-infamous prison, sat in on a staff meeting with Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and his military legal team. The discussion: how to cope with overcrowding as detainees poured in. At one point a senior British officer spoke up. "The best solution is to find a way to release these people instead of building more and more detention facilities," he said. "Why don't we just do the decent thing?" Recalling the incident, Karpinski tried to conjure up the incredulity with which U.S. commanders greeted the Brit's effrontery: "They looked at him like, 'Who asked you?' "

The Brits and the Americans have always done peacekeeping differently in Iraq. British paratroops in Basra favor berets and a less intimidating kit than the Kevlar-helmeted, body-armored Americans to the north. Older and wiser--or so they like to think--the British deploy far fewer reservists, weekend warriors or contract soldiers than do the Americans. True, they operate in a less hostile environment. "Basra isn't Baghdad," says a former senior British officer. But on balance the British still come across more as nation-builders than warriors. They banned the unnecessary "hooding" of detainees in February, before the scandalous photos from inside Abu Ghraib came to light. The British government has investigated several dozen allegations of abuse by its troops, but in almost all instances "there was no case to answer," as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it last week. The Daily Mirror published photos on May 1 that seemed to depict British troops mistreating an Iraqi. But they were faked, the editor was fired and last Saturday the tabloid apologized to its readers and British troops.

The difference in styles--Do the decent thing... Who asked you? --is stark. So much so, NEWSWEEK has learned, as to become a serious obstacle to military cooperation. The British chief of the General Staff, Sir Mike Jackson, delicately hinted at "military friction" last month when he testified to a parliamentary committee about "doctrinally" different approaches "to postconflict operations." Privately, British commanders were seething over the Marines' monthlong siege of Fallujah--the doctrine of "kill, kill and kill again," as a former British officer put it to NEWSWEEK. "British officers were appalled by [U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's intervention there," says war-studies professor Lawrence Freedman of King's College, London. The Abu Ghraib revelations, says former British air marshal Sir Tim Garden, further alienated British commanders. Now, military sources tell NEWSWEEK, British commanders are increasingly reluctant to commit troops to zones not under British control. "We'll do it our way--or no way," says a former senior British officer.

Britain's contribution to the war effort hangs in the balance. With several Coalition members--Spain, Poland and others--withdrawing or downsizing their commitments in Iraq, Blair is under heavy U.S. pressure to send more troops. But with anti-war sentiment rising in Britain, and with Blair's poll ratings collapsing, President Bush's most loyal Coalition partner is finding it increasingly difficult to play the role ...