LONDON - It is
becoming increasingly clear that the British want
to pull out of Iraq altogether.
General
Sir Richard Dannatt said in a recent interview
that Britain needs to withdraw from Iraq "sometime
soon", although he later said that by "sometime
soon" he meant when the job was done. And UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair said he agreed with "every
word" the new head of the British army had said on
the Iraq war.
The general did not at first
give a time indication of what he meant by
"sometime soon". But he clarified later that the
British
presence could not continue
two years or more.
Two years from now is
when Britain goes to the polls, and when Britain's
Labour Party will face hostile questions in the
face of an increasing realization that the Iraq
intervention has been the biggest blunder in
recent British history.
Blair is expected
to quit as prime minister within a year or so. The
circumstances of the two announcements suggest
that Blair will want to pull out of Iraq before he
leaves office.
Few believe that the
military commander spoke on his own, without
private agreement with Blair and government
leaders. The two comments added up to the first
public declaration of a troops pullout from Iraq.
The agreement appeared orchestrated.
In
fact, a British military withdrawal from Iraq has
been ongoing for some time.
"Control of
two provinces has been handed over, and one more
province will be handed over soon," said James
Denselow from the Royal Institute of International
Affairs (commonly known as Chatham House), which
is among the most influential think-tanks on
foreign policy in Britain. That would leave the
British in significant charge only of the southern
city Basra.
"Britain has only 7,000
soldiers left in Iraq, compared to more than
140,000 US troops," he said.
"The British
have been reducing forces significantly since the
invasion," Denselow said. One reason, he said, was
that Britain had also taken significant
commitments in Afghanistan, and British military
resources are "more finite" than those of the
United States.
But Britain has been seen
as the big US ally in Iraq all along, and a
British withdrawal is certain to be damaging to US
legitimacy in Iraq. The United States will be
unhappy to see a senior player like Britain
retreat from Iraq, Denselow said.
General
George Casey, who is the commander of the
coalition forces in Iraq "is a ball player who has
not drifted from his policy", Denselow said. Casey
has said the present high level of violence will
continue for about two months, and that there has
been progress in the meantime toward a peaceful
and governable Iraq.
The United States is
expected to continue to occupy Iraq, while the
British are now taking an apparently military-led
decision to pull out.
The British general
has said that occupation forces are making things
worse in Iraq. British troops, he said, should get
out "sometime soon because our presence
exacerbates the security problems". General
Dannatt took over as head of the British army in
August of this year.
The general also said
that after the initial success of the invasion,
military plans in Iraq were "poor, probably based
more on optimism than sound planning".
Blair said the general was "absolutely
right" about the troops' presence exacerbating
problems in Iraq, and that is why the British had
pulled troops out of two provinces.
What
the British are now saying makes sense for
themselves, but not for the US forces, who are
battling a growing insurgency, particularly in
al-Anbar province west of Baghdad.
Inter
Press Service correspondents in Iraq have reported
that US troops have pulled out of some towns and
areas - because it is too dangerous for them to go
in there. For the United States, there can be no
early exit. And staying on will be a lot harder
when their British cousins down south depart.
