If Tony Blair were not stepping down this summer, he wouldn't be starting the drawdown of British troops in this way. But then if President Bush were not facing the remorseless approach of his eventual departure, and the weight of the opinion polls, he wouldn't be sending in 21,500 extra US troops either. As the allies went into Iraq, so they are planning their leaving, driven by domestic politics, with little concern for what it might mean for the poor inhabitants of Iraq.
It's a shameful act. Even if the withdrawal of British troops is something devoutly to be desired, and demanded by an increasing majority of the public, this is not the way to do it. We are leaving, but we are also still staying. We have made up our minds that we want out, but we're also pretending to the Iraqis and to our own public that we are doing it because the conditions are right, that we will keep troops there in case, and we're still prepared to slow down withdrawal if the conditions demand.
Nonsense. We're turning tail and everyone, particularly in the Middle East, knows it. If Britain were really keeping faith with the policy espoused by Tony Blair over the past four years, he would be increasing the number of British troops alongside the Americans in a determined display of military power intended to smoke out the insurgents and beat back Iranian influence. It would be a pretty daft strategy, but it's the one he signed up to, the faith he promised the White House he'd keep, and the one he has declared to the public.
The fact that he is now doing the opposite is not a sign of the success of his strategy but its failure. As observer after observer has reported, and as British Army commanders have argued in private and hinted in public, the British military presence is grossly overstretched, its troops can operate only out of massively fortified bases and do very little to ensure regular security in the main population centres, while their very presence is serving to exacerbate feelings of resentment at a "foreign occupation".
Withdrawing troops now may lessen our exposure. It will ease the overstretch problem, with benefits possibly for our position in Afghanistan. But the very fact that we'll be there at all leaves us sticking out like a sore thumb, too small to do much good, too large to be ignored. And it will still provide a reason for the Iraqi government to procrastinate in its efforts to take complete control.
British government ministers have always boasted (and Tony Blair was at it again in the debate yesterday) that Basra isn't Baghdad, that there aren't the same Sunni-Shia battles or the violence of the Sunni insurgency further north. That may have been true at the beginning, but the position is now that non-sectarian violence is spreading across the region as competing Shia militia and different tribes vie for control. British withdrawal will be the signal for an escalation of these struggles, but keeping a remaining force will equally make us a potential tool of the local administration in these conflicts.
In formal terms, it is a quite different policy than Bush's and, whatever No 10 says, there can be no doubt that Washington is deeply unhappy with a British move that can be - and is - seen as the direct opposite of theirs. They would have much preferred it if we weren't doing it just as they are sending in more troops. But Bush seems to have accepted that, given Blair's personal desire to leave office with some "progress" in Iraq, he had little alternative. If only Blair had called in his debts from the White House for something other than his desire to rid himself of the Iraq legacy he once so passionately espoused.
And yet, in another sense, both Bush and Blair are doing the same thing in different ways. Blair, with only a few more months in office, needs to declare victory and start withdrawing now. Bush, with nearly two years to go, wants a dramatic display of force to clear the decks so that he can declare victory and start withdrawing his troops just as the election season gets under way in the US next year.
In both cases, they are essentially leaving the fractured Shia government out to dry - and their own successors in London and Washington for that matter. We will not leave with dignity and we'll not leave Iraq, as Gordon Brown will find to his cost, in anything like the condition where he can abnegate British responsibilities there. He, and the new US president, will have to find a better way out, and their task will be made infinitely worse by the mess that the present incumbents are leaving.
We brought on this disaster for the Iraqis by invading their country in the first place. Now we are planning to leave them to clean it up on their own. But then that has always been the story of western interventions in the Middle East.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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