Graphic on the British military presence in Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was to announce Wednesday a timetable for the withdrawal of the 7,100 British troops in Iraq, with nearly half returning by the end of the year.(AFP/Graphic/Martin Megino)This is off The New York Times:
LONDON, Feb. 21 — In sharp contrast to the American troop buildup in Baghdad, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that Britain will withdraw up to 1,600 of its roughly 7,100 British troops in southern Iraq in the next few months.
Around 460 Danish soldiers under British command in southern Iraq will also be withdrawn by August, the government in Copenhagen said today.
“What all this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be,” Mr. Blair said, “but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra’s history can be written by Iraqis.”
Most of the British troops now in Iraq are deployed in and around the port city of Basra near the southern tip of the country.
Speaking in parliament, Mr. Blair said “the situation in Basra is very different from Baghdad” because there was no Sunni insurgency or “Al Qaeda base” in Basra, while “an orgy of terrorism” had been unleashed on Baghdad.
Even so, he said, British troops — whom he described as “brave beyond belief” — were regularly coming under fire in the area.
Mr. Blair said further withdrawals could reduce the British force level to less than 5,000 by late summer. But he said that some British troops will remain into 2008, “for as long as we are wanted and have a job to do.”
In essence, the reduction in force levels means that British troops will pull back to a support and training role at two bases, principally the one at Basra airport. while Iraqi forces patrol the city, Mr. Blair said.
So the Brits are pulling out, just as the Bush administration has been embarking on their surge of troops in Baghdad. It appears that Blair is getting plenty of heat for his lapdog support of the Bush war in Iraq.
But the real fun of this story has to be the Bush administration's attempt of placing a positive PR-spin on this British troop withdrawal. This is from MSNBC:
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Wednesday that Britain’s decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is a positive sign that fits with the overall strategy for stabilizing the country.
Statements from the White House press secretary, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — all traveling — attempted to put a good face on the decision announced in London by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“The British have done what is really the plan for the country as a whole, which is to transfer security responsibility to the Iraqis as the situation permits,” Rice said at a news conference in Berlin, where she was in meetings on the Mideast peace process. “The coalition remains intact and, in fact, the British still have thousands of troops deployed in Iraq.”
Cheney called it good news.
“I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well,” Cheney told ABC News while in Tokyo.
“In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels,” he added.
[....]
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow, on a trip with Bush to Tennessee, said Britain’s decision was not made on a timeline of the sort the president has rejected for American troops. “What you had is progress first, and then the removal,” Snow said.
“The president’s made clear all along, we want to move as rapidly as we can to build capability on the part of the Iraqis so they can in fact assume, first, primary responsibility and then eventually sole responsibility,” he said.
So we're making progress in Iraq because the Brits are leaving--they succeeded in their mission. Meanwhile, militants are now using chemical bombs in Iraq.
Does that sound like progress?
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