Blair to Pull Troops Out of Iraq, Bush’s Last Ally ¶ Updated

13 Comments

1. 

   infidelpig on February 21, 2007 at 5:38 am

     I’m sure Blair has had the ” rear view mirror effect ” for quite a while now, he finally put the vehicle in reverse ; )

     Who’s next……

     Sad for our troops, they need all the help they can get, but maybe, just maybe, this will help turn things around.

   peace

2. 

   CabinGirl on February 21, 2007 at 12:07 pm

   I guess he still has Barney.

3. 

   boran2 on February 21, 2007 at 12:47 pm

   The timing is curious.  I’m surprised that this is not being done a month from now, when Bush is not out so actively selling his bullshit.

   • 

     on February 21, 2007 at 4:38 pm

     I think this is largely about the Scottish elections coming up in May. Last I heard, the Scottish National Party, which is in favor of independence, is leading in the polls. There’s a good chance that they would win as a result of people voting to protest against the war. If that happened, there’s a good chance that Scotland would secede from Great Britain in a few years. I’m sure Blair doesn’t want that.

     • 

       idredit on February 21, 2007 at 8:06 pm

       For home advantage, but a day late and an hour short as Blair decides to declare victory and step down.

       Headlined in The Independent, UK as

       THE RETREAT FROM BASRA

       It is an admission of defeat. Iraq is turning into one of the world’s bloodiest battlefields in which nobody is safe. Blind to this reality, Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain could safely cut its forces in Iraq because the apparatus of the Iraqi government is growing stronger.

       In fact the civil war is getting worse by the day. Food is short in parts of the country. A quarter of the population would starve without government rations. Many Iraqis are ill because their only drinking water comes from the highly polluted Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

       Nowhere in Mr Blair’s statement was any admission of regret for reducing Iraq to a wasteland from which 2 million people have fled and 1.5 million are displaced internally.[..]

       and US puts on brave face and vows to complete mission ‘with honour’

       Putting on a brave a face, the Bush administration hailed Britain’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq as proof of success, even as it braced for pressure from war opponents to follow suit and announce steps to scale back US forces.

       The most ringing statement of faith came from Vice-President Dick Cheney, the most optimistic of Mr Bush’s officials, however bad the news from the ground. Far from undermining the coalition, Mr Cheney asserted, Mr Blair’s announcement was proof that “in parts of Iraq… things are going well”. As for US troops, they would complete their mission “with honour” – an implicit rejection by the Vice-President of any timetable for a pullout.

       Speaking in Berlin, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, also struck a defiant note, dismissing suggestions that the British move leaves the US even more isolated in Iraq. Thousands of British troops would remain in southern Iraq even after the pullout, she said. “The coalition remains intact,” she said. But there was no concealing that America’s most loyal ally in Iraq was scaling back its presence in the country, even as the US was increasing its force with the deployment of 21,500 more troops to Baghdad and al-Anbar province, stronghold of the Sunni insurgency.[.]

        Insurgents shot down a US military helicopter with nine people on board near Baghdad last night but no one was killed, the military said. It was the eighth downing of a helicopter in Iraq in a month. A military spokeswoman said it appeared the Black Hawk had been brought down by rocket-propelled grenades.

       (emphasis added)

4. 

   canberra boy on February 22, 2007 at 8:35 am

   John Howard in Australia is the last ally.  Last Monday he announced the commitment of additional Australian troops to Iraq.  This was a strategy to try to make the new Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, look silly.  Rudd has called for withdrawal of Australian forces.  Instead, Howard’s tactic was destroyed by the news of Blair’s troop withdrawal.  

   Howard has been badly caught out twice in the last week – the first time attacking Barak Obama for proposing troop withdrawals, where he was criticised by both sides of US politics for his intervention.  He said then that setting a date for withdrawal would be an invitation for the terrorists to persist: now he’s had to say that British withdrawal is all part of the plan.

   We’re in an election year in Australia, and the polls are showing Rudd is preferred as Prime Minister and that the Labor Opposition would currently win a comfortable majority in the Parliament.

   A poll this week suggested that Howard, the ultimate political pragmatist, is in danger of losing his own seat in the Parliament.  As a result, he’s started back-pedalling on the continued incarceration of Australian David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay.  Suddenly he’s no longer a climate change sceptic, and we’re likely to see a carbon trading scheme adopted shortly.

   Like most Howard actions, the extra troops for Iraq are more about domestic politics than anything else.  But Howard was in Washington on 11 September 2001, and feels a strong personal bond to Bush.  Whether this will lead him into further domestic political blunders is yet to be seen.

   Dick Cheney’s arrival in Sydney on Thursday night was probably originally calculated to be a political plus for Howard, to have him pictured conferring with our powerful friend from across the sea.  Now it just highlights his association with the architect of the Iraq disaster.

   The mood is changing here, as the scales fall from the people’s eye’s.

   BTW, ten people were arrested in Sydney for marching without a permit before Cheney even arrived.

   • 

     Oui on February 22, 2007 at 10:10 am

     .
     Bush’s little sheriff for SE Asia!

     Good to see you around again!

     "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

   • 

     Superpole on February 22, 2007 at 9:52 pm

     oh, sod it, then.. I thought only we “freedom loving” types here in the U.S. had to have permission from the authorities to march in the streets.. and one has to love the cattle pens they require the protestors to herd into.. usually located a mile from the politician the protestors wish to express their free speech to..

     yeah, it’s really quite FREE around here lately..

     • 

       canberra boy on February 22, 2007 at 10:58 pm

       I had thought that there was no requirement for a permit to protest here, at least until recently.  The law varies a bit between state jurisdictions, I think.

       The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties site says that in general you don’t need a permit in that State, although it may be required where special legislation applies to certain locations.

       Reviewing the NSW Police media release about the arrests last night, there is no mention of charges relating to permits or unlawful assembly.  Seems the media might have got it wrong, or perhaps they reported what they were told on the spur of the moment by the cops on site.  They certainly got the numbers arrested wrong.

       Even if you don’t need a permit, the fact remains that the police are subject to political direction and there are any number of reasons and means for them to bust up a protest.  I remember that in the Vietnam era many protesters ended up being charged only with assaulting police and resisting arrest: it didn’t seem to matter whether they were committing an offence at the point the police seized them and dragged them away!

       • 

         Superpole on February 23, 2007 at 1:53 pm

         that have jurisdiction.. and likely the governor if it appears there’s going to be a protest of an “important” political or corporate figure.

         Chicago is a joke.

         during the run up to the current oil war, there was a rather large protest in downtown Chicago. the city police presence was massive– as if the protestors were going to toss trash cans threw shop windows and start cars on fire.

         it got ugly when the police blocked the march route and ended the protest. a few heads were cracked and numerous people arrested– many of whom were treated rather poorly once they landed in the slam.

         it was anything like the democratic convention of 1968– presided over by hizzoner– the first Mayor Daley, but the message got across– “we don’t like protestors and we don’t want you protesting here in Chicago”.

5. 

   on February 22, 2007 at 3:35 pm

   The take of the LA Times: Why the British are scaling back in Iraq:

   Britain’s decision to pull 1,600 troops out of Iraq by spring, touted by U.S. and British leaders as a turning point in Iraqi sovereignty, was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

   The British military is approaching “operational failure,” former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

   “Because the British army is in essence fighting a far more intensive counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, there’s been a realization that there has to be some sort of transfer of resources from Iraq to Afghanistan,” said Clive Jones, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Leeds, who has closely followed Britain’s Iraq deployment.

   “It’s either that, or you risk in some ways losing both,” he said. “It’s the classic case of ‘Let’s declare victory and get out.’ “

   Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has been pressed to add 800 troops to Afghanistan to halt a resurgent Taliban and a worrying escalation of drug trafficking, at the same time that it is beset by criticism for joining the United States in an unpopular invasion and prolonged war in Iraq. The 132nd British soldier to die in Iraq, Pvt. Luke Daniel Simpson, was buried Wednesday. He was killed Feb. 9.

   The Bush administration hastened to present the British decision as an indication that the U.S.-led military operation was succeeding. Vice President Dick Cheney called the reduction “an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well,” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the U.S.-led coalition “remains intact” even though the roster of nations contributing troops, excluding the U.S., has fallen to 25 from 35.

   But the Pentagon, in its most recent quarterly report to Congress, listed Basra as one of five cities outside Baghdad where violence remained “significant,” and said the region was one of only two “not ready for transition” to Iraqi authorities.

   Once a promising beacon, Basra suffers from sectarian violence as well as Shiite militia clashes over oil smuggling. Ferocious street battles have broken out between rival Shiite Muslim groups in provincial capitals such as Samawah, Kut and Diwaniya in the last year.

6. 

   idredit on February 22, 2007 at 7:32 pm

   Another view from Patrick Cockburn

   Revealed: The true extent of Britain’s failure in Basra

   In a comment entitled “The British Defeat in Iraq” the pre-eminent American analyst on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, asserts that British forces lost control of the situation in and around Basra by the second half of 2005.

   Mr Cordesman’s gloomy conclusions about British defeat are confirmed by a study called “The Calm before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq” by Michael Knights and Ed Williams, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Comparing the original British ambitions with present reality the paper concludes that “instead of a stable, united, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy”.[.]
   Why is the British Army still in south Iraq and what good does it do there? The suspicion grows that Mr Blair did not withdraw them because to do so would be too gross an admission of failure and of soldiers’ lives uselessly lost. It would also have left the US embarrassingly bereft of allies. Reidar Visser, an expert on Basra, says after all the publicity about the British “soft” approach in Basra in 2003, local people began to notice that the soldiers were less and less in the streets and the militias were taking over. “

   In other words, British soldiers have stayed and died in southern Iraq, and will continue to do so, because Mr Blair finds it too embarrassing to end what has become a symbolic presence and withdraw them

7. 

   Superpole on February 22, 2007 at 10:02 pm

   Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, whose party opposed the war in Iraq, said the target should be the full withdrawal of British troops by the end of October.

   He added that the “unpalatable truth” was that Britain was leaving behind a country on the brink on civil war.

   “This is a long way short of the beacon of democracy for the Middle East which was promised some four years ago,” he said.

   Beengo! so we’re still faced with the very real question of WHY are any western nations still there? a conflict which has now gone on for longer than WW II?

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6380933.stm