British handing over Basra

On the weekend   Pentagon adviser Stephen Biddle said the British had 'cut and run from Basra and that US forces are likely to have to go down there to "sort the mess out", by defeating the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr.'

This provoked Robert Fox to comment "the blame game has begun,"  (as if  the Iraqis and Iranians hadn't been being blamed by the US for what is going wrong in Iraq for some time) .

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert_fox/2007/08/the_blame_game_begins.html

Fox adds,  "This, superficially at least, suggests profound ignorance about the capabilities of US forces in Iraq, and of the true situation on the ground in and around Basra.

The US does not have the forces to take and hold Basra, no more than they can take and hold simultaneously, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba, Kirkuk and Mosul. The British forces never intended to take and hold the southern cities - occupation was never on the cards.

British generals are now saying privately that the army has achieved all that it can tactically in Basra with such frequency that this is now a matter of public record. Their view, which is shared by the Foreign Office, is that it is time to hand over local control in Iraq's richest oil province to Iraqis. "The solution may not be what we might have wanted in the first place," a senior office said to me in the past few weeks, "but we have said we are going to give it back to the Iraqis, and that's what we're going to do."

When British troops begin the final pull back from Basra city over the next month, it will mean more than just a "reposturing", as the current military lingo has it, for the UK military presence in Iraq. It is now showing the first real indication of a parting of the ways between Westminster and Washington over Iraq since Tony Blair secretly signed up British troops to the Bush invasion plan at Crawford in April 2002."...

"The fact is that all is not lost in Iraq, southern Iraq especially," said a recently returned commander. "If we see the militias as part of the solution and not the problem, it might just work. It may look pretty ugly at first, but handing over to the big parties is the best chance of keeping Iraq united. The signs are that the big Shiite groups are settling things among themselves."

But the Americans see the Shia militias as the problem, not the solution, and they see them as part of "the great big problem called Iran."

 "The militias are nationalists above all, Iraqis and not proxies for Iran," said a senior [British]  officer recently.

Jonathon Steele  writes  in the Guardian  on the the British leaving  of Basra as 'No Saigon moment' :

The forces chief who planned Britain's part in the invasion of Iraq has rejected claims that Britain's withdrawal will be ugly, embarrassing and akin to America's "Saigon moment" in 1975. "I don't think it's sensible to draw any parallels between Saigon and Basra", Lord Boyce, who served as Chief of the Defence Staff between 2001 and 2003, said yesterday. "The British are not facing what the Americans were facing in Saigon, which was a well-equipped army as opposed to disparate murderers and terrorists". He was responding to claims by Bush adviser Stephen Biddle, who warned the British would have to fight their way out in an "ugly and embarrassing" retreat. US hawks have been expressing concern over British plans to cut forces in Iraq and hope to press Gordon Brown not to withdraw completely.