So the question is, will there be an election before or after our defeat in Iraq? In all the recent posturing from Mark Malloch Brown about the changing nature of the UK/US relationship, you may have missed the fact that a Republican administration that is leaving office can hardly feel minded to paint a British withdrawal from Basra as “job well done.”
The first taste came on Tuesday in the Washington Post:
“The British have basically been defeated in the south,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months…
Defeat. Ugly word, isn’t it? Especially if you’ve lost a loved one, or been wounded. But that is the not-so-private assessment of our majority stakeholder.
Still, if you don’t buy transatlantic machtpolitik as an explanation, then the reality of the situation in Basra can be grasped by asking how television news will portray the final withdrawal.
I’m not asking you to imagine which aspect of liberal media bias will be on display, no I’m asking you to imagine where you’d put your cameras. Which part of the Iraqi security services will you follow as they move in to replace the British? From where will you film the last flight leaving? Will there be any kind of ceremony? A parade perhaps?
Maybe you can see that the answers to these questions will reflect exactly how the final draw down/handover/fall of Basra is shown. But when we do leave, expect to hear many more anonymous US officials quoted using the ‘d’ word. They won’t need to make it look pretty for us and TV won’t be able to.
BTW in case you want to get into the whole ‘bravery of British troops’ stuff, back in April, journo-blogger Michael Yon reported from Basra:
While Americans count on helicopter support for deliberate high-intensity combat here, the Brits were going into extremely hostile terrain, outnumbered, without helicopter support, relying instead upon timing, terrain, maneuverability, firepower, and sheer audacity.
Yon is being polite. The British Army lacks the resources of its US counterpart. If we want to pursue a military foreign policy, we will need to spend much more on our armed forces, keep to our alliances, or else forge new ones. Otherwise the best we can expect is to be portayed as America’s Ghurkas, the worst as fumbling and unreliable colonial auxiliaries.
