{"id":572,"date":"2007-08-09T04:36:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-09T10:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=572"},"modified":"2007-08-09T04:36:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-09T10:36:00","slug":"planning-for-defeat-in-basra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/08\/planning-for-defeat-in-basra\/","title":{"rendered":"Planning for defeat in Basra"},"content":{"rendered":"

S<\/span>o the question is, will there be an election before or after our defeat in Iraq<\/span>? In all the recent posturing<\/a> from Mark Malloch Brown<\/span> about the changing nature of the UK\/US<\/span> 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<\/span> as \u201cjob well done.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first taste came on Tuesday in the Washington Post<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\u201cThe British have basically been defeated in the south,\u201d 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 \u201csurrounded like cowboys and Indians\u201d by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain\u2019s 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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Defeat. Ugly word, isn\u2019t it? Especially if you\u2019ve lost a loved one, or been wounded. But that is the not-so-private assessment of our majority stakeholder.<\/p>\n

Still, if you don\u2019t buy transatlantic machtpolitik<\/span> as an explanation, then the reality of the situation in Basra<\/span> can be grasped by asking how television news will portray the final withdrawal.
I\u2019m not asking you to imagine which aspect of liberal media bias will be on display, no I\u2019m asking you to imagine where you\u2019d 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?<\/p>\n

Maybe you can see that the answers to these questions will reflect exactly how the final draw down<\/span>\/handover<\/span>\/fall<\/span> of Basra<\/span> is shown. But when we do leave, expect to hear many more anonymous US officials quoted using the ‘d’ word. They won\u2019t need to make it look pretty for us and TV won\u2019t be able to.<\/p>\n

BTW in case you want to get into the whole ‘bravery of British troops’ stuff, back in April, journo-blogger Michael Yon<\/a> reported from Basra: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s Ghurkas, the worst as fumbling and unreliable colonial auxiliaries.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}