British forces withdraw from Basra Palace base

True to his word, and despite dire threats from Bush about the coalition needing to hold firm, Gordon Brown has started pulling British troops out of Basra Palace.

British troops began pulling out of Basra Palace last night and expect to hand control of the base to Iraqi forces within days, amid new Anglo-American recriminations about the aftermath of the Iraq war.

The UK battlegroup in Saddam Hussein's former compound comprises about 500 troops and their redeployment to the city's airbase is the penultimate stage of Britain's presence in the country.

Their withdrawal will be followed by the handover of the city itself to the Iraqi authorities in the autumn, the Ministry of Defence said.

The MoD statement released last night said: "Handing over Basra Palace to the Iraqi authorities has long been our intention, as we have stated publicly on numerous occasions. We expect the handover to occur in the next few days.

"The Iraqi security forces want to take full responsibility for their own security and the handover is a step towards that goal. The decision is an Iraqi-led initiative and is part of a coalition-endorsed process, developed in consultation with the Iraqi government, and follows the successful handover of several other bases within and around the city."

So the remaining British troops are now at the airport and, one can surmise, will eventually do what most people at airports do, and get on a plane.

Brown is clearly intending to ignore the threats which Bush has recently made and is setting about evacuating British troops at a timetable to be set by British commanders on the ground.

"Iraqi forces are already deployed and concentrated in the palace," General Mohan al Fireji, a senior Iraqi commander, said at a press conference in the southern city. "The Iraqi forces are ready to take security responsibility in Basra."

The next stage, the actual timetable for withdrawal, will be the trickiest for Brown to pull off. There are already calls from opposition leaders for Brown to announce the complete withdrawal of British troops and, as we know, there is considerable pressure from the US for Brown to continue to give even a fig leaf of cover for the notion that the UK remain engaged in Iraq.

Bush needs the UK to remain in Iraq so that he can continue to hide his own obstinacy in refusing to accept that he has lost his war, a fact that he hopes to hand over to his eventual successor.

I doubt very much that Brown is going to accede to Bush's request, but neither do I think he is going to rush to remove the final UK troops now stationed at Basra airport.

Anyone who followed the way Brown plotted to remove Blair will know that he does not suffer from impatience. He will wait. After all, the troops at the airport are not in any special danger.

But make no mistake, he has moved them to the airport because he intends, eventually, to put them onto planes.

The British involvement in the Iraq war appears to be over in all but name.

And a second British General has stepped up to the plate to attack Donald Rumsfeld:

Major General Tim Cross, the deputy head of the coalition's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, denounced Washington's postwar policy as "fatally flawed".

He insisted he had raised serious concerns about the country sliding into chaos with Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary at the time, but he had "dismissed" the warnings.

"The US had already convinced themselves that Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy," he told the Sunday Mirror. "Anybody who tried to tell them anything that challenged that idea - they simply shut it out."

It will take a little while longer, but eventually Bush will be left alone in Iraq, finally exposing the neo-con Iraqi adventurism as the unilateral nonsense that it always was. Had Blair not, for some bizarre reason, insisted that the US should not be "alone" when they entered Iraq, then this piece of empirical unilateral oil theft would never have been given the fig leaf of UK involvement in the first place.

Brown is, very slowly, reasserting that British foreign policy is separate from that of the US.

Good for him.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Brown, Bush, Iraq war, Basra Palace, British withdrawal