UK troops return Basra to Iraqis

British troops have taken a significant step towards returning home:

British troops have transferred control of Basra province to the Iraqi authorities, four-and-a-half years after the invasion.

The handover marks a significant milestone towards Britain's final withdrawal from southern Iraq.

Brown has quietly set about excavating the Brits from Blair's Iraq war mess ever since he came to power and today marks the most obvious step towards their eventual withdrawal. Under Blair, this would never have been done without the White House's approval as Blair was always determined to leave British troops where they were if only to provide cover for Bush's refusal to contemplate an American withdrawal whilst he remains President.

The Americans have immediately started counter briefing against the British withdrawal.

"I don't know that there is going to be a security vacuum more than there has been," said Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. "The British haven't been patrolling very aggressively anyway. The situation is never going to go back to the status before because all kinds of things have changed."

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution, said Shiite rivalries notwithstanding, the security situation is not so dire as it sometimes appears.

"The vacuum is already there. But I don't think things are catastrophic. It is not anarchic and it is not a state of civil war," he said. "It is more like the Wild West, or a region of competing mafia dons. That's not good, of course, but it's also not horrible."

One is left wondering, listening to these comments, of what kind of state Baghdad will be in when the Americans finally succumb to reality and leave.

I wonder if they will manage to avoid leaving it looking like a "region of competing mafia dons"?

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