[NYTr] Britain retreats from Basra

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by marcus

The Independent - Dec 17, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3258008.ece

Britain bows out of a five-year war it could never have won

By Patrick Cockburn

Britain handed over security in Basra province yesterday, bringing a
formal end to its ill-starred attempt over almost five years to control
southern Iraq.

The transfer of power was marked by a parade of thousands of Iraqi
soldiers and police beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which runs past
Basra. As helicopters roared overhead it was the biggest show of
strength by the Iraqi army forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The great majority of people in Basra were glad to see the British go.
"You can see the happiness on the faces of everyone," said Adel
Jassam, a teacher. "It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off
our chests. "

The unpopularity of the British presence is underlined by the results
of an opinion poll commissioned by the BBC showing that just 2 per cent
of people in Basra believed that the British presence had had a
positive effect on their province since 2003. Some 86 per cent said
they saw British troops as having a negative impact.

Britain did not suffer a military defeat in southern Iraq, though it
lost 134 soldiers and never really established control of the city, the
second largest in Iraq.

By the time of yesterday's handover ceremony it had 4,500 troops in
Iraq, confined to Basra airport, whose numbers will be reduced to 2,500
by mid-2008.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was at the ceremony in
Basra, said that Britain was not handing over "a land of milk and
honey". This is an understatement, since the Basra that Britain leaves
behind will be controlled by semi-criminal Shia militias and political
movements whose differences are often over carving up local resources.

"This remains a violent society whose tensions need to be redressed,"
said Mr Miliband, "but they need to be addressed by Iraqi political
leaders, and it is politics that is going to come to the fore in the
months and years ahead."

The British Army some time ago concluded that its patrols simply
provided targets for militiamen without doing any good.

The steady retreat of the British has not so far been followed by a
battle for Basra between the three main contenders for power. These are
the Fadhila movement, which controls much of the government, the Mehdi
Army militia, loyal to the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the
Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

All these groups control in part or in full different units of the
security forces, as well as valuable economic concessions, such as
Basra port, through which flows much of Iraq's imports. Iran also
retains a pervasive though often invisible influence over the militias.

Britain is officially handing over control, nominal though it may have
been, of Basra to government security forces. This has supposedly long
been the aim of the US and Britain in southern Iraq, but in practice
both countries have increasingly favoured one only of the Shia parties,
ISCI, as its favoured ally. This may eventually lead to a backlash by
the Mehdi Army and Fadhila.

Violence in Basra was never as bad as it was in Baghdad or Mosul,
because the city was overwhelmingly Shia. The Sunni and other minority
groups have been progressively driven out. The British Army also never
tried to impose its authority on the four southern provinces of Iraq to
the degree that the US forces tried to win control of central Iraq.

The area where they were meant to be bringing a better life is one of
the most devastated in Iraq. Because it was Shia it was never favoured
by the over-whelmingly Sunni regime of Saddam. It was also in the
frontline in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, when the city was shelled.

The date palms for which southern Iraq was famous were burned or cut
down. In the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a distinct
civilisation had survived for 5,000 years until Saddam drained them so
they could no longer provide a sanctuary for his opponents.

There seems to be no end to the miseries that Basra has suffered since
the war with Iran started in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war was followed by
the first Gulf War, and this in turn by the great Shia uprising of
1991, which began in a square in Basra when a tank gunner fired a shell
into one of the omnipresent pictures of Saddam. In the fighting which
followed, thousands of Shia were killed and more fled to Iran.

The fall of Saddam was highly popular in Basra, as it was in the rest
of Shia Iraq, but while liberation was popular, occupation was not.

British forces had an early lesson about this when they entered the
notoriously violent town of al-Majir al-Kabir north of Basra. An
attempt to search for weapons led to friction, and during a second
patrol this escalated into fighting, and the slaughter on 24 June 2003
of six members of the Royal Military Police who were trapped in the
local police station.

Rivalries between different Shia militias remain intense and could
explode at any moment. The Mehdi Army is currently obeying a truce
called by Mr Sadr. His declared purpose is to root out criminals, and
he wants to avoid a military confrontation with ISCI when it is backed
by the Americans.

Mr Miliband may be right that Iraqi politicians are better able to
handle Iraqi problems than the British, but this does not mean they are
effective. The ruling elite in Basra is heavily criminalised, and
although the three southernmost Iraqi provinces stand on a reservoir of
oil, they remain miserably poor. For this the local leadership is
partly to blame, but the leadership of the Shia community in Iraq comes
primarily from Baghdad and the shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf.
Basra has always felt exploited and neglected.

Britain stumbled into a small war in southern Iraq which it did not
expect to fight and where its aims were always unclear. It is now
stumbling out with very little achieved and its military reputation
dented, after a conflict in which a victory could never have been won.