Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

070221_british_basra.pdf (application/pdf Object), Feb. 2007

The British won some tactical clashes in Maysan and Basra in May-November 2004, but Operation Telic’s tactical victories over the Sadrists did not stop Islamists from taking
steadily more local political power and controlling security at the neighborhood level when British troops were not present.

As Michael Knight and Ed Williams point out in an excellent recent analysis for WINEP, SCIRI, Sadrists, Dawa and other Shi’ite Islamists won 38 out of 41 seats in the provincial
elections in Basra in January 2005, and 35 out of 41 seats in Maysan….

The British decisively lost the south - which produces over 90% of government revenues and has over 70% of Iraq’s proven oil reserves — more than two years ago.

…the British - which had lost at the political level in early 2005 - were defeated at the military level and confronted with “no go” zones in many areas from the fall of 2005 onwards.

The Captain’s Journal » The British Flight from Basra, August 20, 2007

In Calamity in Basra and British Rules of Engagement, we pointed out that the British had essentially been militarily defeated in Basra.

Richard Beeston, diplomatic editor of The Times of London recently returned from a visit to Basra, his first since 2003. He says in 2003, British soldiers were on foot patrol, drove through town in unarmored vehicles and fished in the waters of the Shaat al Arab on their days off. He says the changes he saw four years later are enormous.

“Nowadays all troop movement in and out of the city are conducted at night by helicopter because it’s been deemed too dangerous to go on the road and its dangerous to fly choppers during the day,” he says.

Beeston says during his latest visit, he noticed a map of the city in one of the military briefing rooms. About half of the city was marked as no-go areas.

British headquarters are mortared and rocketed almost every night.

In this article we cited Anthony Cordesman (Center for Strategic and International Studies) who began openly discussing the situation by calling it a defeat in a white paper entitled The British Defeat in the South and the Uncertain Bush Strategy in Iraq. In response to Cordesman there is a row in Britain over the idea that there has been a defeat.

British Commander Defends Basra Pullout - washingtonpost.com, September 22, 2007

LONDON, Sept. 21 — The commander of the British army said Friday that the recent withdrawal of British forces from downtown Basra was part of a “successful” strategic plan for Iraq and not the result of pressure from Shiite militias.

“To say that we were bombed out of Basra is just completely wrong,” Gen. Richard Dannatt said during a talk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research center in central London.

“We have been successful in southern Iraq,” Dannatt said. “Three of the four provinces that we were responsible for we have handed over to Iraqi control. That was always the plan. The optics of us drawing down and repositioning at the same time that the Americans were surging upwards — the optics, inevitably, were awkward.”

American and Iraqi Forces Control Half of Baghdad - New York Times, September 22, 2007

American and Iraqi forces control a little more than half of Baghdad’s neighborhoods but 8 percent are “free of enemy influence” and are being secured primarily by Iraqi units, according to a senior American commander.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil Jr., the American commander in Baghdad, told reporters in a video briefing at the Pentagon that in around 38 of Baghdad’s 474 neighborhoods American forces were playing mainly a supporting role to Iraqis, and that violence was at minimal levels. That represents only a slight increase in Iraqi control since June.