Why are we still there? (Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

The Guardian,
Saturday March 29 2008

... Senior British commanders have made little secret of their desire to leave, privately acknowledging that the British troops acted as a magnet for disorder, not its repellant. Gordon Brown said last year that he wanted to reduce troop numbers to 2,500 (the minimum required for self-protection) by late spring. But neither an early departure nor a further reduction in troop levels is politically viable. It would look like a retreat under fire, similar to Aden in 1967. That leaves senior British defence planners with one option - to cross their fingers. If the Iraqi army can finish the battle it started, British troops will look less like blue-helmet observers, hoping earnestly never to fire their guns.

The signs yesterday, on the fourth day of the battle, were not encouraging. As fighting spread to Baghdad, Nassiriya, Hilla, Amara, Kerbala and Diwaniya, the Iraqi defence minister, Abdel Qader Jassim, admitted that resistance had been stiffer than he had bargained for. In a change of tactics, Mr Maliki extended the deadline for militants to surrender their arms until April 8. Facts on the ground in Basra were difficult to determine, but in telephone interviews it emerged that the battle for the streets of Basra had only just begun. One Mahdi army commander told the Guardian that it had captured a lot of the army's vehicles, guns and mortars, and that its fighters were well accustomed to using the side streets as their battle space.

Mr Maliki is taking an enormous gamble in staking the reputation of his newly trained army against experienced street fighters in an urban terrain which is very familiar to them. His motives for doing so may be murkier than the mere desire to stamp the authority of central government on Shia militias. In Basra some saw the street fighting as a turf war between Shia militias, conducted in the run-up to crucial provincial elections in October. One prominent member of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement in Basra said the Mahdi army was being targeted not by the Iraqi government but by government militias working for its rivals, the Supreme Islamic Council and Mr Maliki's Dawa party.

Whatever is happening, it is not going according to script. When it left Basra city centre last year the British army said it was handing over control to the police and army. As we can see now, they never had control. Neither does the violence confirm the optimism of the senior US commander, General David Petraeus, who continues to claim that the surge of US troops has worked. If anything, the extent of the clashes shows how fragile the security gains over the past year have been and how dependent they were on ceasefires - like the one with the Mahdi army which now lies in tatters. This week's events expose the myth of an orderly hand-over of control from an occupying to an indigenous army ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/29/iraq