‘Britain stayed in Basra longer because of US’ - Poodles are nice to own

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http://www.khaleejtimes.ae/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2007/September/focusoniraq_September65.xml§ion=focusoniraq

10 September 2007

LONDON - Britain was prepared to withdraw its forces from the southern Iraqi city of Basra in April, but held off for five months after the United States asked it to stay, Britain’s military commander in Iraq said in an interview published on Monday.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Brigadier James Bashall, commander of 1 Mechanised Brigade, said that he wanted to leave Britain’s Basra Palace base in April, something he said would have been “the right thing to do.”

“In April we could have come out and done the transition completely and that would have been the right thing to do but politics prevented that,” Bashall, 44, told the paper.

“The Americans asked us to stay for longer,” he said, adding the decision to stay in the city was a result of “political strategy being played out at highest level.”

On Monday, around 500 British soldiers slipped out of the former Saddam Hussein palace, handing over security to Iraqi forces and leaving behind a city in the grip of a brutal militia turf war.