As America debates its future in Iraq, U.S. allies face an awkward question. How long do they keep their forces in?
By William Underhill; With Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Kasia Gruszkowska in London
Tony Blair knows all about loyalty. Without complaint, the British prime minister has taken years of flak for supporting the U.S. on Iraq. In the last month alone he's been tarred as George W. Bush's willing patsy in a gossipy tell-all penned by his former ambassador to Washington. He ignited a media uproar by slapping a gag on a leaked report suggesting he talked the president out of bombing the Arabic TV network Al-Jazeera. And he's steadfastly echoed the American line on any early withdrawal from Iraq. Smaller Coalition partners may back out, but not the British. "We withdraw when the job is done."
That makes the next test still harder. The rising clamor in America to draw down U.S. forces demonstrates the chasmwide difference between the pressures on Washington and its principal allies. Bush is only now hearing the kind of all-party dissent that Blair and others have managed to endure--and often face down--over the last three years. "It's a paradox," says Menzies Campbell, foreign-affairs spokesman of the Liberal Democrats, the only major British party that opposed the war. "As the debate warms up in the United States, it's almost flattened out over here." So far the British casualty tally in Iraq stands at 98--high, but not high enough to inflame opinion. One recent poll showed 51 percent favoring a timetable for British withdrawal, with 41 percent believing that the troops had a duty to remain until the situation improved. "We could stay for several years," says Glen Rangwala at Cambridge University. "But we are not seeing the same staying power on the part of the United States."
Washington's weakening resolve must be galling for a prime minister looking to his place in history. It's no secret that Blair will leave Downing Street in the next year or so, making way for Chancellor Gordon Brown. Clearly, he doesn't want to go down as "the man who flattened Iraq and lied about weapons of mass destruction," says Toby Dodge, a Middle East expert at Queen Mary College, London University. "He will want to stay on the ground until it turns into something that he can be proud of."
Will it? Other allies have their doubts. Spanish troops have already left Iraq. South Korea, with the third largest force, is debating a cut in numbers. Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faces a spring election, is scaling down its commitment in response to polls showing 80 percent opposition to the mission.
The new right-wing government in Warsaw looks set to postpone a January deadline for pulling out its remaining 1,400 troops. But that support isn't unconditional and may be tied to winning greater commercial returns for their loyalty, possibly in the form of reconstruction or oil contracts. "We don't want to be seen as mercenaries but this is certainly what many people have in the back of their minds," says former Polish Defense minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz.
Some reckon the defection of other Coalition partners makes a strong case for keeping British forces in place longer than they might otherwise be. What an irony, if Britain ends up reluctantly following the U.S. out of Iraq, just as it went in.
