The United States did not enter Iraq alone. In the heady early days, when an end to the war still seemed in sight, more than 30 international flags flew over Iraq.
As the war marched on, though, the leaders of these countries, some with thousands of troops and some with fewer than a hundred, began to rethink their presence. In 2004, Spain ducked out, swiftly followed by a host of small nations. Troops belonging to the Netherlands, Portugal, and Ukraine left the next year. In 2006, Italy and Japan made their farewells. Some 17 nations have left the "coalition of the willing" since the 2003 invasion, but only the anticipated pulldown of the United Kingdom has sparked fighting words.
No country has been as closely allied with the United States on the Iraq war as has Great Britain. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair staked -- and lost -- his reputation on the war. He sent 45,000 soldiers to Iraq in 2003, a contingent second in size to only the U.S. deployment, and he stood firmly by President Bush as casualties, and criticism, mounted.
But Blair left office in June. Next month, amid the ongoing American debate on the future of Iraq, his successor, Gordon Brown, will address Parliament with his own plan for the British future in Iraq. It's safe to say that it won't look quite like the American future there that President Bush sketched out this week: The U.K. is already at its endgame.
The British are in charge of southern Iraq. After the invasion, they kept 8,500 troops in the country to oversee the four largely Shiite provinces in the region. Last year, the Brits started turning areas over to the Iraqi government and drawing down their own troops; today the British military has just 5,500 troops in Iraq and is in charge of just one province, Basra.
A year ago, British soldiers began a final security push, Operation Sinbad, in Basra to root out corrupt police and deliver quick projects to the populace. The push ended in March, and on September 3, when Bush flew into Anbar province for a surprise visit to bolster the political will for keeping American troops in country, the British quietly pulled their last 500 troops out of Basra city. The remaining British force is based at an airport outside of town, and Brown is expected to announce in October that the Iraqis will soon take over in the
province and that the British force will shrink to 3,000.
Although the Union Jack will remain the second-largest foreign flag still planted in Iraq, after the Stars and Stripes, the anticipated pullback sparked a vitriolic spat between the allies. Retired U.S. Army Gen. John Keane, who was vice chief of staff during the invasion, accused the British of a "general disengagement" in Basra. The former head of British forces during the invasion, Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, called U.S. policy in Iraq "intellectually bankrupt."
Analysts and anonymous defense officials on both sides repeated the charges, sounding like nothing so much as bickering siblings.The overheated rhetoric masked a serious point, however: For better or for worse, the strategic interests of the United States and the United Kingdom in Iraq have diverged.
The British army is small, at just over 100,000 personnel, and it is leading NATO's mission in Afghanistan, with 7,700 troops there. Britain does not have the capacity to run two hot conflicts at once, and attempting to do so, according to the army head, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, has "stretched" its military. Basra may not be secure -- indeed, by any measure, it is still a disaster, with multiple Shiite factions and criminals fighting for power -- but the Brits say they have done all they can do. Now their focus is on Afghanistan.
In Washington, Afghanistan seems like a far-off, almost forgotten war. In London, it's the front line. The United Kingdom has a large Muslim community of Southeast Asian immigrants, and nearly all of the terrorist plots the country has faced in this century can be connected to the Pakistani-Afghan border regions, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have reconstituted themselves and where young men can still attend jihadist training camps.
The British army "can't do both Afghanistan and Iraq at a high tempo, and Afghanistan is a much bigger problem right now," said Patrick Cronin, director of studies for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
In the American analysis, however, the specter of a failed, oil-rich Iraq is a far greater nightmare than the unravelling security situation in Afghanistan. "I have tremendous sympathy for the British army," said Frederick Kagan, the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who laid the intellectual groundwork for the American troop surge. "It is overstrained. But they're not thinking strategically if they [pick] this moment to pull out rather than waiting until we've actually turned the corner. The situation in Afghanistan is bad, but we have to face the view the Brits don't want to face: Iraq is more important than Afghanistan. It simply is."
The British pulldown, and possible pullout, has serious consequences for the United States. For starters, most U.S. military supplies come by truck from Kuwait along a highway that runs outside the city of Basra. "I've driven that road a half-dozen times," said Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Department. "It's an extremely exposed road. In each little village, a guy with a [rocket-propelled grenade] can wreak havoc." The contractor trucks driving that road have been taking fire since the war began. If the British don't have enough troops to prevent a flare-up of attacks and if the Iraqi security forces cannot secure the road, then the United States will need to reallocate some of its own stretched force to the south.
More problematically, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, is still a dangerous place. Whatever gains were made during Operation Sinbad were lost soon after: The police force is still corrupt, and the city, according to a summer report from the International Crisis Group, is a viper's nest of militias. Basra's "political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources," according to the report.
The wealth concentrated in Basra province makes it unlikely that peace will settle in any time soon. It sits on 70 percent of the country's oil and provides more than 90 percent of the government's revenue. The province is a fine prize for whoever controls it, and three Shiite factions, all of them taking support from Iran, are battling for power. What's more, the American security surge in Baghdad has displaced Shiite fighters to the region, where the militias have welcomed them. "We've been talking to young militiamen in Basra and the south who see this surge as a benediction," said Peter Harling, a senior Crisis Group analyst based in Damascus, Syria. "With this influx of experienced fighters coming from Baghdad, they see their own capabilities enhanced."
Unlike in much of Iraq, the fighting in Basra isn't sectarian. The region was always mostly Shiite, and the Sunni and Christian minorities were cleaned out soon after the 2003 invasion. With no functioning government in the province, Shiites are fighting Shiites. "Iraq's future may be written in Basra," said Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. The undermining factors in the south -- a decent performance by the Iraqi army but remaining threats from corrupt
and ineffective police forces -- are replicated throughout the country.
"Some say it's not comparable because Basra is largely Shiite, but the building of Sunni forces has as much potential for disaster as the Shiite militias in Basra," Yaphe said. When the Sunni tribes in Anbar that have now joined with the U.S. to battle Al Qaeda in Iraq no longer need that marriage of convenience, who will they turn their weapons on next?" Yaphe asked.
That possibility -- Sunnis battling Sunnis and Shiites battling Shiites while both battle each other -- is the nightmare scenario that the American surge is aimed at preventing. In Basra, the British focused on trying to root out corrupt police and delivering concrete benefits to the people. To avoid a heavy-handed occupation, the British kept most of their troops outside the city. They never pacified the militias, and local politics became another venue for the power brokers of the militias to do battle.
In contrast, the U.S. is trying to push local leaders into the political arena while providing the security framework to prevent them from killing each other when they disagree. "The Brits said, 'We're never going to get the influence we want through the continued presence of a military force,' " said a senior U.S. officer with recent experience in Iraq. "If you want to draw a lesson for us," the officer said, "it's that there is no middle course."
