British army fighting a war it can't win
- From: Kayid Al-Kuffar <Kayedhom@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:59:39 -0700
British army fighting a war it can't win
August 22, 2007
Gwynne Dyer
Independent
"The British have given up and they know they will be leaving Iraq
soon," said Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mehdi army, that country's
most powerful militia group, in an interview with the British
Independent newspaper. "They have realized this is not a war they
should be fighting or one they can win."
Every word he said is true, and most senior officers in the British
army know it. As General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British
army, said last year, Britain "should get out (of Iraq) some time
soon."
There are 5,500 British troops in Iraq, by far the largest foreign
army after the Americans, but they control almost nothing except the
ground they are standing on. Five hundred of them are under permanent
siege in Basra Palace, in the middle of Iraq's second-biggest city,
and the rest are at the airport outside of town, under constant attack
by rocket and mortar fire. They have almost no influence over the
three rival Shia militias and the associated criminals who actually
run the city and fight over the large sums of money to be made from
stolen oil.
Forty-one British soldiers have died in Iraq already this year,
compared to 29 in the whole of last year. The deaths are wasted and
it's high time to go home, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown is
reluctant to anger the White House by pulling all the British troops
out before the Americans are ready to leave. That, however, is
unlikely to happen before President George W. Bush leaves office in
January 2009, as British generals are well aware.
The Democrats in the U.S. Congress have clearly decided that they
prefer to see the Republicans go into the election late next year with
the albatross of Iraq still tied firmly around their necks, rather
than mount a Congressional revolt, cut off funds for the war, and take
the blame for the defeat.
Bush says his policy is to "wait to see what David (Petraeus) has to
say" when the commanding general in Iraq reports on what progress the
"surge" is making in mid-September. But Bush didn't fire the previous
U.S. commanders in Iraq and give Petraeus the job without knowing in
advance what he would say.
Petraeus will see light at the end of the tunnel, as he always does.
The Democratic majorities in Congress will criticize his report but
not rebel against it, and U.S. troops will probably stay in Iraq at
roughly the present numbers until Bush leaves office 17 months from
now. Several thousand American soldiers will have to die to serve
these agendas, but so will about 100 British troops.
British generals are deeply unhappy at this prospect, but as students
of the indirect approach in strategy they have chosen to argue not so
much that the war in Iraq is lost (though it is), but that the war in
Afghanistan is still winnable. So the reason we must get British
troops out of Iraq now is not just to avoid more useless deaths, but
to win by reinforcing our commitment in Afghanistan, which is the
truly vital theatre in the "war on terror."
General Dannatt was at it again last week, telling the BBC during a
visit to Afghanistan that "the army is certainly stretched. And when I
say that we can't deploy any more battle groups (in Afghanistan) at
the present moment, that's because we're trying to get a reasonable
balance of life for our people."
The too-frequent cycle of combat deployments is certainly harming
Britain's forces, with divorces and suicides soaring and retention
rates plummeting, but Dannatt's unspoken subtext was: You can fix this
by pulling us out of Iraq.
There are already more British troops in Afghanistan (7,000) than in
Iraq, so the argument makes a kind of sense: concentrate your
resources where they will make a difference. Except that Afghanistan,
in the end, is also an unwinnable war, at least in the ambitious terms
still used in the West.
The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, too, in the long run, and
President Hamid Karzai's best chance of survival is for the Western
troops to leave soon. Then he would at least be free to make the deals
with warlords, drug dealers and renegade Taliban, in the traditional
Afghan style, that would secure his authority and prolong his life.
But if false hope about Afghanistan provides the pretext for pulling
British troops out of Iraq, why not?
When Gordon Brown faces parliament again in October, his biggest Iraq
problem will not be pressure from the public. It will be pressure from
the army.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
http://www.thespec.com/Opinions/article/237288
.
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