Really not funny

The mainstream press is just now noticing that while the American surge is having manifold effects and a serious impact on the various baddies in central Iraq, the British anti-surge is losing the Shia south. In todays Financial Times, Stephen Fidler and Alex Barker lay out the case against the British government and the British army (Run out of Town: How the British Army lost Basra). The overall impact of the article is that the British government never really bought into the Iraq invasion, never solidly took on its responsibilities, didn't spend any money on reconstruction, and never devised any decent strategy for running its areas. It also castigates the British army for being blase about the Shia militias. The British army actually allied itself with various of the latter occasionally, scotching any possibility of being seen by the Shia public as honest brokers. It also used 'lessons' from Ireland which were completely inapplicable in the Iraqi situation. As the authors point out, there were never more than a few hundred active IRA gunmen and bombers at any one time, whereas all three of the Shia militias in Basra field thousands of gunmen each. Not only that, civil society in Northern Ireland, while battered and abused, had not been completely corrupted and perverted by 27 years of Ba'ath party tyranny.

For the British occupation to succeed, millions of pounds was needed to rebuild infrastructure, the militias should have been destroyed by force, and a troop level of around 30,000 maintained so that the militias could not regroup. Britain would have needed to draw up a comprehensive plan to rebuild Shia society in the south free of the various afflictions which now beset it: gangsterism, fanatical religious mafias, venal public officials and policemen who cannot be trusted. Sadly, the Labour party was almost completely uninterested in the tasks at hand. The groups which were set up by the UK government to control British policy in southern Iraq were soon sidelined by US policy-setting groups and the Pentagon. British troop strength in Iraq is now 5,000. As the article points out, that's just about enough troops for the British to defend their two bases.

The geopolitical situation in Iraq is such that if the Shia south is made available for Iran and the shia militias, there is no hope of peace in the centre. The British government now have a painful choice- bring down Iraq because of their parsimony and pandering to stupid lefty parochialists, or beef up the contingent in Iraq again and have a surge of their own. The US effort shows what boots on the ground does- it suffocates and strangles the insurgency which lives and breathes on room to maneuver. Will the British government suck it up, find the will and complete the task it took on, or like the English football team tonight, show up for half an hour and then wander off pathetically?