Why oh why am I always right?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7312078.stm

'Heavy fighting has been raging in Basra as thousands of Iraqi troops battle Shia militias in the southern city.
At least 12 people have died in the operation, which is being overseen in Basra by Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki, a day after he vowed to "re-impose law".'

It gets really tedious in the end, being right all the time. I said long long ago that sometime someday the shia militias (Mehdi Army, Badr Brigades, plus various other Iranian supported nutters) would need to be taken down. Just like the Republican Guard in Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, these militias are either current or potential states-within-states ('...In Baghdad's Sadr City, Mehdi Army fighters reportedly ordered Iraqi police and soldiers out of the district') which both challenge the nation state and provide a microcosmic version of the state in one organisation. They are extremely destabilising (see Iran, Gaza and Lebanon for details) and quite hard to eliminate. My guess is, there is no 'soft power' way to dislodge them.

The British started the job, got into a bit of a pickle because they were seriously out-manned and often out-gunned, sheepishly gave up and spent the rest of the their time in Basra tiptoeing round the militias. Absolutely disastrous. This not only emboldened the latter, it demonstrated that militia creation was a going concern, and a bunch of amateurs showed up (many from Fallujah) and started new ones. There are now many many militias in Basra- every young gun has a choice of gangs to sign up to. The judgement made by the British government was that the carving up of Basra and its environs by militias, the butchering of civil society, just wasn't our business and even if it was, we just weren't going to engage in that mission.

If anti-war twats knew what they were talking about, they'd be all over that like an STD. As many commentators have pointed out, intervening in a country means the Pottery Barn rule comes into effect - you break it, its yours. We broke the government of Iraq, it was our job to fix it. You don't go in and then give up on the job because its too expensive or you have to kill too many militiamen. Thats the stuff to think about BEFORE you go in. The British government comes out of this very very badly. We skimped on the reconstruction money, we skimped on the boots-on-the-ground, and most importantly we skimped on the political will to do the hard job we were duty-bound to do. That shames me.

Contrast the comments of Iraqis in the South, and Iraqis everywhere else in Iraq. Only in the south is there pessimism about the future, and bitterness on a massive scale against the 'occupation'. Why? Because AGAIN we promised people to free them from the murderous bullies and then left them to the tender mercies of said bullies. If I were them, I'd never trust us again. Just at the moment the US ramped up its troops and moved them into every neighborhood in Central Iraq, the British were taking their forces down from a feeble 7,500 to a vanishingly small 2,500. Just as the last Sunni tribes decided discretion was the better part, the Shia militias Christmases all came at once. Enormous quantities of oil money are now pouring into their coffers, money that Hezbollah and Hamas can only dream of. What do you think they'll do with it? Build schools, hospitals and factories? We both know the answer to that.

So the poor old beleaguered Iraqi state is having to take on the battle-hardened, over-funded shia militias instead. What a disgrace. Where British troops, with their exceptional training and experience could have taken down the militias over a couple of years with moderate casualties and a very high kill rate, the Iraqi police and army will take decades and terrible casualties. Do the unmentionables in Whitehall and Downing street care? No. Not a bit. We should. Those Iraqi soldiers and policemen are dying mainly because we didn't do the task we entered into.

'...Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the BBC: "Militias have taken over almost the city and law and order has collapsed, although it is not a hopeless case because the government is taking measures to reverse the situation. Remember, Basra is the lifeline of Iraq. Most of Iraq's oil exports go through Basra." The people of southern Iraq will not forget how we failed them. Will we remember?