Britain begins to bail:
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LONDON, Feb. 21 — In sharp contrast to the American troop buildup in Baghdad, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced today that up to 1,600 of the roughly 7,100 British troops in southern Iraq will begin withdrawing in coming months.
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driven by bad polls at home and an untenable situation in Iraq, Blair begins to cash in his chips and go home.
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Vice President Cheney said Wednesday that the planned British withdrawal was a response to improved security in the area. "What I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Cheney told ABC News.
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this is absolutely false and Cheney knows it -
British casualties have tripled in the last several months.
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Britain's soft approach of leaving the Islamist militias largely alone, at least before Sinbad, has worked little better than the harder American one according to Anthony Cordesman, an independent analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The British were not defeated in a military sense, but lost in the political sense, if 'victory' means securing the south-east for the central government and some form of national unity," he says. "Soft ethnic cleansing has been going on in Basra for more than two years, and the south has been the scene of a less violent form of civil war for control of political and economic space that is as important as the more openly violent struggles in Anbar and Baghdad."
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make no mistake, Britain is reducing forces because they can do no more. it's a rout, not a victory.