Over at the Danger Room, David Axe writes of the British posture in southern Iraq:
With no forward bases, no intelligence apparatus in the city of Basra, less nimble equipment and no political will to suffer a single additional casualty in Iraq, the roughly 3,000 Brits remaining in the country can do little but wait out the current fighting.
To which Noah Shachtman adds:
So the Brits bail, and Basra is "essentially divided up among Shi'ite party mafias, each of which had its own form of extortion and corruption," as Anthony Cordesman puts it today. Isn't this an extremely bad omen for an American troop withdrawal, under a would-be President Obama or Clinton? How would a country-wide draw-down be different than this local one?
It's a good question. And there are other examples of what a unilateral withdrawal in the face of terror looks like: Southern Lebanon and Gaza. In each case, the Israelis withdrew under the assumption that it was their presence that was instigating violence. In each case, the results were disastrous, as terrorist groups (with Iranian support) rushed to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the IDF. Now we see the same thing playing out in Basra.
Even for the Democrats, an Iraq dominated by Iranian-backed terrorist groups is an intolerable outcome. And yet neither has offered a compelling case for why the American people should expect a different result.
