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View Full Version : Blair’s plan: Political football?



sonz
02-22-2007, 07:19 PM
By: Adam Robertson

Great Britain has made it official. The British leader announced yesterday that he’s withdrawing British troops out of Iraq.


"The UK military presence will continue into 2008, for as long as we are wanted and have a job to do. Increasingly, our role will be support and training and we will be able to reduce our numbers accordingly," the British Prime Minister said.

The top foreign policy aide to the U.S. President George W. Bush described the partial withdrawal of British occupying troops from Iraq as "basically a good-news story".

But both the timing and way in which the plan was made public piled the pressure on the White House, already facing criticism over failure in Iraq and the extended military presence of the American troops there, according to a Houston Chronicle editorial.

For National security adviser Stephen Hadley, the withdrawal of 1,600 British troops from Iraq during the coming few months, and a further 500 by the end of summer, as described by the British PM, means that the British forces managed to achieve its mission of "restoring order" to southern Iraq and that's why they're turning over more of their sector to the Iraqi Army.

But for Americans, Tony Blair’s plan came as an alert that their President’s main ally in the war is starting to get out of the war, while 21,000 more of their brothers and sons are forced to be sent to the battlefield.

Some would point to the fact that UK was already involved with a very limited number of troops in Iraq- 7,100 British soldiers compared with the 135,000 American troops, but still they symbolized the largest war ally’s presence in the occupied country.

Blair’s announcement of the partial withdrawal of his troops from Iraq also affected the ongoing funding debate in the U.S.

* "Political football"?

"The timing of the British announcement is very unfortunate," said Nile Gardiner, a scholar at the conservative Her-itage Foundation. "The British decision is going to be used as a political football by opponents of the president's Iraq plan."

And while some in Washington hailed the British Prime Minister's decision to withdraw British troops from Iraq as a sign of progress by the White House, Democrats saw it as evidence of a need to withdraw U.S. troops.

For instance, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., believe the move by UK, Bush's main war ally confirms "there can be no purely military solution in Iraq," which he said was "a reality that President Bush stubbornly refuses to accept."

But Blair's plan is seen by many analysts as a sign of declining relations between the outgoing British leader and the Bush administration, whose foreign policies, his policies in Iraq in particular, have been unpopular in Britain since the beginning of the war.

"My guess is behind closed doors Bush administration officials are probably thinking the timing of this is not ideal," said Julianne Smith, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

"Just as the U.S. has committed itself to increasing its troop levels, to have its core partner in the war decide to draw down, it looks like the two partners are at odds."

But inside the Bush administration, officials maintained the same rhetoric; that Iraq is undergoing major progress.

"I look at it and what I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Vice President Cheney told ABC News aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in Japan.
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