REPORT FROM LONDON:
by Tom Hayden &
Public opinion is strongly for withdrawal [30 percent for "now", 27 percent "by Christmas", 25 percent in "one year", the rest for "stay the course".
Blair remains adamantly pro-Bush and anti the anti-war movement, dismissing them as "urban intellectuals." His political strategy resembles Richard Nixon in the late Sixties: calling for "law and order" after the London bombings, attacking the peace movement as soft intellectuals, appealing to "the heartland", his version of "middle America."
However, there is a parallel agenda from the "securocrats" [elements of the intelligence agencies and ministry of defense] that hints at British withdrawal earlier than officially projected. On Sept. 24, the Saturday of the London march, the Observer headlines read:
"Defence Secretary confident withdrawal will start in May/ Plan follows pressure for exit strategy"
"BRITAIN SETS IRAQI PULL-OUT DATE AS BLAIR SAYS 'DON'T FORCE ME TO QUIT'"
Clearly this story/leak was intended to defuse or confuse public opinion on the weekend of the protests. But its detail contained a ring of truth. Assuming no radical changes in the situation on the ground, the Observer account is as follows:
1. Blair "has abandoned plans...to public his own exit strategy." His envoy to Iraq last week warned that Britain could be forced out if there is "no reasonable prospect of holding it together."
2. Secret exit strategy plans are being negotiated by a commission composed of the Iraqi government, US and UK diplomats and military commanders.
3. This commission will lay out a point-by-point road map for military disengagement by the US-UK coalition, with the first steps soon after the December elections.
4. The withdrawal will be locally-staged depending on assessments of the security situation, in three stages. The first phase would take 12 months with British troops ending up as a "reserve force." The second phase would terminate daily patrols and place British troops in barracks. The third phase would be the departure of the troops altogether, apparently in the same time framework.
Fantasy? Quite likely. Aimed at quieting the British public? Definitely. But it also appears that the British government is fashioning a phased exit strategy designed by the Ministry of Defence while Blair himself remains "firm." The question is whether the British securocrats are simply posturing to protect Blair's image of manly strength, or whether they are implementing a withdrawal plan for their own strategic reasons, with Blair's tacit consent.
This is not the first hint of British disengagement. The British foreign minister said last April that troop withdrawals might begin in 2006. In July the British media said their government might withdraw 3,000 troops from Iraq to the "international peacekeeping mission" in Afghanistan.
FYI: UK forces in Iraq are 8,000 currently. Poland, which operates in Basra as well, has reduced its forces from 2,400 to 1,700 and plans a 2006 withdrawal. Thailand, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Norway withdrew early in 2005. Ukraine is out. Portugal out. Spain, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua all out. The pattern is clear on the ground, a slow but steady reduction in troop levels, leaving the US and some 20,000 stateless mercenaries.
Neither the peace movement nor progressive British politicians have proposed an alternative scenario for ending both the war and occupation. The Independent on Sept. 25 ran an editorial headlined "We have a duty to Iraq - to make plans for an early exit", which concluded that "the absence of an exit strategy leaves a dangerous sense of drift. [Blair's] only hope of retrieving any honour from the flames of Basra is to set out the practical steps that need to be taken to make the withdrawal of British forces possible sooner rather than later."
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Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
