Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...north, but that will be politics, not policy. And policy-the question of what, if any, role the U.S. military should have in Iraq-is where the congressional questioning should focus. Will Petraeus propose moving U.S. troops into the restive Shi'ite south? What will he do about Basra, the crucial southern oil port where the British retreat has left slow-motion anarchy, a Shi'ite gang war? What will he do about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the most powerful and popular force in Shi'ite Iraq? The general's own staff is divided on many...
...with your own preconceptions," he told me. And Kilcullen's bottom-up tribal assumptions don't fit very well into the top-down struggle between the Hakims and Sadrs and their respective militias. As I reported two weeks ago, when asked if there was a U.S. military role in Basra, Crocker said, "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue-as some are now doing-that we need a Basra surge ... But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have the troops. And if we even proposed it, the political element in the U.S. would...
...Meanwhile, the continuing American and British policy is to draw down, not increase, their military presence in southern Iraq. The British are in the midst of pulling out of the port city of Basra. The long-standing American policy has been to defer to Shi'ite religious sensibilities and keep as low a profile as possible in holy cities like Karbala and Najaf...
...Iraq since the start of Brown's premiership on June 27 has been Armed Forces Minister Ainsworth. On July 24, Ainsworth assured the House of Commons Defense Committee that British forces in southeastern Iraq are unlikely to be reduced below 5,000 after Iraqi forces take over control of Basra. According to Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup, head of the U.K. armed forces, that handover could come soon. "Our mission [in the South of Iraq] was to get the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run that part of the country, if they chose...
...forces needed in the central part of Iraq may be forced to redeploy if British troops depart. In his Aug. 22 radio interview, he said that the U.K. had "never had enough forces to truly protect the people" in the British zone of operations and that the situation around Basra "has been gradually deteriorating with the breakout of almost gangland warfare...