Expert: 'British cuts will be negative'

Posted by Frank James at 9:43 am CST

"...The influence of the British cuts will be negative."

So says Andrew Anthony Cordesman, the highly respected national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Cordesman says the British drawdown will strengthen the Shi'ite hand in southern Iraq which will lead to more ethnic cleansing of a sort, with Sunni and Christian populations being forced out of the largely Shi'ite areas in the south.

Meanwhile, Iran's influence in that part of Iraq will only grow stronger.

What's more, Cordesman sees an irony in that the British cuts and U.S. increases will create similar outcomes: a stronger Shia hand, the dislocation of non-Shia and deeper Iranian influence in Iraq.

Read Cordesman's analyis below.

British Troop Reductions in Iraq

By Anthony H. Cordesman

There is no doubt that any British troop reduction that is not coordinated with a US reduction weakens the image of the Coalition and further isolates the US. This is a war of perceptions, as well as military power, and the influence of British cuts will be negative.

At the same time, the British military position in the south is radically different from that of the US. The British long ago essentially ceded the two provinces they control -- Basra and Maisan -- to Shi'ite Islamist factions. They lost Basra in 2005 to rival Shi'ite extremist parties and essentially let most of the city become a no go zone unless they conducted active operations. They pulled out of much of the southeast to the north of Basra in 2006.

The British soft approach has worked little better, if at all, than the American hard approach. The British were not defeated in a military sense, but lost in the political sense if "victory" means securing the southeast for the central government and some form of national unity. Soft ethnic cleansing has been going on in Basra for more than two years, and the south has been the scene of the 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 Basra.

As a result, the British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British "lost" the south more than a year ago. The Shi'ites will takeover, Iranian influence will probably expand, and more Sunnis, Christians, and other minorities will leave. British action will mean more pressure for federation and separatism, but local power struggles are more likely to be between Shi'ite factions than anything else.

The irony is that British force cuts may well have the same de facto effect as the new set of US military operations in Baghdad. If the Shi'ite militias in Baghdad continue to stand down, and US-led operations continue to focus on local security and defeating the Sunnis, the end result of creating "white spots" in Baghdad will be to solidify Shi'ite control over most of the city and province, segregate Sunnis, and push Sunnis into divided areas outside the city.

In effect, both the UK and US may end up acting to expand Shi'ite influence in very different ways.