BRITISH SURGE?

Defense News:

The U.S. plans to urge Britain to launch a "surge" in Basra to combat increasing violence in the southern Iraqi region, the Sunday Mirror newspaper reported.

Britain, which has around 4,100 troops in Iraq, transferred control to Iraqi forces in December last year but could now be asked to step up its role again amid top-level concern about the situation, the paper said....

But unnamed senior British civil service sources told the Sunday Mirror that Britain would be highly reluctant to go back into Basra because of pressure at home to pull troops out.

"We do not have enough troops for a surge ourselves. The hope is that we can train enough Iraqi army recruits in the next year to cope with the inter-tribal warfare going on in Basra," one source quoted by the paper said.

• I'm glad that the Surge is going so well that we require additional British troops; typically when we are "winning" we require fewer, rather than more, troops over time.
• I'm hardly surprised that the British are sounding reluctant on this. While we were surging last year they were downsizing, and I can't imagine that the Brown government is too terribly excited about stepping more deeply into the mess that Blair made.

--Robert Farley