Basra - Last Hurrah for the Special Relationship?

"The British army is not on the"verge of collapse" - see pw. above.  The British army, like the American army at present, is incredibly stretched and subject to stress - falling recruitment levels, long tours of duty, wear and tear on equipment, high levels of mental stress among troops.  But on the verge of collapse?  The French army in 1917 on the Western Front mutinied; the Italian army retreate from Caporetto was a chaotic debacle; the Iraqi army in the first gulf war fell apart  at the first hint of allied assault.  Those are what you would call collapses. There will be no such collapse - not mutiny nor blind panic stricken chaotic retreat - that will afflict the British or American armies.

pw imagines the politician who associates himself with withdrawal from Iraq will win the election.  Not true.  Iraq and Afghanistan are unpopular wars/occupations here but are not by any stretch of the imagination deeply significant factors in elections.  Iraq rarely makes the headlines and usually is on somewhere like page six, bottom paragraph of the newspapers, or item four in the TV news broadcasts.  The next election will be won or lost on the performance of the economy, and a judgement of the Government's general level of competence.  Only one political leader has openly and unequivocably called for an end to the occupation - Menzies Cambell, leader of the Liberal Democratic party.  This will in the next election, as it always does, get 20 to 25% of the votes and 10% of the seats in the Commons.  The old Liberal party (now theLiberal Democrats) last governed Britain in the period during and immediately after the Great War of 1914 -1918.  Campbell has not a snowball in hell's chance of becoming the next PM.  Cameron, leader of the Conservative party, will remain uncommitted on the issue of whether or not to withdraw British troops; Browne, our "socialist" PM will continue to promise to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the Americans while he quietly desrts them and oversees the slow withdrawal from Basra."  Mike G

Comments

[Cold War Zoomie]

"...I had been going to these places for years and never heard the hostility towards an American leader that I did then."

You must not have been in those pubs during the Reagan years.

And the entire entertainment media back then blasted Maggie and Ron contantly.

Spitting Image Pic

[Cold War Zoomie]

JJackson,

You make some good points. The most important being that the UK viewed the American people and the Bush Admin as basically separate entities before the 2004 election. Those who understand our system knew that we cannot just chuck someone out of office with a vote of no confidence. Bush did not have a comfortable victory in 2004, though. It was a very tight race.

To be more serious than my comment last night, one aspect I left out is how closely our governments work together. More specifically, the average American and Brit have no idea how closely the DoD and MoD work together. On the intel side, our SIGINT operations are comingled in the UK. We have joint operations at places like the link below regardless of how the British Press constantly refers to it as "an American spy base"...

Menwith Hill

(The FAS got one thing right: it's a joint US/UK operation.) I can't speak for the HUMINT and other intel services out there, but we work very closely with the UK in SIGINT.

We also have close relationships left over from the Cold War NATO days, and we are still developing Command and Control as well as telecom systems that interoperate with the Brits and other NATO forces. The Defense Information Systems Agency has a Royal Marine LTC as the US/UK liaison. I'd venture to guess there are tons of these type of liaison relationships still going strong. Plus, we still have multiple DoD bases and facilities in Britian.

On the civilian side, try to visit the US embassy in London some time in Grosvenor Square. It isn't some small operation.

Finally, add our commercial trade relationship to the mix:

British-American Chamber of Commerce

Gee, I wonder if those joint SIGINT operations can come in handy for international trade intelligence, too?

Hmmmm.

[Jim Schmidt]

"I long for my college years (mid sixties) when the fire burned to change the government. Maybe a spark has been re-kindled. I hope so."

TR Stone

I agree. Your comment echoes a previous discussion in this forum whether ideas or enonomic self interest drive political events. Probably both, but, in the spirit of your sentiment, I thought you might enjoy the following line of movie dialogue.

Wally: "I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side. And when I was ten years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat. Riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money. "

"My Dinner With Andre", 1981