Troop withdrawal? posted by Richard Seymour

This is a non-story :

Plans have been drawn up to withdraw thousands of UK and US troops from Iraq by the spring of 2006.
The paper, by Defence Secretary John Reid, suggests the UK's 8,500 troops in Iraq could be cut to 3,000, saving around £500m a year.

The document, leaked to the Mail on Sunday, also sets out US plans to cut its troops from 176,000 to 66,000.

The UK, as I pointed out before , is shifting its troop commitment from Iraq to Afghanistan, where the Karzai regime is crumbling.

Okay, the fact that US troops may be pulled is significant, possibly representing a capitulation to reality which neoconservatives are so hostile to. However, the US has just built a series of massive long-term bases in Iraq, indicating that it intends to maintain a long term presence of troops in the country, running the country by proxy through the behemoth US embassy. In all likelihood, the US will devolve day to day security to the CIA-trained Iraqi forces, (allowing them to get their hands dirty with the torture and so on), while deploying its substantial remaining troop presence mainly for firefighting and larger operations in insurgent areas.

But this doesn't represent the end of the occupation of Iraq, and don't even bet on a reduction of troops without substantial domestic pressure in the UK and US.