Brown’s Lost Fortune
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Your war in Iraq is over.” That is what Gordon Brown was reported to have told British troops on Sunday at Basra. The speech he actually delivered was much more cautious. After all, declaring victory in Iraq can be a dangerous business, as President Bush learned in 2003 when, standing on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln, he declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” No doubt Mr. Brown was mindful of how Mr. Bush came to regret those words. Mr. Brown told his soldiers that “the great venture” had not ended the violence, but had allowed Iraqi forces to take over control of Basra province.
As it happens, British troops will remain in Basra, training and assisting the Iraqis, at least until spring. Their combat role actually ended in September, when the British retreated from Saddam’s old palace to their base at the airport. There is a view in Washington that the British were “defeated” in southern Iraq by the Shiite militias, among which Moqtada al-Sadr’s “Mahdi army” has become dominant. When Mr. Bush decided to gamble on his “surge” to defeat the Sunni insurgency, Prime Minister Blair — already in the twilight of his premiership — was unwilling or unable to commit his successor to a similar increase in combat forces.
No sooner had Mr. Brown taken possession of Downing Street than he announced a phased withdrawal from Iraq. This was just as General Petraeus was reporting success in retaking Al Qaeda’s stronghold of Anbar province. In sharp contradistinction to Mr. Bush, Mr. Brown capitulated to the anti-war voices in the Labor Party without a fight and has pursued a strategy of damage limitation. He has succeeded in removing Iraq as a major electoral issue, but in Washington he has paid a price, allowing President Sarkozy to usurp Britain’s rightful place as America’s closest European ally.
To our British friends we say, don’t despair. There will come a time when Britain needs American help again, and our common interests supersede Mr. Brown’s political calculations. The thing to focus on is that the real victor of the battle for Basra has been Iran. The mullahs have been fighting a proxy war in Iraq for some time, supplying Iranian clients there with sophisticated roadside bombs and other armor-piercing weaponry. Senior British officers have reported since last summer that many of the militia units they face are now commanded by Farsi-speaking operatives.
Faced by Iranian aggression, the Labour government has tilted toward diplomacy, failing to retaliate after the seizure of naval hostages and retreating from Basra in return for a ceasefire by Moqtada al-Sadr. The hardline faction in Britain reckons this an unmitigated failure. By contrast, the invasion of Iraq, which easily overthrew a dictator whom for years the mullahs had tried in vain to defeat, seems to have had a sobering effect in Tehran. As Michael Barone argued here yesterday, in the unlikely event that Iran did indeed suspend development of a nuclear device in 2003, its leaders are most likely to have been motivated, as Colonel Gaddafi was, by fear of the United States.
As 2007 draws to a close, we may look back on this as Iraq’s most fateful year. Freedom and democracy are in the ascendant, with the Sunni insurgency now ebbing away and American GIs still in Baghdad. The crisis in Iraq’s relations with Turkey has been dealt with without a full-scale Turkish incursion into Iraq’s Kurdish provinces. But a major question mark still hangs over Basra province, where the premature British evacuation created a power vacuum which Iran has filled. It was a retreat not sought by the courageous British soldiers who went into the fight but rather by the new leadership in the Labor Party. “The moral of this tale,” as our Daniel Johnson put it to us in a cable from London, “is that fortune favors the brave.”