LONDON, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- "They'll be home by Christmas" said the British government as it sent troops off to fight the Boche at the optimistic start of the World War I. As Britain sends its famous old Black Watch regiment to relieve U.S. Marines -- for the first time hundreds of miles out of their area -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it again, and that makes a lot of Brits worried.
Some 850 troops in the Black Watch battle group, it was announced Thursday, are to begin moving from Basra over the next two weeks towards an undisclosed area, expected to be the Iskandariyah area south of Baghdad where they will relieve the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Marines will prepare to join other U.S. and Iraqi troops in a strong assault on Fallujah and other towns as part of a major effort to pacify Iraq prior to elections in January.
From Blair on down British officials insist this is not "mission creep" or that British troops are being sucked into a an escalating, vicious American war of the kind that a former Labor government rejected when Harold Wilson refused to support President Lyndon Johnson's policies on Vietnam with British troops in the mid 1960s.
Indeed, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told Parliament Thursday that the deployment would be for "weeks not months" and that while the British troops will be under overall U.S. command, they will work to British operational standards and rules of engagement. Even if requested by the Americans to take on operations outside a specific area, they will not do so without direct reference back to their British sector commander in Basra, Maj. Gen. Bill Rollo. The Chief of the Defense Staff, Gen. Sir Michael Walker, went further by saying the Black Watch would be there for "a 30-day limit," meaning that, indeed, they should be home as planned by Christmas.
Doubts remain, however, especially by those who have lost trust in Blair over the weapons of mass destruction reasons he gave for the Iraq invasion, by the whole of the Liberal Democrat party in Parliament and by 63 Labor members of Parliament who signed a request for Parliament to have a vote on the deployment.
Left open, for instance, is the involvement of the battle group's supporting Challenger 2 tanks, a squadron of which will remain in the Basra area to be called on by the Black Watch if necessary. And if the battalion finds itself heavily pressed by insurgent attacks, British commanders could also call on their own RAF air power (currently to be provided by the United States) and also the newly arrived reserve force for the Basra area, the Scots Guards battle group.
More importantly, perhaps, is uncertainty over the reaction of insurgent Iraqis when the British arrive in Babil province. There is little doubt, as both Hoon and Walker said, that the Black Watch is one of the best-equipped, experienced and battle-hardened armored infantry battalions of any nationality in Iraq, and that in spite of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, it is one of only a handful of units that could handle itself at least as well as the 24th MEU.
But British officials fear that the domestic political and media fuss made of this deployment is now so high that Iraqi insurgents will seek to specifically target the battalion and cause as many casualties as possible, aiming to bog it down way beyond Christmas and stir major political difficulties for Blair.
"I am dismayed at the ill-informed speculation of the media in recent days," said Walker. "It provides comfort to our enemies." Another British commander said that by discussing the possible location of the deployment and the potential dangers there, the insurgents could conclude that this is a specific British weakness they could exploit.
British troops -- including the Black Watch -- have been under heavy attack before, most notably in al-Amarah in August, but the Ministry of Defense has deliberately limited media access to the area and played down the attacks in order to avoid "providing aid and comfort to the enemy." The government has also sought to portray the situation in Iraq as steadily improving, although it accepts there will be a rise in insurgent attacks leading to the elections.
However, the annual Military Balance report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded this week that "overall, the risks of terrorism to Westerners and Western assets in Arab countries appeared to increase after the (Iraq) war began in March 2003," and the occupation has attracted some 1,000 foreign al-Qaida militants to Iraq, "a minute fraction of its potential strength."
"The forcible occupation of Iraq, a historically important land of Islam as former seat of the Caliphate, led by Christian nations, has more than offset any calming effect of the U.S. military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, completed last August," said a section of the IISS report relating to international terrorism. "Thus, al-Qaida has added Iraq to its list of grievances. With Osama bin Laden's public encouragement, up to a thousand foreign jihadists may have infiltrated Iraq and established operational relationships with Sunni Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein who initiated the ongoing insurgency, and perhaps to some Shiite militias.
"Furthermore, the substantially exposed U.S. military deployment in Iraq presents al-Qaida with perhaps its most attractive 'iconic' target outside U.S. territory."
