"Today Iraq is a success story," Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared yesterday, on the occasion of the British military withdrawal from Basra. "We owe much of that to the efforts of British troops."

"Our mission has not always been an easy one, many have said that we would fail. Britain can be proud of our legacy that we leave there."

In fact, argues Robert Fisk today, long before this latest episode, the British legacy in Iraq is one of violence and callous abandonment.

"History is a hard taskmaster," he writes. And yet the British did not learn the lessons of its first occupation of Iraq, in the early 1900s.

There followed a familiar story. The British occupation force was opposed by an Iraqi resistance - "terrorists," of course - and the British destroyed a town called Fallujah and demanded the surrender of a Shiite cleric and British intelligence in Baghdad claimed that "terrorists" were crossing the border from Syria, and Lloyd George - the Blair-Brown of his age - then stood up in the House of Commons and said that there would be "anarchy" in Iraq if British troops left. Oh dear.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-a-historic-day-for-iraq-ndash-but-not-in-the-way-the-british-want-to-believe-1677106.html

and elsewhere …..

News that U.S. combat troops won't exactly withdraw from Iraqi cities on June 30th shows the ugly reality behind Obama's facade.

Remember when Barack Obama made that big announcement at Camp Lejeune about how all U.S. combat troops were going to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30? Liberals jumped around with joy, praising Obama for ending the war so that they could focus on their “good war” in Afghanistan.

Of course, the celebrations were and remain unwarranted. Obama’s Iraq plan is virtually identical to the one on Bush’s table on January 19, 2009. Obama has just rebranded the occupation, sold it to liberals and dropped the term “Global War on Terror” while, for all practical purposes, continuing the Bush era policy (that’s why leading Republicans praised Obama’s plan).

In the real world, U.S. military commanders have said they are preparing for an Iraq presence for another 15-20 years, the U.S. embassy is the size of Vatican City, there is no official plan for the withdrawal of contractors and new corporate mercenary contracts are being awarded. The Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq gives the U.S. the right to extend the occupation indefinitely and to continue intervening militarily in Iraq ad infinitum. All it takes is for the puppets in Baghdad to ask nicely…

In the latest episode of the “Occupation Rebranded” mini-series, President Obama is preparing to scrap the June 30 withdrawal timeline.

As The New York Times reports: “The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials. Some parts of Baghdad also will still have combat troops.”