The British withdrawal from the south of Iraq isn’t getting nearly the play it deserves here, possibly because of the absurd White House spin that the U.K.’s pullout is a sign of things getting better in Iraq.

The latest news from Britain is that the British army itself wanted to get out of Iraq a lot faster than Tony Blair has the stomach for:

British military chiefs had been pushing for much bigger cuts in troop numbers in Iraq than those announced by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

For months, army commanders have suggested that British forces' presence on the streets of Basra was doing more harm than good, that it was time to lower expectations and let Iraqi forces take charge of security.

They were forced to agree to a more gradual reduction, partly in deference to US sensitivities.

Meanwhile, Tony Cordesman of CSIS has a blunt assessment, that the British were simply defeated in the south, by SCIRI and the Mahdi Army. Here’s the link to Cordesman analysis, which says:

The British may not have been defeated in a purely military sense, but lost long ago in the political sense if "victory" means securing the southeast for some form of national unity. Soft ethnic cleansing has been going on in Basra for more than two years, and the south has been the scene of the less violent form of civil war for control of political and economic space that is as important as the more openly violent struggles in Anbar and Basra.

As a result, the coming British cuts in many ways reflect the political reality that the British "lost" the south more than a year ago. The Shi'ites will takeover, Iranian influence will probably expand, and more Sunnis, Christians, and other minorities will leave.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israeli thinktank, has a far more detailed account of the history of Britain’s defeat here.