"Britain won't be able to pull all its troops out through the airport, which is why they will have to fight their way out. It will be a hard withdrawal. It will be ugly and embarrassing."As an American, I find his comments to be completely embarrassing. Unfortunately, Mr. Biddle isn't just some insignificant blogger or talking head. He actually has power and influence over military decisions made by our administration and he is making us look bad.
Obviously, the British took offense to these statements. Lord Byce, the former Chief of the Defense Staff in the British military, thinks these comments by Biddle are unwarranted. In response to Biddle he claimed:
"I don't think it's sensible to draw any parallels between Saigon and Basra. The British are not facing what the Americans were facing in Saigon, which was a well-equipped army as opposed to disparate murderers and terrorists."Lord Byce isn't the only Brit who thinks the British can successfuly pull out of Iraq. Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, said yesterday:
"The idea that the US would have to deploy two brigades to protect a British withdrawal is overwritten. Our own troops can do the job. It would take about a month, and it might need a short tactical deployment of extra forces to cover it, but we have the numbers for it."In my mind, our administration should be wishing the Brits good luck and offering our help to remove all 5,500 of their troops safely. Instead we have Mr. Biddle acting like a school kid who hopes it rains on another kid's birthday party just because he didn't get invited. Of course it's much worse than that because he seems to be hoping British soldiers are killed in order to help prove his point.
As for Mr. Biddle...he may have a PhD from Harvard, but he never served a day in Vietnam or Iraq.
2 comments:
good information - why are the brits leaving?
I'm assuming b/c their lawmakers listen to the will of the people.
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