Iraq coalition withering as Britain pulls out

updated 3:46 p.m. ET Oct. 9, 2007

Britain’s decision to bring half of its 5,000 soldiers home from Iraq by spring is the latest blow to the U.S.-led coalition. The alliance is crumbling, and fast: Excluding Americans, the multinational force was once 50,000 strong — by mid-2008, it will be down to 7,000.

President Bush, facing opposition to the war from the Democrat-led Congress, also is paring back. He says he is committed to gradually reducing the American force from its current peak of 168,000 soldiers to just over 130,000 by next summer.

U.S. troops already are stretched thin trying to contain Sunni Arab and Shiite Muslim extremists. But defense experts say the shrunken coalition probably won’t make much of a difference because most of the non-U.S. forces have largely stuck to non-combat roles.

“This is a U.S. and Iraqi coalition — nothing more and nothing less,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, former director of intelligence assessment at the Pentagon and now an analyst with the private Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“A British withdrawal and that of other countries really doesn’t matter very much. They’re playing a very limited role,” he said Tuesday.

A crumbling coalition
What’s certain is this: The alliance has withered dramatically since its peak in the months after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

At its height, in the months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, the multinational force numbered about 300,000 soldiers from 38 countries — 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

By January of this year, though, the combined non-U.S. contingent had dwindled to just over 14,000. As of Tuesday, it stood at 20 nations and roughly 11,400 soldiers.

It’s in for more unraveling: Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday that Britain will halve its remaining force of 5,000 next spring, and another official said there were no guarantees any British troops would remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2008.

The latest defectors include Denmark, which withdrew a 460-strong contingent from the southern Iraqi city of Basra in August and replaced it with a small helicopter unit.

In a recent newspaper interview, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen conceded his country and other coalition members miscalculated when they thought “that foreign troops would be welcomed with open arms like liberators.” Seven Danes were killed in Iraq.

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