The redeployment of British troops from their base at Basra Palace to the airport outside the southern city signals

the start of an end to a wasteful Anglo-American military campaign in Iraq, British media and politicians agreed on Monday, September 3.

"The withdrawal of British forces from Basra Palace…marks the beginning of the end of one of the most futile campaigns ever fought by the British Army," said The Independent.

Some 500 British troops pulled out from their base at Basra Palace and handed it over to Iraqi forces.

Residents said they saw armored vehicles leaving the palace in the early hours of Monday.

Helicopters also took off and landed during the night. On Monday, Iraqi soldiers were on guard outside the main gate into the palace.

Britain's nearly 5,500 troops are now stationed in a single base, at the airport on the western outskirts of the city.

Accommodation at Basra air station, where the British and US consulates are now based, has been improved in recent months to protect against incoming fire.

This year the air base, which is just five miles from the outskirts of the city of 1.8 million, has come under increasingly deadly barrages.

The British Ministry of Defense said its forces would retain overall security responsibility for Basra until the handover to provincial Iraqi control, expected towards the end of the year.

London has handed over three of the four southern provinces it held since the 2003 US-led invasion to Iraqi officials.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown had told US President George W. Bush during his first trip to Washington after assuming office that he was planning to hand over Basra to Iraqi officials within months.

Failure

The Independent said the British involvement in the Iraq war has been a fiasco.

"The British failure is almost total after four years of effort and the death of 168 personnel," it said.

Without a UN mandate, Britain joined the US in invading Iraq on claims of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, a claim later refuted by a US presidential report.

Since then, Iraq has plunged into an abyss of overlapping civil conflicts that have divided its rival religious and ethnic communities, and left tens of thousands of civilians dead.

"The British Army was never likely to be successful in southern Iraq in terms of establishing law and order under the control of the government in Baghdad," said the daily.

"In terms of establishing an orderly government in Basra and a decent life for its people the British failure has been absolute."

British troops had limited control in the southern Iraqi city.

"The British military presence has been very limited since April this year, when Operation Sinbad, vaunted by the Ministry of Defense as a comparative success, ended.

"In the last four months the escalating attacks on British forces have shown the operation failed in its aim to curb the power of the militias."

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, agreed that the redeployment was a sign of failure.

"It's an admission that the sort of role which has been performed from Basra Palace is no longer effective," he told the BBC News Online.

"I see this as a necessary step towards what I believe to be the withdrawal which would be in the interests of British forces."

Brown denied Monday that the redeployment was a signal of defeat.

"Let me make this very clear. This is a pre-planned, and this is an organized move from Basra Palace to Basra Air Station."

There has been a growing tension between London and Washington over the role of British troops in southern Iraq.

US officials described as failure British troops' performance in the oil-rich region.

Retired Major General Tim Cross, the top British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq, hit back at the weekend.

He recalled having raised serious concerns about the possibility of Iraq descending into chaos with then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld who "ignored" or "dismissed" them.

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British army during the invasion, has heaped blame on Rumsfeld and branded the post-invasion policy as "intellectually bankrupt."

AMSI Net- Islamonline