British withdrawal from Basra

Brendan O'Neill has a piece on the Spiked website which seems about right:

The British troop withdrawal from Basra has both been hailed as a victory and described as a defeat...

It’s neither. The withdrawal is better understood as a tightly-controlled PR stunt designed to make the British elite’s lack of political will for staying in Iraq look like something more meaningful. The movement of the last-remaining British troops from the centre of Basra to the outskirts of Basra doesn’t represent a break from Britain’s strategy in Iraq, in the form of a final victory or a crushing defeat. Rather, the withdrawal only makes the political reality – which is that in spirit the British pulled out of Iraq long ago – into a formal reality, too.

He emphasises the central role in the PR war of Tom Newton Dunn, who is the Sun's defence correspondent and also the son of the East Midlands Lib Dem MEP Bill Newton Dunn.