It is from:
As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates
“The British have basically been defeated in the south,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601401_pf.html
This is what Clinton is proposing for our forces. She would leave a temporary and useless force behind as a show of resolve until she could figure a way out to disguise our total defeat.
In my limited view, the British made the same mistake in Southern Iraq as they once made in all of Iraq, when they held it as a protectorate under the old League of Nations: too aloof; not picky enough about who its local friends ought to be; too quick to trust and too trusting on the friends it chose to represent “local authority”; while it ran out of the barracks predominately only at the instances of serious local “deterioration of civil order”; all producing an attitude among the local population that the British were - because that’s what they preferred - not in charge, even on “security” matters.
Who stepped in? Lots of names of lots of local Iraqi Shia “leaders” could be offered as the answer to that question; but behind the majority of them one would find the financing and political organization of Iran. Britain’s problem was that it refused to produce a true counter-insurgency strategy (against Iranian funded militias) and preferred to pretend that it was not a foreign-funded insurgency, but simply disagreements among various local factions.
Many of the “local leaders” who have prevailed in Southern Iraq may be Iragi, may participate in the political parties and political process of Iraq but they have no doubt to whom they owe their success.
The full story has not yet been written, but when it is it will only be produced when the Iraqi nationals of southern Iraq who avoided the political snares of Iran write it and when they do they will likely hold the British as directly responsible, for their incompetence, as they will Iran, for its strategic competence.