Surge II?

Here's the part of the Iraqi front I always forget about:

But “it’s hard now to paint Basra as a success story,” said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces…

“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…

Home to two-thirds of Iraq’s oil resources, Basra is the country’s sole dependable outlet for exporting oil, with a capacity of 1.8 million barrels a day. Much of Basra’s violence is “over who gets what cut from Iraq’s economic resources,” a U.S. Army strategist in Iraq said….

Opines Allahpundit:

The point to take away from this is that there are no U.S. troops in the south and no British troops in any number worth mentioning anymore, so even if we can get Baghdad and Anbar under control, there’s almost bound to be a war going on somewhere in the country — i.e. the south — by the time we leave.

I realize nobody's going to want to hear this, but doesn't that mean Basra is where the "Surge" should go next? If only to prevent further Iranian meddling?

Hey, I agree it's great to have allies when and where you can get 'em, but the British wimp-out in Basra just proves - redundantly in my mind - that the United States is the only country in the world capable of effectively fighting the Global Islamic Caliphate. And that was before the Brits formally defected to the sidelines.

There is a more direct alternative, of course: liberate Iran and destroy the mullahgarchy. I realize nobody's going to want to hear THAT, either, but if this war is ultimately to be won, to say nothing of Iraq being stablized, it is inevitable.