US to step into Basra as British pull back?

Hey, guys, there's a turd over there you haven't stepped in yet,

The US military is ready to intervene in southern Iraq to quell any unrest as British forces prepare to pull out from their last base in the oil port of Basra, the Pentagon said Thursday.

As there is no practical available reserve to deploy right now, maybe I should go with the more prosaic, "You and what army?"

The US is barely holding its own in its current deployment structure, and the intraShia war is as complex and incendiary as anything else out there. Badr, SIIC, and Fadhila all have large presences in the various security forces equipped with US supplied weaponry, and now, we're talking about the US fighting its way in.

Basra is a city of 1 million people of whom about 12 want the US there.

Later: The Guardian has a story on the Basra withdrawal with this at the bottom.

The impending withdrawal has been intensively discussed in telephone calls between London and Washington over the last few weeks....

The Pentagon, focused on making its "surge" strategy work, does not welcome the prospect of having to deploy much-needed US troops to the south to prevent fighting and to protect the oil wells and the road from Kuwait to Baghdad.

The Pentagon does not share British optimism about Iraqi forces taking over.....

(Also, this Robert Burns (AP) piece from ten days ago begins to find a little context,

But officials are laying the groundwork for possible overtures to Turkey and Jordan on using their territory to move some troops and equipment out of Iraq, the official said. The main exit would remain Kuwait, but more routes would make it easier and safer for U.S. troops leaving western and northern Iraq.

We could fly the personnel out, but all the heavy equipment and vehicles will have to convoy out (in a million convoys) through some combination of the Shia south, Anbar, or north through Kurdistan into Turkey. (and the Turks are about as willing as they were when we went in.))