The Brits are bailing out, pulling thousands of troops out of the south of Iraq, amid reports in the British press that all U.K. forces will be gone by the end of 2008. It's a body blow to the Coalition of the Willing.

But Dick Cheney, never one to be tethered to pesky reality, says:

"Well, I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Cheney told ABC News' Jonathan Karl.

"In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels," Cheney said.

Tony Cordesman of CSIS, ever the realist, makes the point that what the Brits are doing is simply handing the south over to the Shiite militias, and that Britain long ago "lost" the south:

There is no doubt that any British troop reduction that is not coordinated with a US reduction weakens the image of the Coalition and further isolates the US. This is a war of perceptions, as well as military power, and the influence of British cuts will be negative.

At the same time, the British military position in the south is radically different from that of the US. The British long ago essentially ceded the two provinces they control -- Basra and Maisan -- to Shi'ite Islamist factions. They lost Basra in 2005 to rival Shi'ite extremist parties and essentially let most of the city become a no go zone unless they conducted active operations. They pulled out of much of the southeast to the north of Basra in 2006.

The British soft approach has worked little better, if at all, than the American hard approach. The British were not defeated in a military sense, but lost in the political sense if "victory" means securing the southeast for the central government and some form of national unity. Soft ethnic cleansing has been going on in Basra for more than two years, and the south has been the scene of the less violent form of civil war for control of political and economic space that is as important as the more openly violent struggles in Anbar and Basra.

As a result, the British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British "lost" the south more than a year ago. The Shi'ites will takeover, Iranian influence will probably expand, and more Sunnis, Christians, and other minorities will leave. British action will mean more pressure for federation and separatism, but local power struggles are more likely to be between Shi'ite factions than anything else.