Britain announced a major withdrawal from Iraq on Wednesday (Feb 21), as thousands of additional U.S. soldiers are arriving in the war-torn country.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose popularity at home has plummeted for his unwavering support for Bush over Iraq, said British troop levels in southern Iraq would be reduced from 7,100 to 5,500 in coming months.

Britain could further reduce its troops to below 5,000 once a base at Basra Palace is transferred to Iraqi control in late summer, Blair added.

Denmark, another coalition partner in southern Iraq, also announced on Wednesday that its 460 ground troops would leave by August. Lithuania says it may withdraw its tiny 53-member contingent.

Many other countries who joined U.S.-led forces in Iraq, such as Japan and Spain, have already pulled out their troops.

The announcement came as the United State is sending some 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

The deployment of British troops in Iraq had been a success, Blair told legislators, adding that the situation in Basra now is very different from the one in Baghdad, and that Iraqi authorities were now able to take over the responsibility for security.

"What all of this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be, but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by Iraqis," he said. "Increasingly our role will be supporting training and our numbers will be able to reduce accordingly."

Some British soldiers would remain in Iraq into 2008 "as long as we are wanted and have a job to do," helping secure supply routes and borders and to support Iraqis, he added.

The White House confirmed that U.S. President George W. Bush and Blair had discussed the plans on Tuesday. A White House spokesman described Britain's cutbacks "a sign of success" in Iraq.

"President Bush sees this as a sign of success and what is possible for us once we help the Iraqis deal with the sectarian violence in Baghdad," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the British pullout is consistent with the U.S. plan to turn over more control to Iraqi forces.

"The British have done what is really the plan for the country as a whole, which is to transfer security responsibility to the Iraqis as the situation permits," Rice said. "The coalition remains intact and, in fact, the British still have thousands of troops deployed in Iraq."

Though the White House portrayed Blair's announcement as a sign of progress but Democrats seized on it to press Bush to bring U.S. troops home.

There can be no purely military solution in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "At a time when President Bush is asking our troops to shoulder a larger and unsustainable burden policing a civil war, his failed policies have left us increasingly isolated in Iraq and less secure here at home."

News of the British withdrawal plans was welcome by Iraqi officials. Sami al-Askari, a Shiite lawmaker and political adviser to Maliki, said it fulfilled "the wish of the Iraqi government and all the political powers in the country."

But Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh said last week that Iraqi forces might not be entirely ready to take over the control of the city.

British Conservative party leader David Cameron said he backed the withdrawal, but added that questions remained to be answered. Britain needed to know whether the Iraqi forces were ready to takeover the security of Basra and whether reduced numbers of British troops would be able to defend themselves against siege, he said.

A total of 132 British soldiers have died since the start of the Iraq war on 19 March, 2003.

Editor: Wing