The British formally handed responsibility for the key southern province of Basra over to the Iraqi occupation government on Sunday.

At the time of the invasion in 2003 the British had 44,000 troops in Iraq, responsible for four of the country's 18 provinces. Basra was their last. By next spring their troop level will be down to 2,500, with only residual duties to provide back-up and training to Iraqi security forces. The British have lost 174 troops over the nearly five years of the war.

Basra, which is largely Shiite in religious terms, usually presented fewer problems to British troops than did some of the more intense antagonisms and struggles in other parts of Iraq faced by the 160,000 U.S. forces in the country. Al-Qaida, a Sunni phenomenon, has never been especially active in Basra and the absence of Sunnis in the province has meant that Shiite-Sunni conflict has not been part of the picture.

At the same time, there have been serious problems which the British occasionally have had to deal with among competing Shiite elements, including the Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and other primarily Shiite groups, like the security forces of the government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki.

Another potential conflagration that loomed in Iraq over the weekend was attacks of Turkish air forces on elements of the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, in the north, inside Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks say that the United States gave them the green light to use Iraqi air space, which the United States in principle controls, for the attacks. The United States denies having done so, which means that the administration is lying or the Turks carried out the attacks without Washington's approval.

The British handover of Basra shows that peace and security do not have to reign in an area for occupying forces -- British or American -- to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis. The progressive reduction of British forces in theater also means that the "coalition of the willing" pretense is, in effect, entirely stripped of its raiment.

The British action also suggests that it is past time for the United States to do likewise, bringing our troops home. If the British can hand over Basra, why can't the United States hand over the rest?