They said the failure had delayed the British withdrawal by "many months".
The British have been winking at the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army in Basra for five years and have done absolutely nothing about the presence of a private army of terrorists basically running the second-largest city in Iraq. Sadr would run the city, and would keep a "peace" that would in time allow the British to leave.
Maliki's military action against Sadr destroyed the understanding that the British had reached in Basra--but it was an understanding that needed destroying.
I understand that Maliki would not deal with the British chain of command, and will meet only with US commanders. The Brits were never popular nor do they know how to be popular in the ME givened their legacy. The last time the Brits were in Iraq was WWI, they threw out the Turks, and manage to insult every tribal leader in Iraq which resulted in the Iraqis helping the Turks to retake Iraq. The Brit force was cut off and surrounded by Turk/Iraqi tribal forces and almost starved to death. At least the provincial Americans (the cowboy, meat and potato, beer drinking and hard liquour types) managed to build coalitions with the various tribal leaders and learned to use force judicially until a US proxy force was formed to do the future fighting. Battle for Basra is the shakedown run for the US trained Iraqi Army. We will simply adjust the training and doctrine, and the Iraqi Army will go into battle again, and again, and again. Each time the Iraqi Army will flush out their idiots, promote the deserving ones and will become a good fighting force.