The tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.
In 2003, George W. Bush
famously declared victory in Iraq.
A powerful explosion
killed more than 20 people today.
The city has been in a state of chaos.
Deadliest strike against American forces.
Bodies have been found,
policemen's, security officers'.
Car exploded today
in the Iraqi city of Basra.
Rockets attacks are a daily occurrence.
What was considered liberation in Iraq
is beginning to look more and more like occupation.
18 years later, an estimated half a million Iraqis,
and 6,840 U.S. troops have perished in the conflict.
Today, the U.S. has 2,500 troops in Iraq,
down from a peak of a 168,000 in 2007.
In July, the government claimed that American troops
will no longer engage in combat;
instead, they'll only train and assist Iraqi security forces
in their fight against ISIS.
This is just diplomatic theater.
The Iraqi parliament, which has voted for the U.S.
to leave the country, points out that renaming combat troops
"trainers and advisers" is deceptive.
It also won't prevent the conflict
from once again escalating
into a cycle of violence and retaliation.
The U.S. military is still engaging in air strikes,
and in April, after militias attacked five U.S. facilities,
the Biden administration
made good on its promise to hit back.
The U.S. should withdraw all troops from Iraq
and finally end this disastrous war.
Our presence in the country has done the opposite
of its stated goal of providing safety and security
in the region.
I was born in Iraq and lived through Saddam's regime,
Operation Desert Storm, U.S. sanctions,
Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Iraqi Civil War.
I witnessed first hand how U.S. actions that favor one group
repeatedly angered another group,
which is why the war has been
an endless game of whack a mole.
I think a moral obligation, to be sure
that when we leave Iraq, we leave it better off
than we found it.
In 2003, L. Paul Bremer,
who was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq,
disbanded the army, which was the most disastrous decision
in the course of the conflict.
The 25-person Interim Governing Council he created
was designed to represent
the diversity of Iraq's population,
but all it did was augment the complexity
of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups;
the result was inflaming sectarian tensions,
which led to a deadly civil war.
The region surrounding it is even more complex.
Numerous nations have competed for decades
throughout the greater Middle East,
from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and more.
When the U.S. removed Saddam,
it allowed these foreign interests
to work through proxies within Iraq,
much as they have in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya.
For the U.S. to bring stability to Iraq,
it would need to establish peace
in the entire region as well.
First, all the Sunni majority nations
would need to reconcile with themselves,
then the Sunni nations with Iran and Iran's proxies.
But as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq,
it's destined to favor one side over another,
and will only exacerbate the regional conflicts.
The decision by the U.S. to back the Kurds
and the Iraqi mobilization forces
in their battle against ISIS may appear successful,
but changing the region's balance of power
has caused new threats to emerge.
This situation is analogous
to the U.S. experience in Afghanistan:
We supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets,
only to see those same Mujahideen
and their Pakistani backers take full control of the country
and become new adversaries
in the form of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Similarly, in Iraq, after the fall of ISIS,
the Iranian-backed militias that had worked with the U.S.,
gained new influence within Iraq.
And the U.S. presence in the region encouraged other nations
to launch their own military operations.
Turkey started bombing Syrian Kurds,
Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined forces and attacked Yemen,
and the Iranianbacked militia Kitaib Hezbollah
was caught using American-made equipment
that the U.S. had given to the Iraqi military.
The result was to strengthen Iran,
just as Operation Iraqi Freedom had done back in 2003.
So the U.S. switched its focus
to containing Iranian influence,
even assassinating Qassem Soleimani
and Abu Mahdi AlMuhandis,
whose militia was largely responsible
for the defeat of ISIS.
This farce won't end
until there's a complete U.S. withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. says it's sticking around
to support the Iraqi military and government,
even though each has publicly stated
that they want the Americans to leave.
There's nothing stopping Bush's disastrous war
from going on for another 18 years
in an endless loop of military actions,
followed by unintended consequences,
followed by a military response
to deal with those unintended consequences,
followed by more unintended consequences.
After 18 years, it's time to give up on the hope
that U.S. troops can bring peace and stability to Iraq.
It's time to bring them all home.