Out of Iraq
The U.S. military makes right moves to scale back
The United States now is scaling back its military role in Iraq, after some 15 years of involvement since the invasion in 2003. It’s about time.
According to American military commanders on the ground, U.S. forces’ activities there will no longer be focused on supporting Iraqi government forces’ efforts to fight Islamic State elements and to eliminate IS pockets of control. The remaining thousands of Americans, to be reduced in number gradually, will concentrate on specialties in building up Iraq’s own forces’ capabilities, increasing their ability to defend Iraq and the government in Baghdad. There will apparently be no crowing on America’s part over the change in role.
This transformation may be coming a little late, given that the key government and U.S. victory — the taking of the city of Mosul, an IS center — occurred in July 2017. Nonetheless, the change in U.S. role comes better late than never. It also leaves behind some major problems, most of them regional rather than confined to Iraq.
Parts of neighboring Syria are still very much up in the air. IS activities and governance there still exist, and a major confrontation between U.S.backed Kurdish forces and those of U.S. NATO ally Turkey is still underway, a major political problem for the United States and NATO in general as well as for Turkey. Another problem in Iraq, perhaps impossible for the United States to deal with, is the major insertion into affairs in Iraq of Iran.
The growth of Iran’s role in Iraq, in spite of the 1980-88 major war between the two, is based on the common adherence of the majority of the populations of both countries to Shiite Islam. This phenomenon is enhanced by the recent years’ enhancement of the rivalry in the Middle East between the Sunni Islam states, led by Saudi Arabia, and the Shiite states, led by Iran. The venue where this confrontation is most intense is in Yemen, where rivalry between the two states through proxy war has torn that country to shreds.
For the United States in Iraq, it is high time to say that we have achieved what we can achieve there and it’s time to go home, 15 years later (or 26 if the first Gulf War is counted), with billions of dollars spent — and some 4,500 American lives lost.