September 30, 2026 (Wednesday)
A Washington Post headline today read: “U.S. withdraws forces in Iraq as balance of power shifts to Iran.”
Journalists Mustafa Salim and Alex Horton explained: After more than two decades, the deaths of more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 U.S. troops, the wounding of more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel, and the cost of more than $2.8 trillion, the last of the U.S. military forces in Iraq today pulled out of Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq.
In December 2021 the military announced it was ending U.S. combat in Iraq, leaving about 2,500 troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces. In 2023 the Iraqi government called for complete U.S. withdrawal, and former President Joe Biden and former Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani agreed to a withdrawal plan in 2024, but Iraq allowed a small contingent of advisors to remain after that deadline when the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria led to concerns that the confusion in Syria would allow militant Islamic groups to regain a foothold there.
At the time Biden agreed to withdraw from Iraq, Iran appeared to be on the ropes, with its regime isolated from neighboring countries and laboring under sanctions and increasing public unrest. Now, as Salim and Horton note, Trump’s impulsive war on Iran has strengthened Iran’s hand in the region.
The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years before, although Iraq was not involved in that attack.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of foreign policy hawks known as “neocons” were frustrated that Democratic President Bill Clinton was not pushing American ideology overseas as hard as they thought he should. In 1997, political commentator William Kristol brought together Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neocons to insist that the United States should significantly increase defense spending and lead the world.
Believing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was destabilizing the Middle East, they saw removing him from power as key to their “Project for the New American Century.” Iraq had allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and neocons believed the U.S. must “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.”
Saddam was out of reach until September 11, 2001, when neocons saw al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. as an opportunity to “hit” Saddam Hussein, although he had not been involved in the attack. The terrorists—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—were operating out of Afghanistan, where the ruling extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, permitted al-Qaeda to have a foothold.
Although Saddam was not affiliated with the 9/11 attackers, officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed so hard on the idea that the terrorists were affiliated with Iraq that many Americans—especially those who watched the Fox News Channel, which pushed the connection—came to believe, incorrectly, that the 9/11 terrorists either were Iraqi or were working with Saddam Hussein.
Bush launched attacks on the Taliban government, successfully overthrowing it before the end of 2001. And then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America’s image. In 2002 it announced the Bush Doctrine, arguing that the new conditions of terrorism required the government to act preemptively to forestall hostile acts rather than wait for an attack.
It embraced the idea that there was “right and wrong” in foreign affairs and demanded that America wage “a war of ideas” by spreading pro-American economic and cultural policies. It warned that there were few greater threats to America than a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), meaning nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
To convince recalcitrant foreign policy realists that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, Bush administration officials warned that the dictator was amassing WMDs, including nuclear devices. In a television interview, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and insisted that Saddam was working to obtain a nuclear weapon.
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke passionately before the United Nations, providing what he insisted was evidence that Saddam had chemical WMDs and had obtained the resources to create nuclear weapons. He hinted that the Iraqi leader had worked with al-Qaeda in 2001 or that he might in the future.
Powell was well known and trusted; if he said Iraq was deadly dangerous, people thought it must be true. It later turned out that Powell had not personally vetted the “evidence” he presented and that it was almost entirely either discredited or made up of rumor.
But his speech did the trick. Enough countries to call it a “coalition of the willing”—although the only major power that participated was the United Kingdom—backed an invasion of Iraq. On March 20, 2003, American troops invaded Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government. The operation would be a “cakewalk,” the administration thought; desperate Iraqis who hated their leader would welcome coalition forces with open arms. Like cowboy heroes—and often portrayed as cowboys—American soldiers would bring democracy and capitalism to the benighted Iraqis.
Saddam’s forces crumbled in little over a month. By May the United States had set up a transitional government in Iraq overseen by former ambassador and State Department official L. Paul Bremer.
On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a fixed-wing aircraft on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a flight suit, he posed for photographs with the vessel’s crew, which had just returned from the Persian Gulf. Bush then gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Festooning the aircraft carrier was a giant banner emblazoned “Mission Accomplished.”
But, of course, it wasn’t.
Today on social media, Trump took credit to himself for ending the U.S. engagement in Iraq—although he confused the names of two different Iraqi operations—complaining that it was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.”
And yet the United States is entering its eighth month of a war on Iran that Trump apparently began with the same cowboy mentality Bush carried into the war in Iraq.
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He announced he had transformed the military by enforcing the idea of “o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”