Posted on 08/12/2026 12:45:01 PM PDT by fruser1
Washington and Baghdad agreed in 2024 to wind down the much smaller US-led operations against the Islamic State jihadist group in the country.
US troops pulled out of bases in most areas of Iraq last year but maintained a presence in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region. Bases there have regularly come under attack since the US and Israel launched the war with Iran on February 28.
A US official confirmed that the US expects to complete its pullout by September 30, but declined to say how many troops remain in Iraq or where they would be redeployed
“The United States, Iraq and coalition partners have achieved tremendous success in defeating ISIS and now the Iraqi security forces, including the Peshmerga and other Iraqi Kurdistan Region security forces, will lead the fight against terrorists in Iraq,” the official said.
The US presence in Iraq grew to more than 170,000 troops at the peak of counterinsurgency operations in 2007 during the Iraq War. In December 2011, the final combat troops departed. But in 2014, the rise of ISIS and its capture of a wide swath across Iraq and Syria brought US forces back at the Iraqi government’s invitation.
After ISIS lost its hold on territory it once claimed, coalition military operations ended in 2021. The US maintained about 2,500 troops in Iraq for training and to conduct counter-IS operations with Iraq’s military.
Some Iraqi militias have justified their existence by pointing to the US military presence, which they describe as an occupation, although the current US mission came at the invitation of the Iraqi government.
It seems unlikely that the Iraqi government will meet its deadline for disarming non-state groups. Some of the country’s most powerful Iran-backed militias have said they have no intention of giving up their weapons.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
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It only took 23 'effing years.
I hope you still have your Saddam poster up on your bedroom wall.
Another hope I have is that the Kurdish elements we worked with have gained the confidence and possibly the means to help overthrow the government of Iran.
You must be thrilled wth the forces in Germany and Japan. Only been about 62 years with no end in sight.
LOL
Make that 82 years!
I am glad you bring that up and no it is not a poster on my wall.
I did vote for Trump and I did know that foreign policy realism means he would likely not be available to avoid a war with Iran. I also, as souls here can attest, ALWAYS and continue to support the war in Iraq. I am well aware that Trump despised that war as well.
But in the first term of Trump as he himself likes to say, one of the best things he did was kill the Iraqi general Solemani on the tarmac at Baghdad. It was easy to do because we were in Iraq. Almost all Americans including Trump do not fathom the full depth and power of anti-American hatred in the world. That is especially true of islamofasicts like the IRGC. Even if Trump quits now— which I would not prefer— he has done more than all prior Presidents combined to send a message to the IRGC that they deserve to meet the virgins they so desperately desire.
I respect the long American tradition of isolationism. I genuinely wish the world was as idyllic as Rand Paul foolishly believes it is. I simply wait until Americans have been murdered in sufficient numbers for a President to do what should be done to the remaining hounds of antiAmericanism. I do want those murders to happen but I never pretended from the moment Khomeini came to power with the assistance of Jimmy Carter that the government of Iran was at war with the US, just as the government of North Korea is currently at war with us. It was always pretense.
If trump only embargoes Iran and seeks security for the strait that is also substantially better than pretending that the IRGC is not at war with us.
Part of why all of these things are harder than they should be is because our intellectual culture despises the idea of America winning a war ever since Vietnam. Defining Iraq as a defeat is part of that ridiculous masquerade. I did know that when Trump did strike— this same establishment would re figure his actions as a loss. That establishment is pro CRINK [China, Russia, Iran, North Korea]. I have never been for them and I always view our soldiers as heroes and not victims or villains.
I am genuinely sad that our culture seeks to redefine Trump’s military attacks on Iran as a failure. As in Iraq, I will not be fooled. Happy to walk that road as lonely as it ever may prove to be.
correction:
I do NOT want those murders to take place
In Germany that is changing -- because the country is being infested by the same people that have made the Middle East a dysfunctional dump for decades ... which begs the point of why the hell the U.S. would have any interest in policing that place (something that Trump has said for years, BTW).
Nice try.
We were in the Philippines for over a hundred years too.
Hope is not a strategy.
The Kurds know that truth better than almost any group of people in the world— and they remain alive and probably stronger than ever.
“You must be thrilled wth the forces in Germany and Japan. Only been about 62 years with no end in sight.”
The US forces in Europe should have been pulled out when the Soviet Union fell. Doing so would have forced the Europeans to face the need to provide for their own defense and could have set the state for a rapprochement with the new state of Russia.
At this point the past does not matter. What matters is the United States government in concert with multinational corporations and Wall Street investment firms made the decision in the 1990’s to pursue a globalist economic policy that led to the dismantling of the greatest industrial supply chain on the planet and handing manufacturing supremacy to Communist China. At the same time successive administrations decided to fund military and social spending at unprecedented levels resulting in the $40+ trillion dollar deficit and the accompanying high taxes and decaying infrastructure. We need to face the fact our country is broke cannot afford to continue to play the role of the world’s policeman. We must retrench and tend to rebuilding our industrial supply chains to ensure future generations of Americans can enjoy the blessing of liberty and economic prosperity.
And what exactly do we have to show for that?
That long American tradition of isolationism goes back to GEORGE WASHINGTON, for heaven’s sake. I’ll take George Washington over George W. Bush a million times over without question. From my profile page:
The United States should be isolationist by nature and interventionist in rare, exceptional cases. That's the only legitimate political posture for a country that is supposed to be built on the idea of limited government. A government that pisses away thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on military campaigns in Islamic sh!t-holes halfway around the world while facilitating an invasion of Third World peasants here at home has no moral claim on any loyalty from its citizens anymore.
I simply wait until Americans have been murdered in sufficient numbers for a President to do what should be done to the remaining hounds of antiAmericanism.
The biggest threats to the life and liberty of Americans can be found right here in the United States. There’s no need to go find these threats in the Middle East.
According to google AI
“United States and Philippine relations are experiencing a historic high in strategic, military, and diplomatic cooperation, marked by the 80th anniversary of formal diplomatic ties and the 75th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty. Both nations are closely aligned in countering regional maritime pressures and expanding economic partnerships.”
I would add, we got fascist Japanese out, communists out, limited the impact of Morro jihadists, and a partner to black Chinese expansion in Asia.
The marines were formed to fight the Barbary pirates and our political leaders had the same debate then that you and I are having now.
The world has never been— including at the time of Washington — a world where isolationism would work for decades at a time.
I want it to work. It works better when you destroy your enemies powerfully and agree that they have been destroyed.
Cheering for your soldiers to come home and heaping shame on their heads as they return is a sure recipe for failed deterrence and yes more murders here at home.
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