Originally appeared at The American Conservative.
U.S. forces in Iraq continues to come under fire with another rocket attack Saturday that targeted the same base that was hit earlier in the week. Iraqi officials are insisting that our troops withdraw from the country:
The US retaliation prompted protest from the Iraqi government, which called it a “violation of national sovereignty.” Iraqi officials said the attack killed five members of local security forces.
The government on Saturday repeated its appeal against unilateral US military action targeting actors in Iraq.
“We also refuse that the American forces or others take any action without the approval of the Iraqi government and the commander in chief of the armed forces, as they did on the morning of 3/13/2020,” it said. “In doing so, it does not limit these actions, but rather nurtures them, weakens the Iraqi state’s ability to provide its own security, and expects more losses for Iraqis. This necessitates the speedy implementation of the parliament’s decision on the issue of the coalition’s withdrawal.”
When our military commits acts of war against Iraqis inside Iraq over the objections of their government, they have no legal basis for their attacks. US forces operate in Iraq because their government agreed to cooperate with ours. We have worn out our welcome with our repeated illegal attacks, and keeping troops in the country against their wishes is tempting fate. As long as US forces remain in Iraq, Iraqi militias will launch attacks and the US will respond with more strikes. “Deterrence” isn’t going to be “restored” when the Iraqis launching these attacks won’t be dissuaded from launching more attacks. The Wall Street Journal quotes one Iraqi lawmaker making this point:
“Today’s attack may send a message that attacks against US forces will continue until they leave Iraq, and the US can’t stop them,“ said Ali al-Ghanemi, a lawmaker in parliament’s security and defense committee.
American and allied soldiers are being put in harm’s way for no good reason. What purpose is served by keeping them there except to put them at risk of injury and death? Our continued military presence is contributing to Iraq’s instability, and it is no wonder that the Iraqi government wants us out:
An Iraqi official said “the only solution for the US is to implement the parliament decision and leave” because militias were likely to attack again, triggering additional American responses.
“If the US leaves, then Iraq will be able to deal with these groups, but with this situation, it’s chaos and undermines the state,” the official said.
American officials claim to respect Iraq’s sovereignty. In practice, our government blatantly violates it all the time. It is time that we respect the wishes of the Iraqi government and leave the security of their country to them. US withdrawal from Iraq is the only option that makes any sense at this point.
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter. This article is reprinted from The American Conservative with permission.
I remember back in the GW Bush days when this site would actually call out Republicans in power for maintaining a counterproductive and violent ‘status quo’ in Iraq and the other countries which had offended the US somehow. Now we get “our government” and “US forces.” I’ve noticed also that on the main page, there’s a screaming big-font headline about how Biden would use the military to combat the COVID virus… but besides on the Antiwar.com blog listings, you don’t see Trump’s name anywhere, or any prominent US official’s, for that matter. This administration has enjoyed a Senate majority for its entire existence and House majority for its first two years, and despite the fact that the (para)phrase, “Elected for his anti-war stance” or “opposition to the Imperial wars” seems to ingrained into the Antiwar.com psyche, Trump has done nothing to lessen our Imperial footprint, rather, he’s attacked Syria, he pulled us out of the Iranian nuclear deal and has then continued to deteriorate US-Iran relations. He’s a con man, a dirty politician so blatantly corrupt that the system can’t deal with it – a president who personally profits off his taxpayer-paid presidential vacations at his golf resorts, who commends war criminals as shining examples and brings them on the campaign trail, who declares fake national emergencies so that he can personally skirt Congress (because who needs checks and balances?) to pay for a cockamamie campaign promise and also to sell arms to his friends and business partners, the Saudi royal family. The man is corrupt as the day is long, and all that matters to him at the end of the day is that his “team” is on the positive side of the balance sheet. Yes, Biden is awful, he’s another Romney/Kerry/Clintonesque center-right neo-lib/neo-con hack, but Trump just fundamentally doesn’t understand the government, and would prefer to run things unilaterally like he’s the CEO of Trumperica, Inc, which I hope you’d agree is dangerous.
Sometimes I just wonder if Trump is part of the “con”. He had spent just about all his life in NYC, is ultra wealthy, was a registered Dem through at least 2000, and probably later. He had to play ball with local Dems as well to get where he is today, as well with Wall St bankers that had bailed him out countless of times. He signs a peace treaty with the Taliban, but most of our troops still are there, at the same time the Iraqis want us gone, and we don’t budge. He is really slick, and the problem is that a vast majority of Americans suffer from major cognitive dissonance. Truth and reality have no place in modern day America.
Yes, Trump is a standard-issue northeastern progressive Democrat who used WWE-style kayfabe to con Republicans into nominating him for president and supporting his standard-issue northeastern progressive policies.
It used to be that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats, but the last two elections both parties have actually put Democrats on their presidential ballots. So we’ve pretty much gone from de facto one-party state to de jure one-party state, at least at the executive branch level.
American governments, like any other empire in the past, pursue what they consider to be in the national interest. Important as interests are, the endless pursuit of them eventually undermines them – catastrophically.
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