U.S. troops in Iraq quietly thwarted two separate drone attacks on bases hosting American soldiers in the first week of 2022. The attacks, attributed to Iraqi Shiite militias, are no surprise: America’s presence in Iraq is increasingly unwelcome. More attacks are bound to come as long as the Biden administration decides to keep forces there. With each passing day, the risk of a deadly attack increases.
And for what?
The presence of U.S. troops won’t stop terrorist attacks from happening and they can’t contain Iran, which has cemented its hold on some Iraqi military institutions since 2003. American soldiers are likely to die in vain because, just as in Afghanistan, they have been given the impossible task of acting as an ephemeral thumb on the scale of a foreign country’s politics.
Americans must ask themselves: Is this worth it? The United States withdrew from Afghanistan last year because its presence there no longer served its interests. Neither does staying in Iraq.
The U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq made painfully clear that there is no magic number of American troops that can eradicate terrorism. The roughly 2,500 in Iraq certainly cannot. While Washington’s foreign policy establishment wrings its hands about the risks of leaving, it appears to be ignoring the clear costs of staying.
President Biden stated that his decision to leave Afghanistan was not just about Afghanistan. “It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries”, he proclaimed. That era will not truly end until the United States has withdrawn all of its forces from Iraq.
Mr. Biden should announce plans for a phased troop withdrawal beginning no later than this spring. It should be closely coordinated with Iraqi, regional and European partners. The specter of a backlash at home, similar to the criticism over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will weigh heavily on Mr. Biden. But if he doesn’t act, attacks on U.S. troops will inevitably increase, making it politically more difficult to leave while simultaneously increasing the risk of the United States getting dragged into a larger conflict in the event of a miscalculation or provocation by a brazen militia, Washington or Iran.
Two decades of a failed and costly strategy in Afghanistan made the decision to leave an obvious one. But the case for leaving Iraq is even stronger. Many elected leaders in the Iraqi political system that Washington helped spawn want U.S. troops to depart the country. The fact that their presence has not been a subject of intense domestic debate shows how inured we’ve become to a long military presence abroad.
Proponents of staying in Iraq argue it is crucial to collect intelligence on terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and prevent an adversary from filling any “vacuum” resulting from a U.S. departure. Nearly identical arguments were made in the case of Afghanistan.
But the truth is that the U.S. presence has helped fuel insurgencies in Iraq. Al Qaeda, and later, the Islamic State, were able to take advantage of their gains against the state and the chaos that ensued. Iraq’s neighbors will always have a greater interest in the country’s future than the United States does.
Moreover, the argument that troops are needed to combat the Islamic State — as in the recent raid that resulted in the death of the Islamic State’s leader in northwestern Syria (a country with a small U.S. military presence of its own) — does not hold up. Iraq and neighboring countries that fought the group are increasingly capable of preventing a significant resurgence on their own. Pursuing “ISIS zero” is a recipe to stay in Iraq forever.
As in Afghanistan, the rationale for the U.S. military presence in Iraq was a naïve hope that our soldiers could kill faster than our enemies could recruit. This dysfunctional strategy led to a hollow Afghan government that dissolved before our eyes as soon as the United States lifted its thumb off the scales. In Iraq, it helped give rise to the Islamic State.
Iraq’s government is unlikely to fall apart with the departure of U.S. troops. Though divisions between and among Iraq’s sectarian groups have diminished the ability of the state to serve its citizens, the government itself is not delegitimized or weakened beyond repair, as was the case in Afghanistan. And as unsavory as they are to the United States, the powerful Shiite militias also view the Islamic State as an existential enemy, and have fought it with immense fervor.
U.S. troops in Iraq ended their combat mission in December. The Biden administration has since assured Americans that the troops that remain in Iraq are there in a strictly advisory capacity. But we have been down this road before. As 2014 closed, President Barack Obama similarly declared that “our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending” and we would shift entirely to a “train, advise and assist” mission. Yet it took 107 more U.S. deaths, 612 American soldiers wounded in action, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and six more years for American operations to truly end.
The United States does not have the answer for Iraq’s woes. It cannot allay the frustration of Iraqis over an unresponsive government and political violence; it is ill equipped to mediate between Iraq’s competing factions or untangle the web of crisscrossing interests that stymies progress.
Nor can it change the reality that some of Iraq’s most powerful political blocs see their interests reflected in Iran while others feel sidelined. Even Iran lacks the ability to control Iraq’s infighting and the brazen antics of power-hungry militias, a reality that a former acting and deputy director of the C.I.A., Michael Morell, warned the Senate about in June 2020.
Pulling out of Iraq is unlikely to be trouble-free. But with the withdrawal from Afghanistan still visible in the rearview mirror, Iraqi partners may actually prepare for U.S. troops to leave this time around. The price of inaction is to force U.S. soldiers to be sitting ducks in a geopolitical tinderbox.
Trita Parsi is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where Adam N. Weinstein, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, is a research fellow focusing on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Mr. Parsi previously served as head of the National Iranian American Council, where Mr. Weinstein also worked as senior law and policy analyst.