The War Is Over: US Army Withdraws from Iraq after Nine Years of Moral and Economic Disaster

The U.S. Army will definitively withdraw from Iraq on the last day of the year, bringing to an end one of the most unnecessary wars history has ever seen, and leaving behind a terrifying balance in destruction and loss of human life. Despite the triumphalist rhetoric Obama and his administration have used to try to disguise the return of the troops, it is clear that the Iraq war will go down as one of the United States’ greatest military and diplomatic fiascos. They haven’t been defeated, but they haven’t won either, not least because the objectives of the Iraq war have kept changing since it began in March 2003.

In the diplomatic sphere, the United States has seen its influence in the region decrease as a result of the stagnation of its troops in Iraq. At the beginning of his presidential term, Obama tried to throw himself into the Afghanistan war in order to minimize the internal cost likely to result from the withdrawal from Iraq, which will be completed in a few days’ time. But Afghanistan looks to be heading the same way as Iraq, another in the genre of conflicts that only exacerbate the problems they aim to resolve. For a long time now, the U.S.’s greatest difficulty in Iraq has been not how to win, but how to get out. Now the same has begun to happen in Afghanistan.

The country that U.S. troops leave behind is surely better than the one governed by Saddam Hussein, though it continues to be embroiled in corruption and violence. What is more relevant than this tentative progress, however, is the exorbitant cost paid by both Iraq and the U.S. in order to achieve it. The number of victims runs into tens of thousands, while the hemhorraging of resources devoted to the war has brought Iraq to the brink of bankruptcy and contributed to the decline of the U.S. economy. The abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo must also be counted among the disasters of a war that should never have been started.

This time the war is really over, as opposed to when George W. Bush declared it so, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It’s been nine years of futile suffering, nine years of economic, military and moral catastrophe, the effects of which will continue to be felt for a long time to come: in Iraq, for having staged it; in the United States and the rest of the world, for having stood by and watched helplessly as a feckless delusion was turned into a tragic nightmare.