US Exits from Iraq

On Dee. 18, a convoy of U.S. Army military trucks from Iraq arrived in Kuwait. It included 500 soldiers and officers and 110 pieces of military equipment. Thus concluded one of the longest and most expensive wars that the United States has ever conducted.

And one of the least popular, both in the U.S. itself and in the eyes of the entire world. Washington justified it with references to Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, but no one believed it. Russia, China and even U.S. allies France and Germany spoke out against the war.

Many Americans did not approve of the war. In fact, Barack Obama, the current president of the U.S., then a member of the Senate from Illinois, warned against an armed operation at a meeting in Chicago in October of 2002. In his opinion, the “stupid” war would draw forces away from the fight against terrorism. Now Obama has managed to close the conflict.

The international coalition nominally participated in the war, but in reality it was the Americans with the support of the British. At the peak of military action in Iraq, there were 176,000 foreign soldiers on 500 bases. These forces quickly defeated Saddam Hussein’s army, but they were at war with insurgents for a long time. More than 1.5 million Americans passed through Iraq over nine years. Of them, 4,484 were killed and 30,000 were wounded. More than 300 soldiers from other countries were also killed, half of them British. The cost of the war for the U.S. is estimated at 1 trillion dollars.

A serious factor that affected the relationship of Iraqis to the U.S. is the number of casualties of the country’s civilian population — a minimum of 100,000 people — and the large number of refugees and displaced persons (several million). Military crimes, including the murder of unarmed people and torture of prisoners, were a blemish on the reputation of the U.S. Armed Forces.

The withdrawal of the last divisions of U.S. troops took place amid tense conditions in Washington-Baghdad relations. The Iraqis refused to grant the right of exterritoriality to American instructors remaining, and their numbers decreased sharply.

The official closing ceremony of the American military operation was without excessive pomp. The U.S. left Iraq, but the war continues, primarily in the form of terrorist acts, sometimes with significant victims.

A difficult consequence of the war is the strained intercommunal and interfaith relationships in Iraq. On the very day that the last American division evacuated, a plot was uncovered in high leadership circles in Baghdad, in which the vice president, representing the Sunni branch, was allegedly implicated. The danger of a new conflict of the Sunnis and Shi’ites has increased sharply. The entirety of Iraq is threatened by strengthened separatist tendencies in the northern part of Iraq, Kurdistan.

In other words, the U.S. soldiers evacuated Iraq and the country’s problems only grew. Now hardly anyone can predict the situation’s development.