A Once-in-Half-a-Century Setback? US Withdraws from Iraq after meddling

The United States is bringing its long-standing presence in Iraq to an end—a country whose fate it had shaped since 1980.

Another Withdrawal in the Series

On September 30, 2026, the US reported that it had withdrawn its military from Iraq, citing completion of its war against Islamic State* (IS). The deeper meaning of this withdrawal can only be fully appreciated by escaping the short memory the news cycle cultivates. For instance, Fox News and other mainstream outlets rushed to conceal the nearly half a century of US engagement in Iraq by reporting that the withdrawal came after a 12-year counter-IS mission. In reality, the US military had been in Iraq since the 2003 invasion that was based on a false pretext. Certainly, Washington had also been engaged in Iraq much earlier during and after the 1991 Gulf War, or even further back in the 1980s during the plot to overthrow Iran’s Islamic Republic, and the subsequent support of Iraqi military aggression against the Persian neighbor. To further signal attempts at diversion, the head of US Central Command, Brad Cooper, made a presentation as if IS was the only reason Washington was in Iraq and claimed that the Pentagon would maintain forces in Jordan to monitor the potential rise of the apparently defeated IS. This position is seriously misleading since there was no IS before the US started meddling in Iraq, even though some US Senate documents revealed that IS benefited from US funding. The US redeployment from Iraq to Jordan invites an in-depth review of its meaning and implications in the face of........

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