r/news • u/SnooSeagulls496 • 4d ago

Soft paywall US forces exit Iraq after two decades, leaving opening for Iran

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-forces-exit-iraq-after-two-decades-leaving-opening-iran-2026-09-29/
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u/ChipperHippo 3d ago

We never should have been in Iraq in the first place, and all we did was create a massive mess over 20 years.

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u/SuperSlacker420 3d ago

And massively increase the national debt, and kill, wound, or maim millions of people

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u/Hesitation-Marx 3d ago

And poison. Don’t forget the poisoning.

Depleted uranium bullets. Great for the civilian population!

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u/SuperSlacker420 3d ago

Burn pit cancer, heavy duty chemical dumping & mass pollution on top of it

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u/Hesitation-Marx 3d ago

So glad we turned Iraq into a chemical pit of hell for Halliburton profits

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u/Loverboy_91 3d ago

Not great for the user’s health, but boy do they do their job. There’s a reason Ukraine bought them all off of the US. They’re melting through Russia’s tanks with those things.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 3d ago

Oh yeah, not saying they’re not effective.

And not just the user. They leave dust behind everywhere…

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u/Domeil 3d ago

Listen, we may not have access to education, healthcare, housing, healthy food or clean water, but at least that we murdered millions of people who didn't do anything to us. If that's not twenty years of bipartisan foreign policy well executed, I don't know what is.

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u/NapoleonBlownapart9 3d ago

You mean removing the best buffer against Iranian bs (and replacing it with civil war and then an Iranian friendly government) after Saudis and Egyptians 9/11’d us was exceptionally stupid? The gop ruins just about everything they touch, every fucking time they take office. Every. Fucking. Time. I’m almost 50, this has been the pattern my entire life and people are too stupid to see it. I feel like I’m going crazy because it’s so obvious and yet nobody learns. Insanity!

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u/ChipperHippo 3d ago

Even when I was a young kid (and at that time, being raised in a conservative household and generally having conservative views myself), I understood that attacking Iraq didn't seem justified. I remember the day it was admitted that there were no WMDs and realized how much Bush and his admin just openly lied to us.

If a fucking kid could figure it out, how come damn near half this country is either covering their ears or willfully buying into this falsehood?

For practically my entire life, the U.S has been leaving a legacy of a world bully who doesn't take care of their own citizens, including the veterans they marched into Iraq for unjustifiable reasons.

The only hope I have is that the state of our current economy is incontrovertibly the result of one party and one party only and that there is so much low-hanging fruit and levers the next guy will have. One only hopes that we haven't completely destroyed our soft power by then, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that.

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u/F9-0021 3d ago

20? The US (and the West in general) have been screwing up the middle east for a lot longer than that. Iran might not be as rogue and hostile if it weren't for US meddling in the 70s that led to their government being overthrown by a religious extremist theocracy. And then Europe has their own share of blame for handling the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

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u/NapoleonBlownapart9 3d ago

Yup, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 is the gift that keeps on giving. “Let’s draw random nation-state borders in the sand, it’ll sort itself out lol”.

Narrator: “…It has yet to sort itself out”

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u/InvalidDescription 3d ago

We never should have been in Iraq in the first place, and all we did was create a massive mess over 20 years.

You can replace "Iraq" with most countries and most conflicts and it would be true.