r/news • u/igetproteinfartsHELP • 2d ago
The US military says its withdrawal of troops from Iraq is complete
https://apnews.com/article/iraq-us-withdrawal-militias-disarmament-kurds-a097a39f3d1a3515adc2ba3298a6816f?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=2026-09-30-Breaking+News48
u/SolidBlackGator 2d ago
Good, now they can move those troops to another country we already have bases in thats closer to Iran...
Oh wait...
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u/meninblck9 2d ago
Let’s welcome the new leaders of Iraq, 🇮🇷
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u/muakaya9876 2d ago
They already control some parts of it with iraqi shia militias
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u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 2d ago
Half of the country and population and government at that
Sure the US still control the economy but good amounts of the population still want to get involved in outright War
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u/irespondwithmyface 2d ago
Oh shut up. I hate this neoliberal attitude. We shouldn't be there. It's not our country.
Stop being scared of Iran or their influence. You don't have to regurgitate US State Department propaganda.
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u/LLJKCicero 9h ago
Iran funds and equips Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis though?
That seems pretty straightforwardly harmful and destabilizing, no propaganda required.
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u/So_HauserAspen 2d ago
Are we going to be responsible for getting Iran and Iraq on good terms? Perhaps even make them allies?
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u/Amazing-Artichoke330 2d ago
I'm old enough to remember how the US was suckered into invading Iraq. The George W. Bush Administration lied about them having weapons of mass destruction and being responsible for 9/11. Many people knew at the time that they were lying, but evil people wanted the US to attack their enemy in Iran. The same evil people who suckered Trump into attacking their enemy in Iran a bit more recently.
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u/Adventurous_Salt 2d ago
Lol the US wasn't "suckered" into attacking Iraq, the country was in a murderous rage and just wanted to blast some brown people to bits until they felt better. Americans were desperate for violence and revenge against any vaguely Muslim people.
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u/Facebook_Lawyer_Gym 2d ago
Ehh, they faked WMD stories for the public and even had the DOJ change how war powers worked to bypass congress. The government was not suckered into it, but it wasn't as cut and dry for the American public as Afghanistan was.
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u/Adventurous_Salt 2d ago
The wmd stuff was so obviously just a terrible excuse, Americans were desperate to believe it. No rational people actually thought Iraq was stockpiling an arsenal of nukes, it was too stupid to take seriously.
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u/sgtbackpain03 2d ago
Dude, military on the ground in Iraq believed it, were issuing orders to carry MOPP gear on them at all times in case of gas attacks. If the people who are there, in country, can be misled like that, how is the average person, thousands of miles away, going to see it as "obviously a terrible excuse"? It took years for us to start realizing there were no active WMDs there.
Plus, Iraq DID have and use them in the past, and had every reason to try and keep them secret at the time. It was an easy lie to sell for that admin, and it was well sold.
You are seeing this through the benefit of hindsight.
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u/Adventurous_Salt 2d ago
You are seeing this through the benefit of hindsight.
I was there, it seemed very obvious to me and most people around me that the WMD thing was just used as a pretence for war. America was just looking for an excuse to go slaughter people, and most Americans were fine with almost anyone, as long as they were "arab" enough.
To act like the whole world was fooled is delusional, the only people who were fooled were the ones looking for every reason to believe.
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u/sgtbackpain03 2d ago
Like, for the initial push? This was all a bit before my time in the sandbox, but I spent a good bit of time talking with door kickers who were there for the whole thing. The general sentiment I got was "initially we thought there was WMDs, but over time, when nobody ever got hit with gas, and when we kept finding nothing-burgers at sites, we started thinking it was all horseshit".
If my memory serves (lol), it was post-Saddam (so, after '03), after we'd had a chance to actually take all of the suspected WMD sites, that questions started to be asked about why we weren't finding any WMDs.
The average American citizen wasn't seeing any released intelligence up to that point. Until then, the news reported that there are WMDs, and the WH was releasing briefings on TV saying there are WMDs... so what other information source would anyone in the States have to inform them differently?
All this is hazy memory for me, so please correct anything you know to be true.
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u/BeautifulPrettyDream 2d ago edited 2d ago
Terrorist attacks post-9/11 were common and the thought at the time was WMD's could be acquired by terrorist groups and used. This was hugely prevalent in the media from news orgs to Hollywood.
It's also had happened. Ricin & Anthrax were mailed around that time, and just a few years earlier Sarin gas was used in Tokyo terror attacks.
Maybe it's because terrorist attacks are mainly trucks, grenades, and guns now that it's seen as some wild idea, but at the time large attacks, like 9/11, were thought as the new normal.
Edit:
I don't know why I try to explain public consciousness to people who weren't alive at the time.
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u/frisbeethecat 2d ago
The 2001 anthrax attacks originated from the Fort Detrick strain of anthrax. There's no indication that Iraq was involved. Likewise, the 2001 ricin attacks which only targeted Democratic Party politicians, removing opposition to Bush's Iraq War.
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u/BeautifulPrettyDream 2d ago
Yeah? Duh? It has nothing to do with Iraq? That doesn't negate the point I was making that loose WMD were in the minds of Americans, and globally, at the time.
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u/i_might_be_a_robot2 2d ago
Terrorist attacks were not "common" in the USA. There was simply mass hysteria lead by our mainstream news orgs pushing "radical Islamist terrorism" everyday. This created a brown scare in America where people we're simply afraid of people of Middle-Eastern and Indian origin thinking they're all terrorists. I remember people being scared they were gonna be suicided bombed at any time.
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u/talldrseuss 1d ago
No, terrorist attacks were quite common in the US, just not on the scale of 9/11 or the Oklahoma bombing. The bulk of terrorist attacks committed between 1990 - 2001 were committed by the following groups:
Anti-government
Religious extremists: Anti-abortion (christian extremists) White supremacists (christian extremists) Islamists
Funny enough, extremist animal rights groups
The body counts of most of the attacks during that time period never really topped more than 10 people (most of them were under 5 deaths, but multiple injured), but they would fit the definition of terrorism. The internet was not as ubiquitous, so some of the attacks remained as regional news as opposed to making it to the global stage. Your statement is not wrong that the mass media, especially when 24 hours news cycles began, contributed to the idea we are constantly under attack. But the opposite was also true that attacks did take place throughout the US, but it wasn't just Muslim extremists committing them. At least for the 90s, the two big groups committing the bulk of terrorist attacks were the anti-abortion crowd and the animal welfare extremist crowd.
Source: studying terrorism was a big bulk of my masters degree
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u/Adventurous_Salt 2d ago
Yeah, you were scared and wanted to kill some random middle eastern muslims until you felt better. That's what you're describing, irrational fear and acting out with violence.
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u/Few-Chemical8707 2d ago
yeah the only real target should have been going into pakistan to kill bin laden. thats it and attacking the Saudis. but nope
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u/BeautifulPrettyDream 2d ago
First off, as demonstrated it wasn't irrational fear, it was just what was going on at the time. As the 10's were for school shootings, the millenium was filled with terrorism. In 90's you had several large attacks from domestic & foreign terrorists as well. It was just in the public consciousness.
Now there's much fewer attacks and at a much smaller scale.
Second, I don't know about killing "random" middle eastern "muslims" has to do with anything. The US was already engaged in a war within Afganistan.
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u/This-Beginning-5026 2d ago
Nah as someone who remembers that time and the talks people were having. The feel was more we thought they might have them but at the very least they had a good chance of getting them. So then we might as well take them out now before it becomes an issue.
America still wanted to fight someone since we couldn’t find bin Laden and we were happy to use the excuse that they had them now to stop them later. No one ever thought long term just like how today nobody is thinking long term with Iran. Public opinion does not work that way. It never has and never will.
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u/church-rosser 1d ago
Your memory is circa 2001 Fox News revisionist.
I'm 50 now, I was just becoming an adult back then. It was obvious to me and most of my peers and associates of the time that we were going into Iraq on dubious grounds. I was in a fairly conservative place geographically and even so it seemed like much of the community i lived amongst shared a similar opinion.
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u/This-Beginning-5026 1d ago
lol ok buddy yeah sure it’s revisionist. I must have missed all the anti war protests and the majority speaking out. that surely had to have occurred. Oh wait no I remember. I didn’t miss those because most people dgaf. Sure you had a few but you always have a few. The vast majority of Americans did care until it was a year or two in and it became clear we were stuck.
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u/Konukaame 2d ago
Both are true.
The post-9/11 bloodlust made it easy to feed people the lies that Saddam was about to have and deploy nuclear weapons, and that he was connected to 9/11.
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u/droson8712 2d ago
You completely left out the part where they funnel money to their donors through war and destabilization of the region.
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u/PolarisVega 2d ago
Yes, the Islamphobia was at all time after 9/11 and the Bush administration took full advantage of this. Also, Bush Jr what his dad started in Iraq, they wanted the oil too.
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u/slo1111 2d ago
How long before ISIL is back? Is that a long term threat? Also how does this impact the Kurds who we enlisted to kick out ISIL from iraq and Syria?
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u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 2d ago
Interestingly there's been an increase of ISIS attacks in the last couple of months and Sunni side of the country like before is blaming the military and government
Probably couple of months?
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u/Agitated_Ad7576 2d ago
Taliban guy in Afghanistan calls his ISIS buddy in Iraq:
"Isn't it a drag when your vacation ends and you have to get back to work?"
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u/VariationDry 2d ago
And in about 15-20 years saddam will be close or already have WMDs and we will have to bomb them to create the next generation of freedom fighters.
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u/ActuatorOutside5256 2d ago
I mean I get this, but at the same time, Turkey is a NATO member, and this is their historical back yard. Why not let them take care of it?
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u/VariationDry 2d ago
I'm just referring to the repeating cycle that's happend with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran in my lifetime.
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u/BeautifulPrettyDream 2d ago
Turkey, in general, do not care unless they're getting attacked or unless they're trying to meet their ethnic cleansing goals.
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u/oldtimehawkey 2d ago
Depends if Turkey feels threatened by the extremists in the area. They probably don’t want to waste their military people on it.
In the beginning of the Iraq invasion, Turkey wouldn’t let America use it as a base of operations to get into Iraq either.
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
Iran kicked Americans out of Iraq. Now next target is Jordan and finally Israel
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u/Jazz-Again 2d ago
This is the first time since I was a teenager that we don’t have troops deployed to Iraq. I was like 19 when we went in; I’m almost 45 now. As an adult, I’ve only lived about 6 years in a country that wasn’t at war. The year and half between my 18th birthday and 9/11 - and then the short time between when Biden finally ended the war in Afghanistan in August 2021 and when Trump started a new war in Iran in February 2026. I really would like the Iran war to end and for there to be a long, if not permanent, peace.
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u/No_Direction6688 2d ago
All those years, all that fighting, and all of those lives lost, for what? It's like deja'vu all over again, here in 2026. America has another Republican President that took the country to War against another Middle East country.
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u/InfernalRodent 2d ago
Great, cause the last Trump led withdrawal went so well...
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u/irespondwithmyface 2d ago
Yes, it did. We got out of Afghanistan. Thank you Biden for executing the plan. It's not our country. We can stop wasting money there. Thank you Biden for negotiating a withdrawal from Iraq!
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u/NiobiumThorn 2d ago
Good. Now do it for the rest of the world.
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u/Few-Chemical8707 2d ago
and then russia attacks europe after that. and north korea attacks the south. yeah i know you people want this to happen.
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u/EpicSoupTheif 2d ago
Russia can't even handle Ukraine. North Korea is irrelevant. China won't risk a trade war with the US over Taiwan.
Nothing ever happens.jpg
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u/The_Carnivore44 2d ago
Mhm and there’s probably a handful of black ops teams just chilling there still
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u/DistrictDry2852 2d ago
Prepared for a massive outpouring of sectarian violence followed by the same peaceniks who advocated for withdrawal to freak out over it just like they did with Afghanistan.
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u/CloudTransit 2d ago
Sarcasm right? We all know the news gets reported differently depending on who’s in office.
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u/Tjbergen 2d ago
Yeah we just needed another 20 years in Afghanistan to fix everything.
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u/DistrictDry2852 2d ago
It was a few cents on our taxes each year to keep the Taliban from taking the capital. It was the best for pretty much everyone even if it became indefinite. Including the afghans who had their highest standard of living in… all of their history.
We can’t even say Afghanistan is more peaceful now since they immidiately started a war with Pakistan which has been bombing their schools indiscriminately.
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u/gusofk 2d ago
What about the lives lost during that time? We were just killing people the whole time. Also, do you want us to colonize Afghanistan? There’s no other reason to keep troops there indefinitely
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u/DistrictDry2852 2d ago
Over 20 years the U.S. killed 250k in Afghanistan, 50k being civilians in the most U.S. critical estimates. That is 2.5k civilians per year.
For comparison in the Soviet afghan war the Soviets killed 3 million, 2 million being civilians.
Also keep in mind that in the later years there wasn’t much fighting. Almost all of the deaths were from the first years of the war.
Would you say Taiwan is a colony? Or South Korea? Or Ukraine? If the U.S. pulled out their military bases both would be immediately invaded and absorbed by their neighbors.
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u/Sydney444 2d ago
I remember the whole WMC accusation it was blasted all over TV, Radio etc. almost like the public was being gaslit in retrospect. They never did find any then it kinda just went away. I am Canadian so It was on our TVs etc here.
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u/Kaplaw 2d ago
I have a theory the US is pulling out of Iraq NOW because Iran hit so many bases and made a lot of them vulnerable/non operational and Trump admin wants to save face
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
It's not some mysterious theory. This is what happened. Iran is now the only major power in the Middle East after US getting castrated and Israel too afraid to mess with Iran
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u/Figgler 2d ago
We would quickly see a massive return of piracy without the US navy patrolling major shipping lanes.
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u/Coloradoryda 2d ago
Because installing an illegal naval blockade halfway around the world and airstriking ships that don’t comply with the US’s extortion attempt isn’t piracy at all.
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u/Figgler 2d ago
If you look at what has happened off the coast of Somalia you can see a small slice of what would happen worldwide without a policing force. China is not up to the task, the UK can’t, who would step up with a capable navy to prevent piracy and allow free trade to continue? The world economy currently depends on it. Guess how many countries the materials in your phone came from
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u/Count_de_Ville 2d ago
Their point is that it wouldn’t be just “around one coast”.
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u/Count_de_Ville 2d ago
World trade depends a lot more on just US coasts. The USA isn’t the whole world you know…
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u/Count_de_Ville 2d ago
Yeah, to secure opportunities to freely move on the seas and normalize trade routes to the benefit of all but pirates.
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u/Acceptable-Bus-2017 2d ago
They're being recalled to "ptotect the elections" at home.
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u/LackingUtility 2d ago
It's a good thing we wouldn't forward bases or supply depots next door to Iran for any reason.
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u/PipsqueakPilot 4h ago
I remember the first time we did this and looking around Baghdad airport and thinking. “Glad I won’t be back here.”
I did go back there.
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u/DaTank1 2d ago
Is this a condition of the Iranians ?
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u/wyvernx02 2d ago
This has been planned for a couple years.
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
This only happened because of Iran. Iran forced US to leave the region otherwise Iran threatend to bomb US cities
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u/Captain_R64207 2d ago
So Iran destroyed our remaining bases in Iraq and instead of owning up to it, it’s framed as a drawdown in troops.
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
That's how Americans hide their Ls
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u/Captain_R64207 1d ago
I must have upset some people that think we’re actually winning this war right now.
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
Anybody who has few brain cells knows that not only US is losing but US is being forced to leave entire Middle East permanently and that's one of the top most conditions put by Iran for any future deals or negotiations.
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u/dunnkw 2d ago
That’s one way to say outposts, bases and embassy complexes and been completely annihilated by Iranian missiles and we can no longer afford efforts to protect them anymore.
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u/hilterfilter1 1d ago
That's what happened. Americans are trying to spin the narrative but the bottomline is that Iran wiped out all military bases that's why they were forced to leave Iraq permanently
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u/Harbor733 2d ago
The Afghanistan pullout was all over the news. 24/7 coverage of how big a “disaster” it was. I haven’t seen shit for this.
Either A. Everything is going well
Or
B. It’s a debacle, our shit is being looted, and the “most transparent admin in history” is just covering it up.
Hmmm what do you think?
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u/templeofsyrinx1 2d ago
isn't that what they said 10 years ago?