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Key point:Unwilling to directly retaliate against Israel, Saddam instead hammered Irans own nuclear nuclear research facility in Bushehr.

At dawn on September 30, 1980 four American-made F-4E Phantom jets screamed low over central Iraq, each laden with air-to-air missiles and three thousand pounds of bombs.

Prior to entering Iraqi airspace they had rendezvoused for aerial refueling with a Boeing 707 tanker escorted by two more advanced F-14 Tomcat fightersthe type immortalized six years later in the film Top Gun. And to complete the eighties action-movie vibe, they were embarked on a mission codenamed Operation Scorched Sword.

The skimming Phantoms climbed briefly to higher altitude so as to appear on Iraqi radars, before ducking back down to hit the deck. But while two decoy Phantoms maintained their trajectory towards Baghdad, the other two veered southwards towards the real target: Iraqs Osirak light-water nuclear reactor.

The jets were undertaking the first air-strike against a nuclear reactor, and the first preemptive air-strike attempting to prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons capability. In fact, the only preceding attack on nuclear facilities occurred during World War II when British commandoes successfully sabotaged Nazi heavy water research facilities in Norway.

Now, the famous Israeli Operation Opera that destroyed the Osirak reactor was still nine months away. The Phantoms soaring towards the reactor in 1980 belonged to the Iranian Air Force.

This obscure but portentous raid, and the context in which it occurred, was documented in-depth by Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop in a fascinating article for Air Enthusiast magazine in 2004.

Iran and Israel had been allies prior to the Iranian Revolution, and Tel Aviv continued to funnel vital arms and other forms of security assistance to Tehran during the 1980s despite the Ayatollahs increasingly anti-Israeli rhetoric. This was in large part due to their shared concern with the military buildup in Saddam Husseins Iraq.

In 1975, Iraq successfully negotiated a $300 million deal ($1.3 billion in 2019 dollars) with France to build an Osiris-type 40-megawatt light water research reactor in Iraq, accorded the portmanteau Osirak. This involved two reactors named Tammuz 1 and 2 to be constructed at the al-Tawaitha Nuclear Center south of Baghdad.

The Osiris reactor was designed for civilian purposes, but it had the potential to serve as a springboard for nuclear-weapons capabilitythough experts to this day disagree on just how imminent the leap to nuclear arms really was. Hussein successfully pressured the French into delivering dozens of kilograms of weapons-grade 93% enriched nuclear fuels, while kilos of uranium were acquired from South America and other sources.

Thus the reactor alarmed both Israelwhich remains today the only Middle Eastern state to possess nuclear-weaponsand Iran, which had repelled an abortive Iraqi tank invasion in 1975. Seeking to forestall the program, Israeli agents bombed a finished nuclear core near Toulon, and France stabbed one of the nuclear programs chiefs, Egyptian scientist Yahya el Mashad, to death in a Parisian hotel in June 14, 1980. These measure delayed but did not halt construction of the Osirak in an exposed dome facility rather than a hardened subterranean complex.

On September 22, 1980 Saddam launched Iraq into full-scale invasion of southwestern Iran, hoping to capitalize on the chaos prevailing in the newly-formed Islamic Republic. The resulting war would drag on for eight exceptionally bloody years.

It was in this context that the Iranian Air Force began planning a strike on Osirak earlier that Junereportedly at the request of the Israeli Chief of Army Intelligence. Israel was one of the few countries willing to furnish Iran with weapons and intelligence to fight the Iraqis, and so the raid was seen as a mutually-beneficial favor.

Irans large fleet of advanced American F-4 and F-14 jet fighters proved a formidable asset against Iraqi forces during the early years of the Iran-Iraq war. The Phantoms deployed by Iranon the raid came from the 33rd Fighter Squadron based near Hamedan, Iran.

Hefting unguided Mark 82,500-pound bombs, the Iranian pilots would have to swoop down into the teeth of formidable Iraqi air defensesat least, formidable in theory. Al-Tuwaitha was defended by several dozen rapid-firing 23- and 57-millimeter flak guns, and one Soviet-built SA-6 and three French Roland 2 short-range radar-guided surface-to-air missile systems.

However, the Iraqi defenses were apparently caught napping. The decoy Phantoms dropped their bombs on an Iraqi power station, knocking out electricity in Baghdad for two days according to Cooper. Meanwhile, the main element dove down on al-Tawaitha and released all twelve bombs in a matter of seconds before rocketing back home. There are no reports of Iraqi defensive fire.

Some witnesses reported seeing two Iranian bombs bounce off the reactor dome. The attack did trigger a voluminous blaze (as seen in this French photo), and damaged the piping, cooling pumps, and lab facilities. And hundreds of French and Italian technicians withdrew from the facility after the raid, though some subsequently returned.

Nonetheless, a CIA intelligence report noted that a redacted source had confirmed only secondary buildings were hit. It was also widely (but wrongly) assessed in the West that the raid had been flown by Israeli pilots in Iranian jets.

On November 30 an Iranian RF-4 reconnaissance Phantom swooped back over the facility at supersonic speeds, snapping photos to evaluate the effects of the strike. According to Cooper and Bishop, the photo-intelligence was then transferred in a metal case to Israel via a 707 airliner being used to deliver Israeli arms to Tehran.

This intelligence, bolstered by photo-recon missions performed by Israeli Phantom jets, helped the IDF devise a full-scale replica of the facility used to plan and practice for their own strike, which finally took place on June 7, 1981. Eight Israeli F-16 Fighting Falcons, escorted by six F-15 Eagles, flew through Saudi airspace, exploiting a gap in Iraqi radar coverage. In less than a minute, the Falcons destroyed the Osirak reactor with huge 2,000-pound Mark 84 bombs, killing nine Iraqis and a French engineer.

Unwilling to directly retaliate against Israel, Saddam instead hammered Irans own nuclear nuclear research facility in Bushehr. Between 1984 and 1987, Iraqi Super Etendard and Su-22M4K jets bombed the complex five times, substantially damaging to the facility, which was not actually seeing much use due to financial constraints imposed by the war.

While the Osirak strike is usually cited as the ur-text in arguments favoring preemptive anti-nuclear strikes, the raids success is somewhatunambiguous. While setting back Iraqi efforts to acquire nuclear arms by a decade, some experts claim the reactor wasnt highly adaptable to such purposes. In the aftermath of the raid, Saddam began a larger-scale nuclear program more directly seeking to produce weapons in hardened underground facilities. Had he not entered into a military confrontation with the U.S. by invading Kuwait in 1990, the Iraqi dictator might have acquired a more robust nuclear arms capability in the long run.

Saddams defeat in 1991, coupled with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, brought an end to the clandestine Israel-Iran alliance. Tehran increasingly leaned on its support for anti-Israeli groups to win influence and alliances in the Arab world, while Israel now understood Iran to be the most likely hostile state in the region to acquire nuclear weapons.

Ironically, having pioneered the preemptive strike targeting another states nuclear research facilities with Israel, today Irans extensive nuclear research program is threatened with preventative air attacks from Israel and the United States. However, Iran learned from the Osirak strikes: its own nuclear research program is dispersed in numerous underground facilities, not concentrated in a single above-ground facility that would prove susceptible to attack.

Sbastien Roblin holds a masters degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

Image: Wikipedia.

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Israel and Iran Are Enemies, But They Joined Forces To Stop Iraq's Nuclear Ambitions - The National Interest

Seventeen years ago almost to the day US-led coalition forces were advancing from the south towards Baghdad. They took the city on April 9, 2003.

That date marked the beginning of a new era for the region. It was a virtual earthquake whose aftershocks are still being felt on more than one level, especially in Iraq, the Gulf and the region of the Fertile Crescent that extends from Iraq to the Palestinian territories, via Syria and Lebanon.

The world stood witness to the changes occurring since 2003 and became convinced that Iran was the United States real partner in its war on Iraq. In fact, Iran was the real victor of that war, a war that had cost the United States thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

What is confusing is why and how the Americans decided to invade Iraq after al-Qaedas holy attacks on September 11, 2001, on the Pentagon and New York, commissioned by Osama bin Laden.

Besieged by severe international sanctions for its foolish invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq had no relationship with al-Qaeda or bin Laden, who was hiding in Afghanistan.

Among the 19 terrorists who executed the attacks was a Lebanese citizen named Ziad Jarrah belonging to the Fatah Revolutionary Council group headed by Sabri al-Banna, aka Abu Nidal. Banna was a defector from Fatah and had suspected links to various terrorist organisations, including al-Qaeda.

Banna was living in Baghdad. To preclude any misinterpretations, the Iraqi regime of the time disposed of the man. It was said he committed suicide at his home in Baghdad.

Despite these preventive moves, there were some people in Washington who insisted on finding a link, no matter how thin, between the Iraqi regime headed by Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, knowing that evidence corroborating the existence of a relationship between al-Qaeda and groups affiliated with the Iranian regime, not Iraq, was overwhelming.

Since September 11, 2001, officials in the George W. Bush administration volunteered Iraq as partially responsible for the attacks. During the first high-level meeting following the attacks, US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz demanded that a response take place in Iraq.

That meeting was at Camp David. Colin Powell, then-Secretary of State, silenced Wolfowitz, assuring him that the US administration had no information linking Saddam to al-Qaeda but Wolfowitz refused to back off.

Wolfowitz, a neoconservative, was later asked why he had focused on Iraq, while everybody knew al-Qaedas leadership was protected by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He answered: The seeds have been planted.

In other words, he laid the foundation for the military invasion of Iraq. This information was published in Vanity Fair and the decisions taken at that stage that changed the face of the world, including travel procedures inside and outside the United States.

Still, the mystery remains: Why invade Iraq? The answer at that time was to bring freedom and democracy to the oppressed Iraqi people.

There is no question that the Saddam regime was dictatorial but why it and not the Syrian regime, for example, which was equally oppressive? More important, what was the difference between it and the government in Iran, especially the Khomeini regime that had American blood on its hands? It ordered the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, followed by the bombing of the US Marine Corps headquarters near Beirut airport in October the same year.

It is still a mystery why the United States started a war on Iraq under the pretext of going after al-Qaeda while its troops were all over Afghanistan searching for al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

To this day, the United States has been suffering from its war in Afghanistan. It couldnt end it, such that, in 2020, it had no choice by to sign an agreement with the Taliban, an accord with a taste of defeat. It was the Taliban regime and Afghanistan that gave shelter and protection to bin Laden and enabled him to plan and execute the September 11 attacks and yet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo found himself compelled to go to Kabul to save what he could of the agreement with the Taliban.

The invasion of Iraq is a bewildering American decision but the conclusion that can be drawn after all those years is that the announced US goal of establishing a democratic regime in Iraq turned out to be an impossible task and that the real target then was Iraq, not the regime.

How else can we explain that a mighty country such as the United States, which was the only superpower in the world, could embark on the adventure of invading and occupying a country without preparing itself for the post-occupation phase? Even a child could guess that occupying Iraq in the way it happened meant offering it to Iran on a silver platter and creating a lasting regional imbalance at every level.

What was birthed in Iraq by the US occupation was a non-viable, unsustainable regime, especially after the intentional marginalisation of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and of offering the Kurds inapplicable promises.

With the passage of time, that is, 17 years since the fall of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad, events confirm that the intention was to finish off Iraq. The old regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction were nothing more than flimsy arguments for achieving the specific goal of destroying Iraq.

In 2020, the United States rediscovered its need for Iraq. This is the Iraq that is resisting Iranian hegemony on the grounds that Arab nationalism still binds together most Iraqis, including Shias.

Does Washington have a clearer vision of what it must do in Iraq to avoid the continuation of the Iranian expansionist project, a project motivated by fighting American belligerence in the first place?

Most important, is it possible to restructure Iraq after all these years of efforts to disintegrate it, unravel its social fabric and send it back to the Middle Ages?

We know what happened in Iraq and what was the goal of occupying it, but why?

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17 years ago, the US target was Iraq not its regime - The Arab Weekly

A Pentagon spokesman has confirmed that troops with the coalition fighting ISIS terrorist group in Iraq will resume their operations, which have been suspended over the coronavirus outbreak, as soon as the situation allows.

Commander Sean Robertson told Asharq Al-Awsat in remarks published Saturday that coalition forces are temporarily withdrawing their troops after Iraqi forces suspended training programs to stop the spread of the COVID-19 disease.

Asked about Frances withdrawal of its contingent of troops from Iraq, Robertson said it was up to the French defense ministry to respond to such questions.

But he confirmed that the US continues to cooperate closely with its partners in the coalition.

He also stressed the coalitions commitment on the exchange of intelligence with Iraqi forces to help defeat the remnants of ISIS.

The US mission said on Thursday that due to a combination of security conditions and restricted travel options as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the State Department has ordered the departure of designated US Government employees at the US Embassy in Baghdad, the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, and the US Consulate General in Erbil.

The US government has limited ability to provide emergency services to US citizens in Iraq, it said in a statement.

It recommended a series of actions if a US citizen in Iraq is on a temporary visit and desires assistance to return to the US when a flight is available.

It said actions to take, include departing Iraq by commercial transportation as soon as possible, monitoring local media for updates, and reviewing personal security plans.

Their advisory came after two rockets slammed early Thursday into the Iraqi capital's high-security Green Zone where the US Embassy is based.

The US has blamed the attack and similar other attacks on Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah.

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Pentagon: Withdrawal of Coalition Forces from Iraq Aims to Limit Virus Outbreak - Asharq Al-awsat English

Victor Charlie debuted in 1954 as the Saigon-Cholon Peace Committee.

Mid-1950s Vietnamese revolutionaries, inside US-occupied zones, morphed into: "the Front" joining patriotic, Buddhist and peace societies en masse. By 1962, 250,000 activists enlivened myriad societies whilst gathering info for a secret leadership. A campaign targeting Vietnamese who collaborated with Americans, launched in 1957, ratcheted-up in 1966. By 1972 the Front had executed, gunshot-to-the-head, 37,000 US-collaborators.

"Viet Cong" a contraction of "Vietnamese Communist" appeared in Saigons US-controlled newspapers in 1956. U.S. officers referred to the southern-based insurgency as "V-C"; or, when festive, as: "Victor Charlie."

Between 1949 and 1955 the U.S. invented: Taiwan, South Korea and South Vietnam. Inaugural solemnities for the latter occurred October 26, 1955; eighteen months after America assumed Frances Vietnam file. South Vietnams President Diem wrought holy terror upon national-liberationists. Assassinated with US blessing in 1963, Diem was succeeded by a martinet parade.

Circa January 1968, South Vietnams 19.5 million inhabitants included: 331,098 U.S. Army soldiers, 78,013 Marines and 100,000 other U.S. government personnel. South Vietnams military (350,000) was buttressed by Regional and Popularisation Forces (300,000).

Seventy-thousand of the Fronts 300,000 members were combat available.

In April 1967 Front leaders toured Hanoi pitching: General Offensive, General Uprising. This, largest-operation-to-date, received approval in July.

Hanoi then harassed U.S. garrisons along Cambodian and Laotian frontiers. A 22-day battle at Dak To killed 262 US troops. In mid-January USMC Khe Sanh began receiving sustained artillery fire. Khe Sanh impinged the Ho Chi Minh Trail down which trickled 15,000 battle-tested regulars; missioned to alloy the Fronts dilettantes. AK-47s and RPG-2s poured down the Trail.

At a U.S. Embassy-sponsored pool party in Saigon, days before Tet, none of the assembled 200 intelligence wonks vented a thought about impending offensives. Perhaps "pool party" says it all. Tet planning docs had been intercepted, translated, published and disregarded. Westmorelands intuition acted-up, but he couldnt muster alarm. An alert was ignored.

In 36 hours, starting midnight January 30, an 85,000-troop army ambushed targets in 120 South Vietnamese locales. Attacks typically involved mortar/rocket barrages followed-on by hundreds of charging AK-47-brandishing foot-soldiers.

Insurgents held territory in 36 of 44 provincial capitals. Positions were usually occupied for a few hours then abandoned. Exceptions:

In Hue, 5,000 insurgents seized 190 government buildings. Marines suffered 216 killed and 1,609 wounded in Hue; at times holding only a few blocks. U.S. bombardment demolished 10,000 of Hues 17,000 buildings; leaving 116,000 of 140,000 residents homeless.

Saigons Cholon district became a "free-fire zone." Bombardment left 80,000 residents homeless.

Tet reverberated for months. Village skirmishes near Saigon claimed 500 American lives. A 119-town rural Mini-Tet hit on May 4. Saigon saw another attack wave, May 25. A six-week Third Offensive kicked-off in August.

U.S. and South Vietnamese forces suffered 12,700 casualties (2,600 fatalities). Counting civilian fatalities as enemy combatants skewed official death tallies. Officially, 7,700 civilian deaths resulted from blasting 75,000 residential buildings.

Vietnam spans 331,210 square kilometres. This area had 42 million inhabitants in 1968.

Iraq spans 437,072 square kilometres. Iraqs population: 40 million.

Iraq witnesses several assassinations a day. Assassins are militia. Targets are US-collaborators. Saigon 68.

Like their Vietnamese forebearers Iraqi national-liberationists demand the U.S. leave their homeland. Like their forebearers, Iraqi militias draw support from militaries within their country, and from foreign governments; yet, remain civilian/paramilitary affairs comprised of politicized week-end warriors with deep local roots.

Iraqi militia numbers match Victor Charlies pre-Tet numbers i.e. 70,000 combat-available. While not as centralized, Iraqi militias exhibit collective endeavour. In 2015 a 10,000-troop militia consortium overran ISILs Tikrit redoubt; breaking through ISILs perimeter at eight locations.

On January 3, 2020, upon leaving Soleimanis funeral services (at Soleimanis house) Iraqi militia chief Muqtada al-Sadr summoned a war-council for January 13 in the Iranian city of Qom. Kataib Hezbollah, Al Nujaba and others heeded.

At Qom, al-Sadr called for expelling Americans in a "humiliating manner" and for all contact with Americans to be criminalized.

Post-Qom, al-Sadrs million-man anti-US march met expectations. Many marched in martyrs shrouds. The 5,000-strong Kataib Hezbollah is closing outposts, repositioning arsenals and donning civilian profile. Al Nujaba posted a photo of a US helicopter in rocket-launcher sites, captioned: "the countdown has begun".

Militia surface-to-air capabilities remain unknown. Much of their kit saw service in Tet (AK-47s, RPGs, Katyushas). Distinguishingly, militias possess armoured vehicles, even M1 tanks.

Thirty-five times more U.S. personnel were in Vietnam 1968 than are in Iraq 2020.

Media-speak: US military personnel in Iraq number 5,200.

Translation: US (and Coalition) military (and civilian) personnel (and home-citizen contractors) in Iraq equal 20,000 public charges shuttling about bases like peas in a shell-game.

From 19,000-troop Camps to platoon-sized Convoy Support Depots, the U.S. constructed hundreds of bases during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-11). Most sit abandoned.

Nowhere in the unclassified domain are there proper lists Americas Iraqi bases. CNN and BBC recently trumpeted Americans are closing three of their eight Iraq bases. Bloomberg, Yahoo, Sky Arabia, TASS and Al Arabiya reported the U.S. was closing 15 of 17 Iraq bases. Turkish journalists counted 9 U.S. bases but missed the one the BBC showcased. Military Bases.com lists 12 Iraqi grooves most of which are closed; but who knows. Theres a global archipelago of off-the-books bases.

Umpteen bases close while bases at Ain Al-Asad (Al Anbar) and Erbil International Airport expand. (Erbil is Kurdish Iraqs capital.) Three additional bases are under construction in Kurdish Iraq.

As Americans step outside militia range, the fate of Baghdad-area installations (US Embassy, Green Zone etc) remains shrouded.

Presently, there are a dozen US/Coalition bases in Iraq. They house 200 to 3,000 personnel per base.

Multi-battalion attacks, such as Iraqi militias are wont to do, would rout these bases.

William Walter Kay is a researcher and writer from Canada. His most recent book is From Malthus to Mifepristone: A Primer on the Population Control Movement.

Continued here:
Bad Moon Rising: Iraq on the Eve of Tet Offensive 2.0 - Antiwar.com

Five coalition servicemen died this past week in Iraq. Capt. Moises Navas and Gunnery Sgt. Diego Pongo, both Marines, were killed in northern Iraq by Islamic State fighters, while a few days later, Army Spc. Juan Covarrubias, Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal Roberts and British medic Lance Cpl. Brodie Gillon died in a rocket attack launched by a Shia militia group.

If media attention hadnt been fixated on Covid-19, their deaths might have raised the question of what the United States is still doing in Iraq. Its a fair question. The Islamic States physical caliphate is no more, and in the wake of assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iraqi parliament recently voted to expel U.S. forces. Now, with Iranian-backed militia groups targeting U.S. troops, its probably a good time for the administration to assess its policy objectives in Iraq.

To be clear, this isnt going to be diatribe against military involvement overseas. I have, over the course of a 31-year career, seen my share of wasted effort and lives in pursuit of incoherent policy objectives, but am not of the view that the U.S. can simply retreat behind its borders and expect its national interests to take care of themselves. And there is good reason for continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq: to pre-empt a resurgence of the Islamic State a threat which, as this recent incident illustrates, has not gone away and as a check on the malign influence of Iran. The 5,000 U.S. troops currently there might be a relatively small price to pay to achieve those goals, if that is indeed the plan. But at a time when the United States finds itself again at a decision point in Iraq, I am concerned that once again there are no clear policy objectives to guide U.S. military involvement.

I have, like many of my contemporaries in the military, some personal involvement in Iraqs troubled recent history most recently as the commander of the coalition special operations task force given the mission of defeating the Islamic State which had, by the beginning of 2016, reached a point only 30 miles from Baghdad. During the ensuing campaign which ultimately enabled the Iraqi security forces to re-take Mosul and effectively expel ISIS from Iraq, we in the task force were compelled to adhere to an uneasy truce with the various Iranian-backed Shia militia groups that fought alongside the Iraqi Army against the common foe.

In my subsequent billet as chief of staff at Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT), it became clear that Iran would emerge from the counter-ISIS campaign in a position of strength in Iraq. And with ISIS now defeated, it seemed only a matter of time before Iranian-backed militia groups turned on U.S. forces. As SOCCENT planners prepared for this eventuality while working on a wider plan to counter Irans malign influence in the region, it became apparent that one person was holding the militia back from attacking U.S. personnel. And that person was one Qassem Soleimani. Why the nemesis of U.S. interests in the region should in this instance, oppose the spilling of American blood, we could only speculate. The reason, we supposed, was that Soleimani was, in the end, a pragmatist he would have to have been to have survived as long as he did. And for those like him, accustomed to operating in what U.S. national security pundits like to call the Gray Zone, there are certain boundaries implicitly acknowledged by both sides to avoid all-out conflict.

When, several months after my retirement, I heard of Soleimanis death, I assumed that those who planned it understood these rules, and that the decision to break them was taken deliberately, with a plan to mitigate the inevitable repercussions for doing so. Now Im not so sure. That Kataib Hezbollah a virulently pro-Iranian militia would respond by launching rockets at coalition personnel was an entirely predictable response.

Nevertheless, killing Soleimani might still have made sense if it was part of an overarching plan, but the evidence so far indicates that there is no such plan beyond a willingness by the United States to trade blows. And Soleimanis death, in addition to provoking attacks of the kind that just took place, will make Iran only more determined to influence the Iraqi government to expel U.S. forces from the country once again. And that worries me, because I was hoping that after years of involvement in that troubled country, the U.S. had learned from its mistakes.

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Seventeen years ago this month, the U.S. invaded Iraq, beginning a chain of events that even now has yet to run its course. I played a small role in that operation as a planner with 7th Marine Regiment, and remember vividly the sense of anticipation as we rumbled through the border town of Safwan in the gray light of early dawn, part of a vast armored column that stretched for as for as the eye could see while the horizon ahead flashed and rumbled. On that first day, the only sign of resistance came from a stray dog who emerged from the abandoned border post to bark at us furiously, as though a harbinger of things to come.

Some three weeks later, on the day that Baghdad fell, I found myself in Firdous square surrounded by hundreds of Iraqis who swarmed around the giant statue of Saddam Hussein at its center in scenes of riotous celebration. As the statue toppled, the crowd danced and bayed their delight. It was a moment of pure euphoria, the likes of which I had never seen before nor since.

That mood swiftly evaporated, giving way instead to resentment towards the occupiers as a rapidly declining security situation was fueled by a series of rash decisions by the coalition provincial authority. These included the now infamous de-Baathication edict which ensured that the burgeoning insurgency would have no shortage of recruits armed, trained and angry.

I returned to Iraq several times over the course of the following years. First as an adviser to the nascent Iraqi Army, during which tour I participated in the Battle of Fallujah and subsequent operations in Mosul, providing security for the countrys first democratic elections. Then as an infantry battalion commander to the worst part of notorious Anbar province, a town called with unwitting irony, Karma where the U.S. commander who preceded me was killed by a suicide bomb days before our turnover. I experienced at first hand, the peaks and troughs of the war from post-liberation euphoria, through the disillusionment and the vertiginous slide into mayhem that followed, to the period of optimism that came in the aftermath of the dramatic increase in troop levels known as the surge.

It was during that period beginning in 2009 that it really seemed possible that Iraq might transition into a peaceful democratic society. As the number of violent incidents plummeted, the U.S. military turned over the reins of security to Iraqi security forces and took a back seat. But these milestones of the military campaign were not matched by a sense of political progression, by an understanding that this hard-won reprieve would last only if each segment of Iraqi society Sunni, Shia and Kurd were given representation in the new government. There was a brief window of opportunity when a determined U.S. diplomatic and political effort might have curbed the excesses of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an avowedly Shia politician who rose to power in the U.S.-backed elections of December 2005 and over the course of the next four years steadily consolidated his position. Instead, by the time that Iraqis took responsibility for security, and Maliki announced that he had no further need for U.S. troops, the U.S. government had lost all leverage. And, in the halcyon early days of the Obama administration, it seemed a good time to turn away from a wasteful war.

After the last U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, Maliki, at the head of the hardline Shia Dawa party, embarked on an agenda that was blatantly sectarian, arresting tribal leaders without reason, and edging out Sunni politicians, to include his deputy prime minister, a Sunni, whom he sentenced to death in absentia. When, in 2013, Sunni tribes in Anbar protested their disenfranchisement, Maliki dispatched his Shia-dominated security forces to quell the disturbance, a task they performed with zealous brutality, killing scores, and leaving in their wake a sense of helpless rage. The stage was set for the subsequent rise of the ISIS in Iraq who seemed to offer the Sunni population, now excluded from the political process, their only recourse.

By the summer of 2014, the stream of Islamic State conquests in Iraq was a gut-wrenching litany of places whose names evoked for so many Marines and soldiers memories of bloodshed and suffering: Tal Afar, Mosul, Al Qaim, Haditha, Fallujah, Karma. When I returned to Iraq as head of the special operations task force, I felt for the first time during that war that military and policy objectives were aligned and made sense.

Now four years later the Islamic States physical caliphate is gone, but the grievances that fueled its rise are still there as I was reminded recently in an email from an Iraqi journalist friend.

It has been more than 40 days and Iraqis continue demonstrating against their corrupt government. More than 300 of them have been killed, and 15,000 injured. The main power supporting the government is a political block led by Hadi Al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr organization and one of Irans main allies. Everyone is asking what is the American stand on this? Is the U.S. just going to watch this?

My friends plaintiff question is a reminder that the United States will never be able to meet the expectations of the few friends it has left in that country. But there is good reason for the U.S. to retain some military presence there: to help train the Iraqi security forces, thus making them more professional and less susceptible to sectarian influence and to assist the Iraqi government in their counter-terrorism efforts. But this time, the administration will need to combine military and economic assistance with a concerted diplomatic effort to prevent a repetition of the Maliki era, when sectarian interests dominated the Iraqi government and gave rise to ISIS.

So many unintended consequences were unleashed that day that our armored columns sped across the border at Safwan opposed only by the forlorn barking of a stray dog. Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later it does appear, as my friend indicates, that Iran has been the only real winner, and will continue to consolidate power unless the United States implements a clearly defined policy to retain presence and influence. Its not so much a question of what the United States can hope to gain by continued involvement, as it is about what it stands to lose by a precipitous withdrawal. And to that, recent history bears sobering testament.

Andrew Milburn is a former Marine colonel who retired in March 2019 as the chief of staff of Special Operations Command Central. He has commanded Marine and special operations units in combat at every rank over the course of a 31-year career, and is the author of When the Tempest Gathers: From Mogadishu to the fight against ISIS, a Marine Special Operations Commander at War.

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The Iraq War is not yet over - Military Times