It may surprise most Americans, but the “forever wars” haven’t ended quite yet. Rather, the final US-led mission in Iraq — Task Force Inherent Resolve, a 25-nation coalition set up in 2014 to counter the Islamic State — isn’t set to disband until sometime in our new year. Although a small group of US counterterrorist forces may remain in the region, 2025’s pullout can be viewed as a symbolic end to America’s ill-fated attempt to create a stable and free Iraq that, in President George W. Bush’s words, would “be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
This withdrawal will probably have none of the bloody chaos of the Joseph Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan in 2021. That said, few people are optimistic about the future of Iraq’s 46 million people. For 20 years, parliaments have come and gone; twice, the nation has suffered more than nine months without a sitting government. Acrimony and distrust between Shiites, who form a majority, and Sunni Muslims remain strong. The ethnic Kurdish regions in the north are largely autonomous. Above all, there is the Iran problem: Tehran exerts tremendous political pressure on its fellow Shiites in Iraq, and the strongest militias are Iranian proxies.