When President George W. Bush delivered his “mission accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, few may have anticipated that U.S. forces would still be at war in Iraq today. The current foes are armed groups that once fought alongside American forces in Iraq against the Islamic State. Some of these militias are aligned with Iran and oppose the presence of 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, a matter made more fraught by the Israeli war in Gaza.
The militias have launched scores of attacks against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, the latter where three U.S. service members were killed and dozens injured in an enemy drone strike in January. The Biden administration ordered a retaliatory drone strike in early February that killed a commander of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the Iran-backed militias violently opposed to the ongoing U.S. presence in Iraq. But the U.S. retaliatory bombing of dozens of targets has drawn condemnation from Iraq’s weak central government as a “flagrant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.”
In this episode of History As It Happens, Chatham House analyst Renad Mansour delves into why “Washington’s use of violence and of sanctions has done little to dampen the strength of these groups or to diminish their power. This is because bombs and sanctions do not produce political reform,” as he wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Every U.S. president has had some kind of victory in Iraq, and yet it is not a complete victory. It’s not a sustained victory. Because of that, Washington gets pulled back in every few years, and so these armed groups aren’t necessarily the problem in and of themselves. What they represent is a problem in Iraq. The state is incoherent. Power is diffused, Mr. Mansour said in an interview. The militias, whether aligned with Iran or more interested in the Iraqi state’s well-being, are interconnected with the government politically, economically and socially.
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