Vice President Joe Biden once triumphantly declared that Iraq would one day be seen as the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement.” This was back when the plan was to bring all American troops homes. There was some talk of leaving a residual force of 10,000 or so, but this plan was never enthusiastically pursued and eventually dropped for, among other reasons, the inability to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government. Eventually, U.S. troops were gone from Iraq.
With the rise of ISIS—once dismissed by the president as the “jayvee” of terrorist organizations—American troops have been returning to the scene of his “greatest achievement.” They are deployed, a few at a time, to help train and assist the Iraqi military as it fights to take back the towns and cities it had lost to ISIS. The most important of those towns, Mosul, will soon be the objective of a Iraqi offensive and as Foreign Policy reports,
General David Petraeus has written that
Which is to say, this time, some American troops will almost certainly remain in Iraq. With, or without,, an SOF agreement.
