The US announced a sharp cut Wednesday to troop numbers in Iraq, as President Donald Trump seeks to honor his pledge to halt the country’s “endless wars” overseas with just two months to go until the election.
The move, reducing the Pentagon’s footprint in Iraq from 5,200 military personnel to just 3,000, and an expected parallel announcement on Afghanistan, comes as Trump strives to cast himself as a peacemaker as he fights an uphill battle to stay in power.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany rejected suggestions that the announced drawdown was an election move, saying that “now is the time” because Iraq is stable and its security forces are well-prepared.
“End to endless wars. We hear that often. Not too often do we see that actually done,” she said.
“It’s a fact: President Trump has broken the 39-year-old streak of American presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict.”
General Kenneth McKenzie, the head of the US military’s Central Command, said in Baghdad that the drawdown was “due to our confidence in the Iraqi security forces’ increased ability to operate independently.”
That would take the US presence there to its lowest level since Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama cut troops to a token force in 2012 in a previous attempt to end the then nine-year-old war.
But Obama was forced to reverse course by the rise of the Islamic State group (IS), raising the number of troops inside Iraq back over 5,000 as part of an international coalition to combat the jihadists. ‘Bringing them back home’
Cuts were already underway, with some troops just moved to Gulf-area bases due to the Covid-19 threat and rocket attacks by Iran-linked Iraqi armed groups on the Iraq operations.
But, fighting for re-election against Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has sought to honor his repeated pledge during the 2016 campaign to end US wars abroad and bring back servicemen.
“We kept America out of new wars and we’re bringing our troops back home, we’re bringing them back home from all these faraway places,” Trump said in a campaign speech in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on Tuesday.
“We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and what do we get out of it?” he said, adding: “Biden voted for the Iraq war.”
