Joe Biden’s Iraq Withdrawal Mistake Is No ‘Legacy Builder’

Planned Withdrawal from Iraq is Gift to Iran, Islamic State: Iraqi Defense Minister Thabit al-Abbasi has said then United States and Iraq have reached an agreement to withdraw most of the U.S. military presence in Iraq by 2026. A small U.S. presence would remain in Iraqi Kurdistan to disrupt Iranian-backed militias. 

President Joe Biden may believe an American exit from Iraq would cement his legacy as the man who ended America’s longest wars. He insists his Afghanistan withdrawal was wise and, in his speech ending his reelection campaign, said, “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” While this claim is untrue—the U.S. Navy remains engaged against the Houthis—it reflects Biden’s aspiration.

Rather than be the president who brought peace, the Iraq withdrawal will instead cement Biden’s legacy as a man who repeatedly misjudged and empowered American enemies and put American security at risk.

A Pattern of Mistakes and What Comes Nextg

As vice president, Biden supported the first U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. That premature departure created a vacuum that allowed both Iranian-backed militias to consolidate their grip on the Iraqi government and gave the Islamic State space to rise in northern Iraq. That, in turn, forced the United States to return to Iraq and engage militarily inside Syria. 

America’s second departure will be worse. The president may believe he alone initiates the withdrawal, but that is not how Iraqis and Iranians will perceive it. Because the exit follows repeated Iranian-backed drone attacks on U.S. units in Iraq, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will conclude that their terrorism forced Americans to withdraw under fire. That, in turn, will only encourage greater attacks against Americans across the region. If Iranian drone attacks force an American departure from Iraq, after all, why should Iranian proxy militias not begin to target the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain? Iranian influence will grow across Iraq as Baghdad will no longer be able to use the American presence as an excuse to resist Tehran’s extortion.

Biden’s belief that a residual presence in Iraqi Kurdistan can prevent Iranian aggression or Islamic State resurgence is also naïve. Bafel and Qubad Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in northern Iraq and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are business partners. The Iraqi Kurdish leadership is among the world’s most corrupt, on par with Afghanistan, Somalia, and South Sudan. The Barzani family prioritizes personal profit over principle, and Iran pays their price. According to the Kurdistan Victims Fund vs. the Kurdistan Victims Fund lawsuit now before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Masrour and Waysi Barzani killed an American intelligence officer while trying to transfer him to Iran. 

Nor are the Kurds reliable militarily. The Kurdistan Regional Government spends more on Peshmerga public relations than its counterterrorism. While Barzani partisans often say they were the crucial component in the Islamic State’s defeat, this is false. Initially, the Kurdistan Democratic Party sold weaponry to the Islamic State, believing the group could weaken Baghdad to Erbil’s benefit.

The cowardice of Masrour Barzani, then the national security council chancellor and today the prime minister, enabled the Yezidi genocide as he both rejected the Yezidi request for arms and then ordered the Peshmerga to withdraw, leaving the Yezidis to their fate. The Peshmerga played only a minor role in the subsequent campaign against the caliphate;. At the same time, they assisted Kirkuk’s defense, Shi’ite militias rather than their Kurdish counterparts, who led the liberation of Tikrit, Beiji, Fallujah, and Mosul. Rival Kurdish groups affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) meanwhile led the fighting against the group in Sinjar and Syria. 

Forcing greater American dependence on Iraqi Kurds will backfire in another way. The Barzanis always put their own family power above all else. That is why, for example, in 1996, Masoud Barzani invited Saddam Hussein’s forces to Erbil just years after the Iraqi dictator was responsible for an ethnic cleansing campaign against Iraqi Kurds that utilized chemical weapons, killed 182,000 including 8,000 members of Barzani’s own tribe. 

Today, the PKK is a top rival; the group enjoys the popularity that Barzani lacks largely both because of the legacy of Barzani’s betrayal of the Yezidis and because Iraqi Kurds see it as less corrupt. The Syrian Kurds run al-Hol, the camp that holds thousands of Islamic State prisoners. The Barzanis would prefer to see their Kurdish rivals defeated, even at the expense of the Islamic State escaping al-Hol. Biden also sets a dynamic parallel to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and Egypt, whose security forces extract billions of dollars to defeat extremists but never meet their goal for fear of losing the cash injections.

If the withdrawal moves forward, Biden will truly have cemented his legacy, not as the man who enabled peace but rather as the fool who dismissed the lessons of the past and laid the groundwork for the expansion of Iranian influence, the resurgence of the Islamic State and, quite possibly, the next 9/11.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and pre-and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics.