U.S. Soldiers return home from Iraq

One hundred and ten army vehicles crossed from Iraq into Kuwait early Sunday morning, carrying the last 500 United States Army soldiers out of the Iraqi combat zone. As the metal gates closed behind the last truck, soldiers cheered the final end of a nine-year war.

“Prior to this withdrawal, I just kind of assumed it would be pushed back and pushed back,” said Sarah Ahmed, College senior and Director of Academic Affairs in the International Affairs Association. “To see that it’s finally happening is kind of surreal.”

The Iraq War, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom in its early phase, began in 2003 with a joint invasion by United States and allied forces. On Mar. 22 in 2003, President Bush announced in a radio address that the mission’s purpose was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”

Within a few months, the U.S. took over Baghdad and the Hussein regime was toppled. But it was only the beginning of a nearly decade-long occupation of Iraq.

“Initially, we went in and it was a successful thing,” explained Penn College Republicans chairman — a Wharton and College senior and a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist — Charles Gray. “Then it went bad for a while. What happened was, we adopted a surge strategy and brought in a lot of troops to the situation in 2007 and 2008. In 2009, [the situation] really stabilized.”

President Bush’s 2007 troop surge, which deployed more than 20,000 troops into Iraq, aimed “to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs,” according to a Jan. 10, 2007 White House press release.

With U.S. troops now removed, some observers doubt whether the last two goals will stay accomplished in the near future. “I still feel that the infrastructural problems that are going to be sustaining in Iraq will be around for a long time,” Ahmed said, “[but] I don’t think it’s something that the U.S. can do about it.”

“The Vietnam and Iraq invasions are the two great catastrophes of American foreign policy in the post-WWII era,” Political Science professor Ian Lustick wrote in an email. “The final end of the Vietnam War began a 27-year period during which the memory of the Vietnam disaster protected the United States from gross misuse of its enormous power.”

“I hope that some good at least can be salvaged from the disaster in Iraq in that, perhaps, at least as long a period of inoculation against the hubristic use of military force is now beginning,” he added.

College sophomore Bianca Faccio doubts whether troops should have been in Iraq at all. “I am very happy that our troops will be coming home, but they should have never [been there] in the first place. This decision, although positive, may be too little, too late.”

“The decision to attack not only had negative effects on our domestic and economic matter, but it also had a negative effect in the international realm,” she said. “The Security Council was undermined and the legitimacy of the United Nations was put into question,” Faccio added.

“It’s also … saddening to see that so many people had to die during the nine years in Iraq,” Ahmed said, touching on the lasting effects of the war. According to CNN, four out of five deaths in the war were Iraqi civilians, a statistic Ahmed found “very unnerving.”

Penn Democrats president and College junior Andrew Silverstein looked forward to seeing what the U.S. can do now that resources used in Iraq are freed up. “I think a lot of students feel ready for our government to focus on domestic issues,” he said.

According to BBC News, the war cost the government nearly $1 trillion in the last nine years.

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