The Washington Post described US President Joe Biden's announcement that the United States will end its combat missions in Iraq by the end of the year as his latest attempt to push American diplomacy beyond the post-9/11 period, shifting focus away from terrorism and the Middle East and toward other threats such as China and cyberwar.
President Biden had promised, during his reception of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi at the White House yesterday, Monday, to continue support for democracy in Iraq, including elections scheduled for the fall, but he said that the military mission there would change. Biden said that the US role in Iraq will only be to continue training and help to deal with ISIS, but that by the end of this year they will not be on a combat mission.
This came three months after Biden announced the complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and only one week after he began transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, hoping to eventually close the camp.
Together, these steps represent what has become one of the pillars of Biden's foreign policy, after two decades of what he sees as an outdated response to 9/11 and the terrorist attacks, and focusing more forcefully on China, which he sees as the greatest threat to American security.
And by dragging American forces in a race to a back seat, Biden is trying, according to what the newspaper says, to bring down the curtain on the bloodiest and most costly conflict of this era, which previous American presidents have described as the global war on terror. Eighteen years after it began, the Iraq war is now a deeply unpopular chapter in American foreign policy.
It also represents a painful legacy for President Biden himself. The president's son, Beau Biden, who died in 2015, was on standby in Iraq, and the president said he suspected toxins from the outbreak had led to his son's fatal brain cancer.
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