When he was first elected president, many observers, up to and including the Norwegian Nobel Committee, believed Barack Obama would represent a substantive departure from the foreign policy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On the campaign trail, the then–senator from Illinois promised to bring the Iraq War to an end within 16 months. In reality, it ended in December 2011, as agreed upon in the status of forces agreement Bush made with Iraq in 2008, and only after Obama tried and failed to keep a 10,000-strong residual force there past the withdrawal date.
On the eve of Election Day 2016, there were about 5,000 U.S. soldiers in that country. Many were embedded with Iraqi troops or otherwise engaged in the military campaign to retake the city of Mosul from ISIS, a group that evolved out of Al Qaeda in Iraq—itself a product of and one of the primary combatants in the post-invasion phase of the war. The number of Americans in the country has crept upward since June 2014, when Obama sent troops there at the request of the Iraqi government. The deployment came just two and a half years after the withdrawal that was supposed to mark the conclusion of the war in Iraq. In our February issue of Reason saying farewell to Obama, Ed Krayewski details the wars the president waged.
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