Ed Krayewski on Iraq and the Long Shadow of US Interventionism

You’d
be forgiven if, while looking at recent headlines about Iraq, you
thought it was the aughts again. Fallujah, the site of some of the
most intense fighting during the U.S. war in Iraq, is again at the
center of political violence in that country. The United Nations,
meanwhile, reported 7,818 civilians were killed in Iraq
in 2012, a casualty level not seen since the years of the Iraq War.
But while the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from the country in
December 2011 marked the end of the American war there, it did not,
and could not, mark the end of the influence of the war on events
in Iraq. Instead, writes Ed Krayewski, what’s happening in Iraq
follows the American war, the legacy of foreign policy
interventionism in action.

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