Iraq-A 3 Section Confederacy With Volatile Neighbors and no Infrastructure

U.S. Marks End to 9-Year War, Leaving an Uncertain Iraq

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

American forces, arriving in Kuwait in one of the last convoys out of Iraq, took the same highway they came in on in 2003.

By TIM ARANGO

Published: December 15, 2011

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

A soldier at a Baghdad market, the scene of bloody attacks in the past. Merchants now sell items left behind by departing soldiers.

The concrete blast walls that shielded the shopping stalls have lately come down. Since then, three explosions have struck the market, killing several people.
“This will be an easy target for car bombs,” said Muhammad Ali, a merchant who lost two brothers during the cruelest times of the conflict. “People will die here.”
After nearly nine years, about 4,500 American fatalities and $1 trillion, America’s war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish on Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops take the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States’ most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.
For the United States, the war leaves an uncertain legacy as Americans weigh what may have been accomplished against the price paid, with so many dead and wounded. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was vanquished, but the failure to find illicit weapons undermined the original rationale, leaving a bitter taste as casualties mounted. The lengthy conflict and repeated deployments strained the country and its resources, raising questions about America’s willingness to undertake future wars on such a grand scale.
Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop “surge,” but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” Emad Risn, an Iraqi columnist, recently wrote in Assabah al-Jadeed, a government-financed newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis, too.”
Iraq will now be on its own both to find its place in a region upended by revolutions and to manage its rivalry with Iran, which will look to expand its influence culturally and economically in the power vacuum left by the United States military. While American officials worry about the close political ties between Iraq’s Shiite leadership and Iran, the picture at the grass-roots level is more nuanced. Iraqis complain about shoddy Iranian consumer goods — they frequently mention low-quality yogurts and cheeses — and the menacing role of Iranian-backed militias, which this year killed many American soldiers.
Failed Reconciliation
The Iranian rivalry frequently plays out in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Iraq’s religious authorities are based. Iran, which like Iraq is majority Shiite, recently installed one of its leading clerics in Najaf, raising worries that Iran is trying to spread its brand of clerical rule to Iraq. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American cleric with very close ties to Iran, has recently said that with the military withdrawal, American diplomats are now fair game for his militiamen.
Iraq faces a multitude of vexing problems the Americans tried and failed to resolve, from how to divide the country’s oil wealth to sectarian reconciliation to the establishment of an impartial justice system. A longstanding dispute festers in the north over how to share power in Kirkuk between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, an ominous harbinger for power struggles that may ensue in a post-America Iraq. A recent deal between Exxon Mobil and the Kurdistan government in the north has been deemed illegal by Baghdad in the absence of procedures for sharing the country’s oil resources.