Vietnamese Press: US Military Withdrawal from Iraq a victory for Tehran

September 30, 2026
Juan Cole
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – I was a little surprised to see that the Vietnamese internet news agency Vietnam.vn has an Arabic service. It carried an article yesterday from the newspaper Báo Tiền Phong on the complete US military withdrawal from Iraq. The ironies are many. I am in my 70s now, so I well remember the disastrous final US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 during the presidency of Gerald Ford, our only unelected president. The war was really over with in 1973, or maybe even in 1971, but Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Kissinger were afraid to bring home 500,000 men suddenly, thinking that it could lead to public disorder. So they ended the war in dribs and drabs over several years. The soldiers they sent to die in a southeast Asian jungle for nothing were of so little value to them that they preferred to see them go on being in danger of their lives than to risk that they might, on their return, join a *gasp* protest. So much for the First Amendment.

In spring 1975 town after town fell to the advancing Vietcong, and it became increasingly clear that many officers in the South Vietnamese armed forces, whom the US had thought their friends and allies, had secretly gone over to the Communists. The Communists had all along been an expression of Vietnamese nationalism, which made them ultimately the more attractive political force. There had been a silly Washington phobia that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists that then so would Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and perhaps Japan and South Korea. They called it the “domino effect.” It was a falsehood for which tens of thousands of Americans died, and who knows, three to five million Vietnamese. Finally, the last US helicopters fled the US embassy in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, with frantic Vietnamese allies of the US hanging off their landing skids.
Today’s US military withdrawal from Iraq is not nearly as dramatic. It may not even be what we used to call front page news, when there were front pages.
Trump is the main reason for this withdrawal. His murder of Qasem Soleimani and a prominent Iraqi militia commander in January 2020 angered Iraqi Shiites. The Shiite militias that had grown powerful during the fight against the radical Salafi ISIL terrorist organization began bombarding US bases. In a move that foretold the future, Iran bombarded bases where US troops were stationed with precision missiles, carefully avoiding killing any of them, though dozens suffered from concussions. Trump dismissed the concussions as minor. They weren’t.
The Iraqi parliament immediately met and demanded that the Iraqi prime minister arrange for an expeditious US withdrawal from Iraq. Trump and Biden resisted this demand for a while. Although the pretext for the US military presence in Iraq was the fight against ISIL, it had been decisively defeated in 2017-2018. The continued US presence was in part a hedge against Iranian influence in Iraq and a marker of continued American dominance.
The Iraqi prime ministers, under pressure from parliament, worked slowly to convince the Americans to leave. Biden signed off on it in 2024, eager finally to put George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” in the rearview mirror, but also because the US troops were in constant danger from the Shiite militias’ mortar and drone fire. After Trump whacked Soleimani, US soldiers simply were no longer welcome.
The brain-dead Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran was the nail in the coffin. Depending on how you define a base, there were about 20 US military bases in the Middle East before Ben-and-Don murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian military forces responded with a “debasing” strategy, targeting these US installations. The Iranians rendered the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain, HQ of the Fifth Fleet, “inoperable.” Bases in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE were attacked. Because of the Trump administration’s news blackout on its humiliating losses, it is hard to know how many, if any, US bases are still functioning. All appear to have been at least damaged, and others besides Manama may have been destroyed. Not only did Iran attack US military installations, but so too did its allies among the Shiite militias in Iraq.
Just one brigade of US troops was left in Iraq. They have been withdrawn and sent to Jordan. US bases in Jordan were targeted by Iran on several occasions.
This American withdrawal from Iraq is an ignominious end to Bush’s Iraq War, which I blogged almost daily for many years. While the defeat was not as dramatic as in Vietnam, it too was a major defeat for the US. Bush brought a pro-Iran Shiite majority to power in Iraq. While Baghdad is not the sort of open enemy to Washington that Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party had been, powerful forces in parliament and on the street among the majority Iraqi Shiite population despise the United States after it attacked Iran. Moreover, the Netanyahu-Trump war has deeply harmed the Iraqi economy by interfering in oil exports. We have come full circle. I think then VP Dick Cheney plumped for a war on Iran to do regime change and so get sanctions lifted on Iraqi oil exports, allowing US companies to profit. Now, Iraqi tankers are again having difficulty exiting the Strait of Hormuz, not because of Congressional sanctions but because of the fallout of Ben-and-Don’s catastrophic campaign against Iran.
The Vietnamese newspaper appropriately gets the last word. It notes that the US departure will give Iran greater freedom of action in Iraq.
Just one brigade of US troops was left in Iraq. They have been withdrawn and sent to Jordan. US bases in Jordan were targeted by Iran on several occasions.
This American withdrawal from Iraq is an ignominious end to Bush’s Iraq War, which I blogged almost daily for many years. While the defeat was not as dramatic as in Vietnam, it too was a major defeat for the US. Bush brought a pro-Iran Shiite majority to power in Iraq. While Baghdad is not the sort of open enemy to Washington that Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party had been, powerful forces in parliament and on the street among the majority Iraqi Shiite population despise the United States after it attacked Iran. Moreover, the Netanyahu-Trump war has deeply harmed the Iraqi economy by interfering in oil exports. We have come full circle. I think then VP Dick Cheney plumped for a war on Iran to do regime change and so get sanctions lifted on Iraqi oil exports, allowing US companies to profit. Now, Iraqi tankers are again having difficulty exiting the Strait of Hormuz, not because of Congressional sanctions but because of the fallout of Ben-and-Don’s catastrophic campaign against Iran.
The Vietnamese newspaper appropriately gets the last word. It notes that the US departure will give Iran greater freedom of action in Iraq. 

dead Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran was the nail in the coffin. Depending on how you define a base, there were about 20 US military bases in the Middle East before Ben-and-Don murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian military forces responded with a “debasing” strategy, targeting these US installations. The Iranians rendered the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain, HQ of the Fifth Fleet, “inoperable.” Bases in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE were attacked. Because of the Trump administration’s news blackout on its humiliating losses, it is hard to know how many, if any, US bases are still functioning. All appear to have been at least damaged, and others besides Manama may have been destroyed. Not only did Iran attack US military installations, but so too did its allies among the Shiite militias in Iraq.