What will happen in Iraq after the US military withdrawal within a few months? There is no clear answer.

​Eighteen years since the US invasion of Iraq, the Joe Biden administration is confused about what to do after the administration of George W Bush unleashed an earthquake whose aftershocks have jolted the entire region. What will happen in Iraq after the US military withdrawal within a few months? There is no clear answer except to say that Iran is increasing the pressures to prove that it is the number-one player in Iraq and that there is no going back to the old reality where Iraq is Iraq and Iran is Iran.

What has collapsed in the region is not only Iraq, where the Americans moved in with the help of Iraqi sectarian militias that fought the Iraqi army. The leaders of these militias returned from Iran to Baghdad on the back of American tanks. At the present time, they constitute the most anti-US faction in Iraqi. The “Popular Mobilisation Forces”, an umbrella group of sectarian militias affiliated with Iran, are just an Iranian proxy to put pressure on the United States in Iraq.

What is frightening is that it was not only Iraq that suffered as a result of the change of landscape brought about by the American invasion. As the Iranian expansionist project proceeded, Lebanon has been subjected to a blow that could end up finishing off this country as we know it. At the present time, one can ask if  Lebanon as a country actually came to an end with the civil war that began on the thirteenth of April 1975.

It can be said that Lebanon ended before that,  with the signing of the Cairo Agreement in November 1969, when the state relinquished part of its sovereignty to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. However, the current reality indicates that Lebanon as a country has become a thing of the past. With Michel Aoun’s accession to the presidency on October 31, 2016 all sectors in the country collapsed as it fell under the yoke Hezbollah  and implicitly that of Iran. Lebanon would not have fallen under the full guardianship of the “Islamic Republic” had it not been for Hezbollah’s bullying of the Lebanese. This goes back, before anything else, to what happened in Iraq in 2003 and nowhere else.

​Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But the terrorist attacks in the United States changed forever the lives of Iraqis.
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In their aftermath, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, swiftly deposing the Taliban regime that had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terror network blamed for the attacks.

But it was not long before President George W. Bush shifted his attention to Iraq, identifying it, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” and asserting that its brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, was armed with weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaida. No evidence of either was found.

What followed was a U.S.-led invasion of a country in the heart of the Middle East that spurred a decade of war, with consequences that reverberate across the region to this day.

The Bush administration was already planning to invade Iraq before 9/11, but the attacks supplied the necessary pretext. The catastrophic war that followed turned Iraq into an ungovernable wasteland.

​The invasion and occupation of Iraq was arguably the most consequential result of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 9/11 did not motivate the Iraqi invasion, for which the Bush administration had begun actively planning before the hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers. But it did create the political atmosphere needed to justify an unprovoked invasion.

Relying on the shattered sense of US invulnerability, the Bush administration argued for a so-called preventive attack on Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein’s alleged project to build “weapons of mass destruction” and use them against the United States in the near future — a project which was entirely mythological. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice eloquently and dishonestly encapsulated this tortured logic with a celebrated comment: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a growing cadre of political, economic, and social elites had been advocating for the United States to assume its rightful place as the hegemon in a “unipolar” world, and to exercise direct control over countries that challenged its leadership. For these imperialists — most visibly located in the national-security apparatus — and their media cheerleaders, Iraq was the lynchpin for reestablishing US control over the Middle East.

Iraq and Iran have agreed to cancel visa requirements for visitors from both countries.

​Iraq and Iran both agreed on Sunday to cancel visa requirements during the Iraqi prime minister's second official visit to Tehran this year.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke of the "good news" he received from his guest, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, who informed him that visa requirements for citizens wishing to visit Iraq would be cancelled.

Iraqi citizens visiting Iran would also be exempt from visa restrictions.

Raisi - an ultraconservative politician who took on his role last month - stressed that his country is looking forward to consolidating relations with Iraq.

Iraq’s electricity ministry said on Wednesday that Iranian gas supplied to the central and southern regions was reduced from 49 million to 8 million cubic meters per day, causing a risk of serious power shortages.

A reduction in Iranian gas supplies led the national power system to lose about 5500 megawatts, the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said that there has been contact with the Iranian energy ministry and Iran’s embassy in Baghdad to clarify the reasons for the reduction, the statement added.

Washington has repeatedly extended by 90 or 120 days a sanctions exemption to allow Baghdad to import Iranian energy after Washington reimposed sanctions on Tehran’s oil sector forbidding countries from purchasing Iranian energy.

America illegally invaded Iraq in 2003, occupied and destabilized and flattened it, and then never left. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and millions more have been made refugees or internally displaced persons.

The consequences for the population are almost beyond comprehension: After decades of conflict, more than 2 million Iraqis are disabled, while the PTSD is inescapable. Entire generations have been left unable to look at the sky the same way.

The Iraqi people must be added, alongside the American dead and their families, to the register of 9/11’s victims, after that day’s events were used as a justification for war. The atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, the bombardment of Fallujah, the attack on civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square by the military contractor Blackwater — these events are a small part of a long list, made exceptional not by the character of their violence but by their outsize impact on the collective psychology.

​America trained, funded, and commanded Iraqi Interior Ministry special police forces to run a network of torture centers across the nation. Parts of Iraq are now rubble, a ruin-monument to western folly. One hundred military orders were signed into law by the U.S.-backed Coalition Provisional Authority to privatize state-run companies and amend the tax laws to facilitate foreign ownership.