6 October 2026

When Was Iraq Certain?

The American Departure and the Wrong Question About Iraq’s Future

I stopped at the title before I reached the article.

“Iraq Faces Uncertain Future After US Troop Departure.”

My first reaction was not disagreement.

It was a question.

When, exactly, was Iraq’s future certain?

Was it in 2003, when an invasion destroyed one political order without knowing what would replace it?

Was it during the insurgency?

During the sectarian bloodletting?

During the construction of the new constitutional order?

During the first American withdrawal?

During the collapse of Iraqi forces before ISIS in 2014?

During the war against ISIS?

During the Kurdistan independence referendum and the events of October 2017?

During the mass protests?

During the repeated failures to bring armed groups fully under constitutional authority?

During the recurrent disputes between Baghdad and Erbil over budgets, salaries, oil, territory, authority and constitutional obligations?

Or during the years in which Iraq became an arena in which the United States and Iran could compete while Iraqis themselves lived with the consequences?

The historical record does not describe a country moving in September 2026 from certainty into uncertainty. Iraq has lived through war, internal conflict, displacement, terrorism, political instability, foreign interference and recurrent institutional crises throughout the post-2003 period. The first agreed American military withdrawal in 2011 was itself followed by deteriorating security and eventually ISIS’s seizure of large parts of the country.

So perhaps we should formulate the problem differently.

Iraq has not suddenly entered uncertainty.

Something else has happened.

One of the mechanisms through which Iraq’s uncertainty was being managed has changed.

That is a much more interesting problem.

And for Kurdistan, it is a much more uncomfortable one.

What Actually Ended?

The departure of American forces on September 30 matters.

But precision matters too.

The United States and Iraq had agreed in 2024 to conclude the Coalition’s military mission and move toward bilateral security relationships. The arrangement explicitly envisaged continued security cooperation rather than the disappearance of the relationship.

When the final forces left Erbil on September 30, 2026, the Pentagon described what had happened as a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort accompanied by a more conventional bilateral security relationship. It said targeted American training and intelligence support would continue.

That distinction matters.

A military presence ended.

American power did not disappear.

Iraqi geography did not change.

Iran did not suddenly arrive.

The militias were not created on September 30.

ISIS did not suddenly rediscover Iraq.

The Baghdad–Erbil disputes did not begin that morning.

Nor did Kurdish vulnerability.

So instead of asking what uncertainty the American departure has created, I would ask:

What existing realities has the departure made more visible?

That question takes us somewhere different.

The Vacuum That Was Already Occupied

I have become increasingly suspicious of the word vacuum in Middle Eastern political analysis.

America leaves.

A vacuum appears.

Iran fills it.

Turkey fills it.

ISIS exploits it.

Somebody must fill it.

But Iraq is not an empty bottle.

Neither is Kurdistan.

More than forty million human beings do not constitute a geopolitical vacuum because American soldiers leave.

There are governments.

Parliaments.

Political parties.

Courts.

Security forces.

Peshmerga.

An army.

Police.

Intelligence services.

Businesses.

Universities.

Civil society.

Foreign relationships.

Political elites.

Armed organizations.

Citizens.

And competing ideas about what Iraq should become.

If the removal of several thousand foreign soldiers produces something resembling a vacuum, then the interesting question is not simply who will fill it?

The interesting question is:

Why was it empty?

What capability was missing?

What institution failed to develop?

What responsibility had been outsourced?

What political problem had been postponed because an external actor made postponement temporarily survivable?

That is where the analysis should begin.

Intelligence Can Postpone Correction

There is a strange possibility here.

External protection can solve real problems.

It can deter attacks.

Provide intelligence.

Train forces.

Supply technology.

Reassure allies.

Constrain adversaries.

And in the case of the international campaign against ISIS, external military assistance contributed decisively to defeating an organization that had captured enormous territory and inflicted extraordinary violence.

But successful protection can create another problem.

It can make the consequences of an unresolved weakness temporarily manageable.

And when consequences become manageable, the pressure to correct the underlying weakness may decline.

This is not an argument against American assistance.

It is an argument for asking what assistance produced.

After years of partnership, the correct measure of success cannot simply be:

Are the Americans still here?

It must also be:

What became possible for Iraqis and Kurds to do without them because they were here?

That is a very different metric.

Protection that produces permanent dependency contains a contradiction.

The highest achievement of protection should be capability.

The Kurdish Question After the Americans

This is where I depart most sharply from the article’s framing.

It describes the Kurdish position as essentially defensive. Kurds, it argues, have little interest in overturning the post-2003 order. They want to preserve constitutional recognition, prevent Baghdad from using budgets and salaries against Kurdistan, and retain protection against Iran and Iran-backed armed groups.

I understand this description.

But I would not make it the Kurdish political horizon.

Because there is something deeply troubling about defining Kurdish strategy primarily through what others may do.

America leaves.

Iran may advance.

Militias may attack.

Baghdad may coerce.

Washington may impose sanctions.

Therefore Kurdistan becomes vulnerable.

All of these may be legitimate concerns.

But where is Kurdistan in this explanation?

Not geographically.

Causally.

Where is Kurdish agency?

After more than three decades of self-government, what capabilities exist that did not exist before?

What institutions have become resilient?

What happens if Washington changes policy?

What happens if Baghdad fails?

What happens if Iran attacks?

What happens if Turkey changes its calculations?

What happens if one Kurdish party makes a catastrophic mistake?

What happens if a foreign protector decides that protecting Kurdistan is no longer worth the cost?

A political strategy cannot consist indefinitely of hoping that somebody else answers these questions favorably.

Who Will Protect Us?

For understandable historical reasons, Kurdish political thinking has repeatedly returned to one question:

Who will protect us?

History supplied good reasons for asking it.

But there comes a point when a people possessing institutions, territory, resources, universities, security forces, international relationships and decades of political experience must add another question:

What must we build?

That is not isolationism.

It does not mean abandoning America.

It does not mean distrusting Baghdad.

It does not mean rejecting relations with Turkey, Europe, the Gulf states or anyone else.

Quite the opposite.

A capable Kurdistan should have more relationships, not fewer.

But relationships should increase choice rather than replace capability.

The movement the Kurds should want to see is:

Protection → Capability → Responsibility → Reciprocity → Redundancy.

Protection helps create capability.

Capability makes genuine responsibility possible.

Responsibility requires reciprocity from partners.

And redundancy ensures that the failure of any single relationship does not become an existential event.

That is what political maturity begins to look like.

The Problem With “The Shiites,” “The Sunnis,” and “The Kurds”

There is another feature of the article worth examining.

It is careful at points to acknowledge internal divisions. There are different Shiite currents. Sunni actors have different objectives. Kurdish interests are described through political elites.

That caution is important.

But the analysis nevertheless gravitates toward three large containers:

Shiites.

Sunnis.

Kurds.

Then interests are assigned to them.

This is understandable shorthand.

It can also become an explanatory trap.

Communities do not make decisions.

People do.

Parties do.

Commanders do.

Governments do.

Institutions do.

Militias do.

Voters do.

Business networks do.

Foreign governments do.

And actors within the same ethnic or sectarian category frequently possess radically different interests.

The important question is therefore not simply what “the Shiites” or “the Sunnis” or “the Kurds” want after the American departure.

It is:

Which actors acquire which new choices because a particular constraint has changed?

Now we have a mechanism.

An armed organization may calculate that the cost of coercion has declined.

A federal institution may discover that responsibility can no longer be deferred.

A Kurdish institution may discover that a capability it assumed somebody else would provide is missing.

A political entrepreneur may discover a new electoral opportunity.

ISIS may discover exploitable gaps.

Baghdad may discover that declaring sovereignty is easier than exercising it.

These are explanations.

“Shiites want X” is usually only the beginning of one.

Sovereignty After the Parade

There is a particularly revealing moment in the article.

Iraq celebrated the Coalition departure in the language of sovereignty. Some armed factions simultaneously presented the departure as a victory for their “resistance.”

But what exactly has become sovereign?

That is not a rhetorical question.

If sovereignty means that foreign soldiers have departed, then September 30 provides an answer.

If sovereignty means that legitimate Iraqi institutions possess final authority over organized violence, the question remains open.

The Iraqi government itself has declared that weapons should be under state authority, while the timetable for dealing with armed factions has reportedly moved into 2027 and some powerful groups continue to resist disarmament.

So the interesting test of sovereignty begins after Sovereignty Day.

Can the state decide?

Can it enforce?

Can it protect?

Can it prevent actors inside its territory from imposing foreign strategic interests upon Iraqi citizens?

Can it protect Kurdistan when federal responsibility requires it?

Can it prevent Kurdistan from being attacked by forces over which Baghdad claims jurisdiction?

Can decisions of war and peace actually travel through constitutional institutions?

A flag ceremony cannot answer those questions.

Institutions can.

The United States Is Also the Wrong Fixed Object

The article raises a serious question about American reliability.

Regional partners may reasonably examine whether association with Washington imposes risks without guaranteeing protection when those risks materialize.

But even here I would rotate the problem.

American policy changes.

Administrations change.

Threat perceptions change.

Strategic priorities change.

Domestic politics changes.

Technologies change.

Interests change.

Why would any rational political actor build a long-term strategy on the assumption that another country’s preferences will remain fixed?

The uncertainty of American policy is not an anomaly.

It is politics.

The United States should be criticized when criticism is warranted.

But Kurdistan must also criticize an architecture that makes every change in Washington feel existential.

This is the harder question:

Why, after all these years, does a change in American military posture still have the power to reorganize Kurdish perceptions of political possibility?

That question belongs in Erbil, not Washington.

Preserve the Partnership. Remove the Dependency.

This distinction matters because the wrong lesson from American departure would be withdrawal from America.

That would merely replace one rigid answer with another.

The better objective is:

Preserve the partnership while reducing the dependency.

Continue intelligence cooperation.

Continue training.

Continue diplomatic relations.

Continue economic ties.

Continue educational partnerships.

Continue security cooperation where interests coincide.

Build relations with Europe.

Work constitutionally with Baghdad.

Maintain pragmatic relations with neighbors.

But simultaneously build Kurdish capability.

Unify the Peshmerga institutionally rather than cosmetically.

Build command structures that survive party disagreement.

Develop intelligence capability.

Develop civil defense.

Develop protection against drones and missiles.

Build economic resilience.

Reduce the ability of another government to turn salaries into political leverage.

Create multiple international relationships.

Build institutions that continue functioning when personalities change.

The objective is not autarky.

It is choice-space.

A Kurdistan with only one protector has one point of failure.

A Kurdistan with capabilities, constitutional rights, functioning institutions and multiple relationships possesses alternatives.

That difference is political freedom.

Perhaps America Did Not Create the New Uncertainty

This leads me to a different interpretation of September 30.

Perhaps the American departure did not create Iraq’s new uncertainty.

Perhaps it revealed Iraq’s old uncertainty.

That would explain much.

Iranian-aligned armed organizations existed before the final American departure.

The incomplete monopoly of legitimate force existed before it.

ISIS remnants existed before it.

Baghdad–Erbil disputes existed before it.

Kurdish military fragmentation existed before it.

Economic dependency existed before it.

Unimplemented constitutional commitments existed before it.

Foreign interference existed before it.

The American presence interacted with all these problems.

Sometimes it constrained them.

Sometimes it mitigated their consequences.

Sometimes American policy contributed to problems of its own.

Sometimes American power allowed local actors to postpone solving problems they eventually had to solve themselves.

September 30 therefore did something analytically useful.

It removed one variable.

Now we get to see more clearly what remains.

The Post-American-Presence Test

I would therefore resist both triumphalism and panic.

Baghdad should not assume that the departure of foreign forces proves sovereignty.

Kurdistan should not assume that their departure proves abandonment.

Armed groups should not assume that American absence gives them permanent freedom of action.

Washington should not assume that military departure ends American interests or responsibilities arising from continuing partnerships.

And analysts should not assume that uncertainty suddenly arrived because American soldiers departed.

The better test is more demanding.

Can Iraq turn sovereignty from a slogan into institutional capacity?

Can Baghdad establish constitutional authority over organized violence?

Can the federal state fulfill its responsibilities toward Kurdistan?

Can Kurdistan transform decades of external protection into indigenous capability?

Can the Peshmerga become an institution rather than an agreement to create one?

Can Baghdad and Erbil build a relationship in which responsibility travels in both directions?

Can international partnerships become sources of additional capability rather than substitutes for it?

And when any of these arrangements fail, can the failure be detected and corrected before another generation inherits it?

Those are the questions that matter.

The Future Was Always Uncertain

There is, finally, something philosophically strange about our fear of uncertainty.

The future is uncertain.

It was uncertain on March 20, 2003.

It was uncertain when Iraqis voted on a new constitution.

It was uncertain when American forces departed in 2011.

It was uncertain when ISIS entered Mosul.

It was uncertain when Peshmerga forces fought ISIS.

It was uncertain when Kurdistan held its referendum.

It was uncertain yesterday.

It will be uncertain tomorrow.

The purpose of politics cannot be to abolish uncertainty.

That is impossible.

The purpose should be to build institutions capable of surviving error inside an uncertain future.

That is the distinction I would make now.

A society is not secure because it knows what will happen.

It is more secure when it possesses enough knowledge, capability, institutional flexibility and freedom of criticism to respond when what happens is not what it expected.

That is why I would change the question.

Not:

What will happen to Iraq now that America has left?

But:

What did Iraq and Kurdistan learn to build while America was there?

And then the harder question:

What do they discover, now that American troops have left, that they failed to build?

That is not pessimism.

It is an opportunity for criticism.

And criticism, if allowed to reach the responsible institutions, can create knowledge.

The final American aircraft therefore did not carry certainty out of Iraq.

There was no certainty to carry away.

What departed was a particular military presence—a mechanism that deterred some dangers, constrained some actors, supplied capabilities, enabled others, and sometimes allowed underlying problems to remain unresolved.

Now those problems become more visible.

Good.

Visibility is uncomfortable.

But invisible weakness is more dangerous.

For Kurdistan especially, the next question should not be who will replace the Americans.

Nobody should.

Not Iran.

Not Turkey.

Not Baghdad.

Not another great power.

The task is not to find a new dependency sufficiently powerful to make the old uncertainty invisible again.

The task is to build enough capability, responsibility, reciprocity and redundancy that the next departure, the next war, the next American administration, the next Iraqi government, the next regional realignment—or the next error made in Erbil—does not close the future.

The future of Iraq did not suddenly become uncertain on September 30, 2026.

It became uncertain the moment human beings began making political choices whose consequences they could not completely know.

That condition is permanent.

The question is whether Iraq—and Kurdistan within it—can finally build institutions appropriate to that fact.

Uncertainty is not the failure.

The failure would be entering it without the means to learn.