President Trump hailed the last American troops leaving Iraq on Wednesday as the close of a two-decade quagmire the country never should have entered, and proof short, clear missions beat endless ones.
Speaking to guests at a White House Hispanic heritage celebration, Trump praised the orderly departure of coalition forces and equipment from Erbil Air Base and framed the moment as a win for the United States, for Iraq, and over ISIS.
The exit ends a military commitment that began with the 2003 invasion, cost roughly 4,500 American service members their lives, and stretched across multiple presidencies before Trump refused to let a temporary presence harden into a permanent one.
The New York Post reported Trump’s remarks and a related social media post the same day.
Trump told the White House audience the pullout was complete and decisive.
He said:
"This day is a victory for the United States. It’s a victory for Iraq and a decisive victory over ISIS."
He added that the departure itself closed a long, expensive chapter.
Trump stated:
"This orderly departure of coalition forces and equipment from Erbil Air Base marks the end of a very expensive excursion into h***."
He called Iraq “a place where we probably shouldn’t have gone” and said of the long war:
"It was a quagmire. Many, many years it lasted, but soon that part of history will be over."
Twice he drove the point home with the same plain line: “We’re getting the h*** out of there.”
In a social media post that Wednesday afternoon, Trump blamed “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire.” He also described his own approach:
"I set a clear mission, gave our Commanders the tools to finish it, and refused to let a temporary presence become a permanent one."
He praised Baghdad’s “wonderful new prime minister,” Ali al-Zadi.
American troops first entered Iraq in 2003 and toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
They left in 2011 under President Barack Obama.
They returned in 2014 after ISIS terrorists seized control of about a third of the country.
That cycle, invade, withdraw, return when the vacuum filled with jihadists, is the record Trump said he would not repeat. The final exit from Erbil Air Base is the concrete end of that pattern under his watch.
Trump stacked the Iraq timeline against recent operations he presented as the opposite approach.
He said the United States has a war with Venezuela “that was over in 148 minutes.”
On Operation Epic Fury against Iran, he said, “we have been there for six months with 18 killed,” and added that “we’re going to have that war won very quickly, one way or the other.”
He also noted U.S. negotiators have struggled for months to reach a deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and ends Tehran’s nuclear program. Trump predicted a resolution shortly after the Nov. 3 midterm election.
The contrast he drew was simple. Iraq became a multi-year, multi-president commitment that killed about 4,500 Americans. The newer campaigns he cited were measured in minutes or months, with far lower American losses, and with an explicit refusal to turn temporary force into permanent occupation.
Trump’s Wednesday message treated the Erbil departure as more than a logistics milestone. He cast it as the deliberate close of a war he argued America should never have started, run by leaders who let temporary deployments harden into open-ended ones.
The 2003 invasion, the 2011 departure, the 2014 return after ISIS seized large parts of Iraq, and the final coalition exit from Erbil Air Base form a single arc. Trump’s claim is that he broke the arc by setting a mission, resourcing commanders, and leaving when the job was done.
Whether future presidents keep that discipline is a separate question. The record of this week is that the last U.S. and coalition forces and equipment have left Erbil, Trump called the long war a quagmire born of bad decisions, and he held up shorter operations as the model he prefers.
American troops and the taxpayers who fund them get the benefit when presidents treat overseas force as a tool with a start and an end, not a permanent forward deployment by default.
