The U.S. military announced that it's ending Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq, which began in 2014 to combat ISIS. CBS News' Charlie D'Agata has more.
Page A8From§Eachthe matinee edition — 30 September 2026
U.S. ends its Iraq war the same week it revisits the lie that started it.
As it ran on the front
The wire calls him only Curve Ball. In 2011, eight years after the invasion his story justified, he told CBS's Bob Simon, "Telling the truth is not for me." His tale of a mobile biological weapons program was the chief justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion found no such weapons.
The U.S. answered that caliphate with a new war, Operation Inherent Resolve, and spent the next twelve years fighting an enemy the first war had created. In December 2015, with the caliphate still holding ground, the White House pledged additional Special Operations troops to Iraq. Political associates of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called the escalation unacceptable; Iraqi militia leaders decried the deployment too, on their own terms. The earlier withdrawal, in 2011, had come wrapped in President Obama's promise that there would be no more American boots on Iraqi ground — a promise the 2015 pledge had already broken.…
…(cont) By April 2018 the coalition declared major combat against ISIL over, saying it was shifting "from supporting and enabling combat operations to the training and development of self-sufficient Iraqi security-related capabilities." The fighting did not stop there. Twenty months later, in December 2019, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi condemned unilateral American bombings inside Iraq as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, "a dangerous escalation that threatens the security of Iraq and the region." The training mission kept bombing anyway.
On Wednesday the last American troops assigned to the anti-ISIS fight packed out, nearly seven years after Abdul-Mahdi's condemnation, twelve years after the mission opened, twenty-three years after Curve Ball's tale opened the war before it. CBS ran the closing story and, the same day, ran a second piece revisiting Curve Ball himself, the same 2011 line about telling the truth sitting one screen away from the announcement of the war's end.
Nobody drawing the paycheck to notice said the sentence out loud: the war that began on a fabricated tale closed, on schedule, with the vacuum it created finally patched over well enough to leave. Twelve years, three administrations, one caliphate built and unbuilt, and the invoice went everywhere except back to Curve Ball.
“One man told a story about labs that did not exist, and twenty-three years later my nephew's unit was still getting shot at cleaning up what that story opened. Wednesday the same network ran the war's end and the defector's old interview one click apart, and nobody drew the line between them. That's not journalism failing — that's journalism doing exactly what it's paid to do.”
“Twelve years, caliphate gone, troops home — that's a win, full stop, case closed. Sure, the reason we were even in that neighborhood traces back to a walk-in nobody double-checked, but that was a different administration, a different war, really a different — okay, it's the same war. Still, focus on the homecoming.”
The receipts
The U.S. military has declared an end to its Iraq-based anti-ISIS operation, more than 20 years after initially invading the country to oust then-President Saddam Hussein. Back in 2011, Bob Simon interviewed the Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification…
The last American troops assigned to fight ISIS in Iraq pulled out of the country Wednesday, ending the mission that dismantled the extremists’ self-declared caliphate but raising fears about what might fill the vacuum as the Iran war grinds on.
· The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq declares an end to major combat operations against ISIL in Iraq and closes the Coalition Forces Land Component Command headquarters. The U.S.-led coalition says in a sta from the morgue, 30 Apr 2018
· Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi condemns the unilateral American bombings inside Iraq, saying the U.S. strikes are a "violation of Iraqi sovereignty", and a "dangerous escalation that threatens from the morgue, 29 Dec 2019
· Following the Obama Administration's pledge of additional Special Operations troops to Iraq, several members of Iraq’s ruling alliance state that only the Iraqi Parliament can authorize the action, an from the morgue, 3 Dec 2015
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.