President Trump touted the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq as a win for both countries more than 20 years after the start of the Iraq War. "It's a victory for the United States, it's a victory for Iraq and a decisive victory over ISIS, which has been completely decimated,”
Page A5From§Eachthe early bird edition — 30 September 2026
Trump declares 'victory' the same week the lie that started the war reairs on TV.
As it ran on the front
"Curve Ball" is the wire's name for the defector who told CBS's Bob Simon in 2011, "telling the truth is not for me." His story of a mobile biological weapons program was the chief justification the White House offered in 2003 for invading Iraq. The invasion found no such weapons. It left a vacuum, and that vacuum grew into the Islamic State. The United States answered its own creation with a second war, Operation Inherent Resolve, fought for the next twelve years.
Those twelve years ran on promises to leave. In December 2015, with the caliphate still holding territory, the White House sent more Special Operations troops instead of fewer; associates of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called the escalation unacceptable, and so did the militias fighting alongside the mission it reinforced. By April 2018 the coalition declared an end to major operations. It was not the end. In December 2019 the U.S. answered an attack that killed an American contractor with strikes on an Iranian-backed militia; Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi condemned them as a breach of Iraqi sovereignty.…
…(cont) That is the war that closed this week. On Wednesday the last U.S. troops fighting the Islamic State left Iraq, twelve years after the mission began and twenty-three years after the invasion that made it necessary. The word landed the same week a CBS retrospective put Curve Ball back on the air, telling the same story he told in 2011: that the tale which built a war was invented.
Three weeks earlier, on September 10, a newer version of the pattern was still running. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke publicly for the first time about the Pentagon's boat-bombing campaign in the Caribbean, confirming the military was killing people aboard suspected drug vessels. Southern Command's Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere put that campaign's death count, as of that day, at 230. Iraq took twenty-three years to close on a claim its architects were never made to answer for.
A war built on an unverified claim rarely announces itself that way at the start. It announces itself as necessary, and it ends, if it ends, decades on, on a word like victory, issued by the same office that opened it, with no accounting attached.
“This is the same trick twice: sell the war on a story nobody checks, then sell the exit as a win nobody audits. Twenty-three years later "victory" just means the cameras move on, this time to a boat war already 230 bodies deep in the Caribbean.”
“Decimated is decimated, ISIS is done, and a president who closes out a war gets to call it what he wants — that's just how a transition gets messaged. The boat strikes are a completely separate operation, unrelated, nothing to connect here— wait, did I say unrelated? That's not where I meant to go with that.”
Earlier in this story
- U.S. ends its Iraq war the same week it revisits the lie that started it. By Sal · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026
The receipts
President Trump celebrated the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq on Wednesday and insisting that his war with Iran won’t drag on for decades.
· ‘Serial Killer Empire’: US Kills 3 in Boat Strike, Bringing Trump Murder Count in ‘Make-Believe War’ to 230 from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
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.