Oh for heaven’s sake, really? Is this a country, or a failing business?

Top Pentagon leaders said Monday that the United States has no plans to withdraw troops from Iraq, despite a draft letter from a senior military officer that appeared to suggest plans for withdrawal were underway.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the U.S. is “moving forces around” Iraq and neighboring Kuwait. He said a draft letter circulated internally by a U.S. Marine commander was a “poorly written” honest mistake that should never have gotten out.

The draft letter appeared to suggest the U.S. was preparing to pull troops out of Iraq in response to a vote by the Iraqi Parliament over the weekend. The draft said troops would be “repositioning over the course of the coming days and weeks to prepare for onward movement.” and warned of an increase in helicopter travel around the Green Zone. It added, “We respect your sovereignty decision to order our departure.”

If the Iraqis vote for us to leave their country, then we had better do it. There’s a word for a country in which foreign troops remain against the wishes of its people: occupied.

What did the Commander-In-Chief expect? He assassinated a senior Iranian leader in Baghdad. The Iraqis are supposed to be fine with that?

Look, I acknowledge that Gen. Soleimani was a nasty SOB with a lot of blood on his hands. The world is a better place for his not being in it. And I understand that the US could not simply sit back and allow Iran to get away with unanswered provocations. But the American president’s decision to assassinate a senior foreign leader is an extraordinary provocation. And what is it likely to get us? On what grounds did we do it? Eric Boehm writes in Reason:

Soleimani “was actively plotting in the region to take actions, the big action as he described it, that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. “We know it was imminent.”

But 48 hours after the drone attack that claimed Soleimani’s life, that narrative is starting to unravel amid reports that Trump took the unprecedented step of killing a foreign leader based on thin evidence of a threat and with an eye towards domestic politics. Indeed, the administration has so far provided little evidence that killing Soleimani has made Americans objectively safer—while the strike has clearly worsened the status quo by raising the likelihood of Iranian reprisals and the prospect for open war.

Yep. We are supposed to believe the Commander In Chief, and the US military, when successive administrations — Republican and Democratic — have lied this country into disastrous wars? Matt Welch, also writing in Reason:

The truth, which literally hurts, is that every administration lies about war, particularly (though not only) about its reasons for initiating deadly force. It was literally only last month that The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” project detailed how America’s longest war has been a nearly two-decade festival of deadly bullshit. How many times are we going to accept on-the-record U.S. military quotes like “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible”?

Too many times, I’m afraid. We enable the machinery of our own bamboozlement with our often partisan-based trust in the protectors of the flag.

Readers with long memories will surely note that David Frum wrote President George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in January 2002, linking Iran, North Korea, and especially Iraq in a rhetorical if not quite actual network of bad-guy regimes threatening to do the U.S. harm. “I was to provide a justification for war,” Frum recalled in his memoir. The justification was…misleading.

Consider the war of choice that deposed Muammar Qaddafi, and led to massive regional instability:

“We knew,” Barack Obama said on March 28, 2011, “that…if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen….Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

We know now that the congressionally unauthorized, U.S.-led regime-change war in Libya was not, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly bragged on the presidential campaign trail, “smart power at its best.” It was one of the major causes of Middle Eastern instability and misery over the past decade. But what we’ve forgotten, because our political discourse is cripplingly trivial, is that Obama’s bar-lowering justification was hysterical.

Read it all, and remind yourself that we Americans are led by people whose judgment and whose words we cannot trust. I am not a pacifist, and I don’t think the Iranian government is an innocent victim here. But I am very, very tired of leaving American blood and American treasure in the Middle East because of the hubris and incompetence of American leaders. And no, sorry, this time, it’s not different.

About Trump, some people on the Right backed him because they figured him to be less of a war enthusiast than Hillary Clinton. He’s blown that reputation sky-high, along with Gen. Soleimani. It’s the rashness of the attack, given the enormity of its potential consequences, that shocks. And now the Pentagon can’t even get its story straight about whether we are about to leave a country we invaded, and in which we have made our presence unwelcome by assassinating a top leader of the neighboring country, possibly (if the Iraqi leader is to be believed) because we induced the Iraqis to lure Soleimani to Baghdad in the first place.

UPDATE: Here is the letter that the commanding US general in Iraq sent: