I don’t agree with every argument made in this Lee Smith New York Post piece, but I do endorse the bottom-line conclusion: it’s time—well past time—to get out of Iraq. President Donald Trump should follow up the Qasem Soleimani strike by finally doing so instead of risking Iraq 2.0 in Iran.

Smith writes:

Now that Trump has brought down the Islamic Republic’s top military commander and terror mastermind, he can reconcile the two wings of the party by declaring mission accomplished and dropping the mic. America’s work here is done.

It shouldn’t be a tough decision to make.

Despite the thousands of American lives and billions of US dollars sacrificed to ­remake Iraq, Tehran has more influence with Baghdad than Washington does.

TAC‘s own Dan McCarthy made a version of this argument over at Spectator USA. McCarthy contended:

Donald Trump was elected to put Washington’s emphasis back on the well-being of Americans, rather than on the imperial politics of the Middle East. A war with Iran would be a betrayal of his mandate—a war that would lead to other wars and more prolonged occupation of the region. His domestic agenda, all his policies on trade and immigration, would fall by the wayside in the same fashion that George W. Bush’s did as a result of the Iraq War. He would become another war president, and another failed president. But killing Soleimani doesn’t make that inevitable—on the contrary, by itself Soleimani’s death brings an end to one of the villains whose role in stoking anti-American violence in the region made it harder for us to leave.

Except Trump appears for the moment to be hell bent on doing the opposite: staying in Iraq for no obvious purpose even as Iran is menacing our troops and the Shiite-run Iraqi government says it wants us to leave. We would maintain a growing military presence in the country to either prop up a regime that is closer to Tehran than Washington would like and claims to want the U.S. out of its sovereign territory or to once again try to nation-build in Iraq, presumably empowering a different faction. If Iraq follows through on not wanting all of Trump’s horses and all of Trump’s men to try and put Humpty together again, our president wants to hit them with sanctions.

This is arguably crazier than the rationale for invading Iraq in the first place, if that is even possible. It is the continued presence in Iraq that is putting Americans in harm’s way for an underlying mission that makes no sense. If the reports that Iranian missile launches yielded no American casualties hold up, suggesting a face-saving move by Tehran, Trump would be wise to exercise restraint and tell the Iraqi parliament, “Thanks for the memories.”

The alternative is to remain in Iraq as it becomes more violent and continue tit for tat military strikes increasing our military footprint in the Middle East and potentially replicating what Trump called the “big, fat mistake” of Iraq, this time in Iran.