UNITED STATES: POLICEMAN OF THE MIDDLE EAST

How did we become the policeman of the Middle East?  I think we volunteered for it, and it had something to do with oil.  We stay in the Middle East because we are doing nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.  President Bush (Bush-43) started this nation-building even though he ran for president on an anti-nation building ticket.  So when we say some Iranian General is a bad hombre (for example) we should remember that is our viewpoint, not that of the Middle East or at least some of the Middle East.  To Shiite Muslims, and particularly Iran, they think Gen. Soleiman was a hero.  To the Shiites, we are a colonial power out to tell them how to live (I guess we call it "behave.").

Of course, it is more complicated than that because we originally entered the Middle East to oust the leader of Iraq who was a Sunni Muslim.  At the request of the Iraqi government, President Obama had us leave Iraq at which time a group of Sunnis ex-military people came into being called ISIS that vowed to destroy us.  It turns out that ISIS became a popular movement throughout SE Asian countries as well as Iraq.  So we spent a lot of lives and money to push ISIS out of Iraq.  Though it looks like we have succeeded in doing this with the help of Kurdish forces (Iran is anti-ISIS also), we are told that ISIS is hardly obliterated and is waiting to re-enter the fray.  but at the time of writing this, ISIS seems to be on the back burner.

Because Gen. Suleiman, who had a genius of enlisting militia paramilitary forces, even of Sunni Muslims as well as Shiite, was killed on Iraqi soil, there have been anti-American demonstrations in Iraq and the Shiite part of the Iraqi Parliament has voted that the U.S. should leave.  Though eastern Iraq is Shiite Muslim like Iran, they do not want to be taken over by Iran and, in fact, there are anti-Iran demonstrations as well.  We left once before during the Obama administration at the request of the Iraqi government and ISIS rose up so we had to go back in when the Iraqi military not only couldn't handle the ISIS forces but dropped their arms and fled.

Is the modern Iraq military any better?
Still, a great swathe of the Washington political establishment sees a full withdrawal from Iraq as an “invitation” for ISIS or an ISIS-like successor group to reemerge; the Iraqi army, they argue, is ill-equipped to handle the looming fundamentalist threat on its own. Likewise, foreign policy hawks worry that a U.S. withdrawal would leave Iraq to be absorbed into the Iranian sphere of influence; as the Atlantic Council puts it, withdrawal gives “Soleimani the kind of posthumous victory the Trump administration previously denied him when he was alive.*

As stated elsewhere, demonstrations in Iran were anti-government, but when Soleiman was killed the demonstrations turned against the U.S.
The antigovernment rallies that have defined the region in recent months were put on a back burner after a U.S. airstrike killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq last week. The attack, which also killed a top Iraqi paramilitary leader, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, drove millions of mourners into the streets of Iran in a show of national unity, displacing the antiregime protests that shook Iran in November and December, at least for now.**

Actually, the 5,000 troops we have in Iraq are only about 13% of the forces we have there.  For example, we have 13,000 troops in each of Kuwait and Qatar and 7,000 more in Bahrain.  I am able to confirm there are about 40,000 American troops in the Middle East and another approximately 14,000 in Afghanistan.***

* https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/explained-why-does-america-still-have-troops-iraq-111751
** https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-iran-tensions-have-set-back-middle-east-street-protests-11578675523
** https://www.axios.com/where-us-troops-deployed-middle-east-5e96fdb2-c7ba-4f26-90b4-7bf452f83847.html