President Trump responded to the interim Iraqi Prime Minister’s insistence that all foreign troops leave his country by demanding that Iraqis pay for all the bombs the United States has dropped on their country in the nearly seventeen years of U.S. occupation since the March, 2003 invasion.
“We have dropped a lot of very expensive bombs on Iraq over the years,” Trump said Sunday, “and so far the Iraqis have contributed nothing.”
The president’s comments came in the wake of Iraqi Prime Minister Abel Abdul Mahdi’s statement that it was “time for American troops to leave” and Iraq’s parliament voting to support the expulsion of U.S. troops from the country on Sunday following the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian leader Qasem Soleimani.
Trump, unmoved by the mere wishes of the elected representatives of Iraq, continued. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Iraq. Billions of dollars on a great big, beautiful airbase there. And they still haven’t paid us for the accommodations and services we provided at Abu Ghraib. The interrogators, the police dogs, the chemical light sticks we used to sodomize them, the hoods, the dog leashes we used to humiliate them. All that costs money, and we’re not going anywhere until they pay us back.”