Fighting the same enemies

On the fifth anniversary of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the ‘operation’ part is still far from over. When the Iraqi military was neutralized in the first few weeks of the war it was hard to imagine that, five years later, the battle for Iraq would still be raging. Saddam Hussein had two bitter enemies: Iran, Iraq’s historic rival, and Sunni fundamentalists. Now that the old guard is gone, US forces are left fighting against the same people Saddam Hussein was bent on destroying: al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Twenty years ago this month, I was standing on the frontlines of a war that has been compared in brutality to the trench warfare in Europe during World War I. Iran and Iraq were in the last stages of a conflict that had lasted eight years and claimed over a million lives. Chemical and biological weapons, which had been banned under the Geneva