Thursday, July 30, 2009
And then there was one. As of July 31 the multi-national force in Iraq will consist entirely of troops from one nation: the United States. The last remaining militaries other than the U.S., the British and Australians, will pull out their troops by Friday. This development has prompted the question over what to do about the name, Multi-National Force-Iraq, when there’s no longer any “multi” involved. An American military spokesman said that as of next January, the name will officially become “United States Force-Iraq.”
The one-time “coalition of the willing” that originally helped the U.S. invade and occupy Iraq involved 38 nations, including Georgia, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, Tonga, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Latvia. Many of these countries sent small contingents of soldiers numbering in the hundreds. In the case of Iceland the troop level consisted entirely of two soldiers.
The country that suffered the most fatalities—outside the U.S.’s 4,300—was Britain, with 179 killed. The other 37 coalition members lost a total of 139 soldiers.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Iraq Force Soon to Be a Coalition of One (by Rod Nordland and Timothy Williams, New York Times)
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