Biden declares an end to America’s ‘forever’ wars

 As the mighty gas-turbine M1A1 Abrams battle tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles of the US military thundered over the Kuwait-Iraq border in March 2003, victory over Saddam Hussein was never in doubt. So comprehensive was the defeat of the Iraqi dictator that when the tanks and other armoured vehicles eventually swept into Baghdad, an officer of the 3rd Infantry Division proudly boasted on Fox News: “Saddam Hussein says he owns Baghdad. We own Baghdad. We own his palaces, we own downtown.”

It was the same story, though different in scale, two years earlier in Afghanistan when an extraordinary combination of US special forces and CIA paramilitaries, backed by air power and Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the Arabian Sea, helped to topple the Taliban government