AQ did not go to Iraq until we did, and they went there because we were there. It was, for AQ, primarily a battle field against foreign influence in the region. Their battlefields for taking on "apostates" were in all those other Muslim countrie around the region where they were recruiting fighters to come help them against us in Iraq, while at the same time conducting UW to support those insurgent movements at home.
The fact that they killed many Muslim Iraqis is immaterial to their goals there, just as the fact that we killed many Muslim Iraqis was immaterial to ours.
But for our operations to remove Saddam, there would not likely be any AQ in Iraq today, and very little Iranian influence as well. We need to own that.
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