The collapse of Iraq’s armed forces in the face of a lightning advance by Islamic militants has left some Lowcountry veterans of the Iraq war, incuding the Army general who helped pave the way for the U.S. invasion in 2003, frustrated, saddened and disappointed.
“I’m very sad about what could have been and what appears is now happening,” retired Lt. Gen. Colby Broadwater, who commanded operations in northern Iraq and Turkey in early 2003, said Friday. “We lost the better part of 4,000 soldiers in that operation. The Iraqis lost a lot of people. We have put untold billions of dollars into assisting and stabilizing that nation, which is a very difficult thing, to build a nation, and now it appears it’s all falling apart.”
Broadwater, now president of the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, worked closely with American and Iraqi leaders, including current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to organize Iraq’s new government after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.