With a few exceptions, it was hardly possible to imagine Embassy officials or troops in Baghdad taking great risks to get their Iraqi contacts out before we left.
Early reports suggest that in his testimony to a congressional committee today, General David Petraeus will claim that the Iranians assisted the Mahdi Army militia to fight the forces of Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in the recent week-long battle in Basra.
On the Iraqi front, analysts say the US has to decide how many more victories by Isis it can sustain before increasing support to the underperforming Baghdad government forces on the ground.
There was a time in 2007, in between Chris Kyle's deployments, when half my platoon was trapped behind a house while two Iraqi insurgent machine gunners pinned us down.
"Our style is very different and I believe if we use that and impact them with our style, there is definitely a chance we'll be victorious," their Iraqi midfielder Yaser Kasim told the Swindon Advertiser, intriguingly.
Upskilling the Iraqi security forces in this area will allow them to clear territory safely and return it to local people who have been displaced".
The commander of the US war against the Islamic State (Isis) placed the Syria side of his cross-border campaign on the back burner on Friday and could not predict when Iraqi forces will recapture territory from the jihadist army.
The urgent delivery of new anti-tank missiles for the Iraqi army has been one short-term response.
What undermines Bush's assertions on Iran's destabilising activities in Iraq is the absence of any such statements by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki's government.
Four years on, Isis controls a third of Syrian and Iraqi territory, and is growing branches in other countries of the Arab and Muslim world – most recently in Nigeria.
During the previous Iraq war, the US spent nearly a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars building, arming and mentoring Iraqi military and police units, only to see them overwhelmed by Isis.
