Second, the Iraqis will need to prepare to fight the Islamic State in its next incarnation—that of a traditional terror group, conducting hit-and-run or suicide attacks against the Iraqi people. The United States and its coalition partners will likely need to leave some troops behind to teach, train, and mentor the Iraqi special operations and police forces as they make the switch from winning back territory to protecting the population in territory under Iraqi control.

All of that means that the United States will want to leave a stay-behind force in Iraq, and not just for Iraqi interests but for U.S. interests: No one wants to return to a situation similar to the one in which U.S. forces deployed in 2014, where the Iraqi military the United States had left behind in 2011 had atrophied due to both neglect and the politicization of its officer corps by the former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

Trump’s careless words bind his own military’s hands. BuzzFeed’s Borzou Daragahi—who was part of a Pulitzer-finalist Baghdad bureau for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and knows Iraq well—has been keeping track of the way in which Trump’s rhetoric is being received in Iraq. (The tl;dr version: not well!) The fear many have is that once the Islamic State is defeated in Iraq, the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq will be tempted to turn their attention toward the U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.

One area in which the Iranians, in particular, have consistently bettered the United States in Iraq has been in messaging. The Iranians have been very savvy in using investments in Iraqi media to sow doubt about the true intentions of the United States. That’s why a year ago, at a time in which the United States had just helped Iraqi forces recapture Ramadi, 40 percent of Iraqis nonetheless believed the United States was “working to destabilize Iraq and control its natural resources.”

“Pshaw!” we would tell the Iraqis at the time. “That’s typical Middle East conspiracy-mongering!”

Well, the joke was on us, because our elected head of state apparently believes what the Iraqis feared we believed. (Also, we are no longer in any position to arrogantly poke fun at our brothers and sisters in the Middle East for their fondness for conspiracies. We now have our own problems in this regard, and as the Iraqi-Lebanese satirist Karl Sharro has pointed out with glee, the United States is beginning to look more and more like an Arab country these days.)

So if what the president said was such a disaster for U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East, why and how did he say it?

The why is easiest to answer: Trump is basically the guy you find yourself sitting next to in a bar on a Thursday afternoon who offers commentary on the cable news playing in the corner. He doesn’t really think about the second- and third-order effects of what he’s saying, because that’s not his job. He’s just trying to enjoy his Michelob and strike up small talk. That’s what Trump was trying to do at the CIA: Establish a rapport with strangers in a bar, not really choosing his words very carefully.