The War Is Over

Or at the very least the presence of the US military in Iraq is.  This is the Breaking News alert I received from CNN yesterday:

The United States officially ended its mission in Iraq on Thursday, nearly nine years after it led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Baghdad for the ceremony to personally thank the U.S. troops who have served there, as well as Iraqi security forces.

All U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of the month after Washington and Baghdad failed to agree on terms under which they could remain.

There were about 5,500 American troops in Iraq as of Tuesday, the most recent day American officials in Iraq gave CNN figures.

More from the CNN article:

Hussein's regime proved easy to topple, but no weapons of mass destruction were found, and the United States and its allies were left occupying a country where they were not greeted as liberators -- despite the prediction of Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney.

Iraq erupted into sectarian violence, leaving U.S. troops to try to contain what threatened to become a civil war. Improvised explosive device or IED became a household term; traumatic brain injuries, a signature wound of the war.

[…] In all, the United States spent more than $800 billion in Iraq.

But Panetta reflected on a greater cost.

He said the United States was "deeply indebted" to all Americans in uniform. Nearly 4,500 of them were killed in this war. More than 30,000, wounded.

[…] No one knows for sure how many Iraqis who have been killed since March 2003, but the independent public database Iraq Body Count has compiled reports of more than 150,000 between the invasion and October 2010, with four out of five dead being civilians.

Thousands of other Iraqis struggle to cope with lives marred by war. For them, the battle goes on as the Americans leave behind a fragile nation struggling to establish democracy, struggling to establish stability.

Violence still claims innocent lives in Iraq. People are frustrated with the lack of electricity. Baghdad is awash in trash. No one can predict Iraq's future without the presence of Americans.

I wonder how different the situation would be in the Middle East and for the US in the world had Bush not invaded Iraq after 9/11.  Given what we’ve witnessed with the Arab Spring revolts, Saddam Hussein would have likely been toppled by his own people, supported by the UN/Clinton embargos and no-fly zones that very effectively undermined his rule.

I guess we’ll never know, but the thought of all those lives lost and money wasted compels me to wonder…