« More police brutality against OWS demonstrators: Pepper Spray du jour. | Main | Time Magazine's Person of the Year: The Protester. »

Eight long years later...and what did we accomplish?

After nearly nine years, some 4,500 American fatalities and about $1 trillion, America's war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops traverse the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States' most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.

Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop "surge," but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.

In the hands of a people who still want to kill each other:

There are still roughly a dozen insurgent groups and militias active in Iraq: Sunni groups made up of former members of the ruling Baath Party and the home-grown insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Iraq; and Shiite militias supported by Iran and Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric.

And how many Iraqis did the Bush/Cheney War Machine kill before we got on the path of diminished violence?

While more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians perished in the war and its aftermath, violence has decreased significantly since 2007, when there were almost 7,500 attacks a month. But Iraq remains an extremely dangerous place. According to the American military, there were 500 to 750 attacks a month this year, including bombings, rocket attacks and assassinations.

Considering that the last surviving veteran from World War One just died this year and we have been paying his benefits for almost 100 years, the American Tax Payer can expect to be paying Iraqi War Veterans' benefits for about another 80 or so years.

Just setting aside the human tragedy of all the U.S. and Iraqi deaths, check out this Wikipedia page detailing how much all of these wars have cost us. And just as Vietnam turned into a non-issue after all of these decades, so will Iraq.

What a complete and utter waste.

Watch the slideshow of photos from this historic day here.

Name (required)
Email
Website
Remember personal info? Yes   No
Comments

home | music | democracy | earth | money | projects | about | contact

Site design by Matthew Fries | © 2003-23 Consilience Productions. All Rights Reserved.
Consilience Productions, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
All contributions are fully tax deductible.