U.S. military formally ends mission in Iraq – Opinion

Posted by deslava27 |

U.S. military formally ends mission in Iraq – latimes.com. Today officially the US has withdrawn from Iraq. After nine years of war, billions of dollars spent and nearly 4,500 lives lost. This war like the Afghanistan war and our conflict in Vietnam comes to a close in a bunker far away from the civilians we were there to liberate.

Under Bush the Mission was completed in 2003. We had liberated Iraq from Hussein and had brought freedom to Iraq. What the Bush administration did not bargain for was a long expensive insurgent and guerrilla war. After the initial liberation of Iraq the US had an opportunity to give power back to the people and leave. Instead it stayed and started a conflict that lasted more than 9 years carving out Iraq into sectors and dividing its people.  With the US exit from Iraq, Iraq is no better than it was 9 years ago, except now it has no clear government, a weak police and military force and the peace developed at gun point and held together by US dollars will start to break around the seams once the money stops flowing into Iraq.

There was perhaps no better symbol of the fragility of the security gains in Iraq than that the final ceremony was held in a structure known as the “Glass House.”

The domed, glass-clad structure near the Baghdad airport runway was once a VIP lounge under Hussein. Many of the glass panels were shattered  and its reception rooms lay in ruins after U.S. troops stormed the airport in 2003, but even today the building is patched with plywood and camouflage netting, and protected behind blast walls.

If there was real peace and the mission had been accomplished the ceremony could have been held in downtown Baghdad with soldiers in their hummers waving goodbye to happy Iraqi citizens saying farewell to their liberators like when they first entered Baghdad. Instead the reality is another, Army and the high-ranking officials at the ceremony know that is not the truth of the situation and that is why they end the ceremony in a remote secure location. No great news coverage, no parade, no sight of the Iraqi people, just a let’s get out of here while we still can event.

Around 200 U.S. military personnel will stay in Iraq after this year, but only to administer arms sales and other limited military exchanges as members of the U.S. diplomatic mission.

Though security has improved dramatically since the insurgency’s height in 2006 and 2007, Iraq remains riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and beset by fears that the U.S.  departure will cause violence to increase once again.

Many U.S. military officers, including some in attendance Thursday, have spent years fighting in Iraq  and now wonder as they leave what has been achieved.

Weaponry dealers and mercenaries will stay in Iraq because that is what the country needs. Not schools, not hospitals not a stable government. The war spent billions of unaccounted dollars, thousands of US soldiers lives and Iraqi citizens lives still torn with no hope insight. It wasn’t worth it, it really wasn’t. 9 years over there and we fixed nothing, and now the troops come back home to unemployment, a battered economy and less freedom then when they left. Its a shame they fought for freedom in another country and return to one less free.