Finally!! All U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, some 39,000, are heading home and will be out of Iraq by December 31.
What took so long? Pres. George W. Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan and our search for Osama bin Laden and sent troops into Iraq in 2003, supposedly because Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Of course he’d have known they didn’t if he’d just waited for the U.N. inspectors to finish their job, but he didn’t. Hussein was caught, tried, and executed in 2006, but still we stayed.
We lost more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers in “Bush’s War” but now, finally, it’s been declared officially over by Pres. Obama.
Welcome home, U.S. troops. And Happy Holidays to you and your families and loved ones. We celebrate your return.
As much as I hate to say it, I just don’t trust that anyone left behind there will be safe. I think we should do everything we can to cover our asses while we’re heading out too!
Isn’t that SOP, to cover withdrawing troops? The few hundred troops left to defend our embassy should be relatively safe (it’s an embassy, after all), but we know they won’t be, any more than the embassy troops in Afghanistan have been. As far as I’m concerned, the more troops we get out of harm’s way, the better.
The mission in Afghanistan was fuzzy from the beginning. To try to transform into our own image an entire backward, illiterate, religion-crazed, tribally-diverse, violence-prone country just because the 9/11 terrorists had training camps there makes about as much sense as razing and rebuilding Hoboken because too many bank robbers came from there. But there I go again. Just one man’s opinion.
BTW, Pied – excellent photo! May I ask where you got that?
Excellent points Jim, on both the image and our foreign policy!
I was very tempted to add that it’s also high time we were out of Afghanistan too, for all the reasons you stated. But I didn’t want to detract from my immediate point — getting out of Iraq. I’ve already scolded myself for thinking Obama might announce a withdrawal from Afghanistan some time next year, say, a few months before the election …
I ran a Google image search for the photo. Don’t recall which of several sources it came from, and couldn’t identify the original source. I liked it too. At first glance I thought it was a painting or illustration of some kind.
That’s what I get from haste – errors! 🙂 I looked at your wonderful image and made my comment in the context of Afghanistan without paying enough attention to the words. Sometimes my fingers get ahead of my eyes. 🙂
P.S. Did some more searching on the picture at Tin Eye (search results expire in 72 hours). Interesting to see it identified variously as US troops in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. Or as British troops or NATO troops. Apparently the source is unclear, the subject is unclear, and even the nature of the picture is unclear (realistic illustration or photo?). Now I’m really curious about it.
Hmm. Me too. How did you find it in the first place? For my posts I most often use a piece of image-search software promoted by WordPress.
Just ran a Google image search.
Doh. I just ran “image Iraq war” and up they popped. Thanks – sometimes the simple eludes me. 🙄 However, it occurs to me that this might have the disadvantage you mentioned, i.e., running into copyright or ownership issues. When I use the WordPress method (a plug-in I think is called Zemanta), that doesn’t seem to be an issue. Many of the search results are from Wikipedia or Flickr, but so far are never the quality of the one we are discussing here.
Zemanta, if I’m not mistaken, does not pull up copyrighted material. Google will pull up anything that’s on the Internet, and it’s up to you to figure out if it’s copyrighted or not.
PiedType, it is high time, as you say. Too many lives have been lost. It was folly to begin this: let’s hope they can withdraw with speed and safety.
Amen to that, Kate.