"It's harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq - all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering - all of it has led to this moment of success.I saw (somewhere?) of some republican commentator saying that he'd better include the word "victory" all over the place in the speech (after questioning whether it was right at all for the prez to deliver a 'political' speech to troops) - come to think of it, it might have been a Fox bit I accidentally saw on youtube. Anyway, yeah, glad the speech was modest in the tub-thumping stakes.
Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.
We're building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home."
"So this means we'll cut defense spending now, right?"HA!! HEHEHAHAAAAHAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
The Iraq war was the greatest crime of the 21st century. But what's truly shocking is the total lack of accountability.I'd be hard-pressed to disagree, nixerman, and when reflecting on how those in power not only evaded accountability, but profited from this crime, I usually recall this passage from The Gulag Archipelago:
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand-fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason that they are growing up 'indifferent.' Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country.But thinking back to all the flags and car magnets from the last decade, I can't be sure that most of us in the US recognized this as a crime: popular opinion waned only as casualty counts increased, the length of operations approached that of our involvement in the second world war, and the hollowness of official claims became more broadly evident and discussed.
That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.What's interesting is that Obama was actually negotiating to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely, but couldn't get the Iraqi government to agree for U.S immunity. One of the reasons for that is actually due to leaked wikileaks memos.
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/said with irony, sadness, joy, relief, regret, disappointment, anger, and a prayer that we've learned our lesson
posted by tomswift at 8:18 PM on December 14, 2011 [1 favorite]