End of One War

The Iraq War is over, and Iraq will not be another South Korea with a US Army presence for an undetermined number of years; we have been in Korea for over 60 years. (We have had troops of various sorts and numbers in the Philippines for over a hundred years.)

Lest we forget, the agreement to remove all troops by the end of 2011 was negotiated by the Bush administration which had started the war. That was a fitting end to it. It never paid for itself like Paul Wolfowitz promised, and we never created the odd utopia of Islamic values and American objectives that we had envisioned at the beginning.

The cost thus far is $800 billion, well on the way to over the trillion dollar mark Joseph Stieglitz wrote about some years ago: we will continue to be bedeviled by Iran in the area, and the cost of medical remediation of the wounded will continue onwards.
The karma of the slaughter of innocents and Abu Ghraib will continue to be played out, indelible symbols of our own pieces of the heart of darkness... which we will rage and rage against, believing ourselves to be always obedient to our better angels.

To all of us who wanted it, look what destruction we have wrought.
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