Thanks to Raed Jarrar for his years of service to the movement to end the war in Iraq. His consultancy with the American Friends Service Committee during the darkest times was like a searchlight for the truth. One could always rely on him for nuanced and insightful analysis.

That´s strange; I could have sworn that I just read an article yesterday quoting Obama saying that the US war was a success and that Iraq was far better off now.
The scary thing is that that is what US school students will learn. Poor misunderstood and always trying to do the right thing USA. Am I wrong?

Another point to add to Raed's excellent post is the billions in arms now being arranged by Nouri al Maliki to buy from the USA and to get training by the USA. More violence, more control by the USA and of course more money for arms manufacturers in the USA.

I sent this comment to the NYT paean about the Iraq war:

The Times soft peddles this massive and disgusting war crime, perpetrated by neo-fascists Bush and Cheney, and buried by Barack 'look forward not back' Obama.

Bush's 2004 Washington Correspondents Dinner video joke about not finding the WMDs used to LIE his way into war in Iraq is the most disgusting and callous performance every seen in the world --- even outdoing Hitler's victory jig --- and the virtual pardon of this world-class war crime that has now killed and wounded tens of thousands of American working-class soldiers and orders of magnitude more Iraqi children is clear cause that all these international war criminals; Bush, Cheney, and Obama should be hung by the neck until dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKX6luiMINQ

Sorry about not playing along with the Times's glossy facade of helping to 'fog-up' the fog of war crimes as by-gone issues to be softly avoided.

Best luck and love to Occupy Empire.

Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
over
violent/Vichy
empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

for all those who still spout the nonsense that 'the US is a force for good in the world', Iraq disproves the notion.
the destruction of a country, a nation, of historical treasures of world importance -- it would be an insult Vandals to name the US as such!

That there must be a reckoning, that all those who made the assault and destruction possible must e brought to account is a given. Bush, Blair, Howard (Australian Prime Minister at the time) and their minions ought to be the first to hang.

Critically the Iraqis must rest control of their resources from the hands of outsiders and ensure that none of those who destroyed their country profit. this will not be easy, nor will suing for and receiving compensation from those countries responsible for the destruction but the Iraqi people have the right, and the destroyers deserve the pain.

The US and its cronies must never be allowed to sell the idea that the assault and destruction was justified, or that they somehow 'won'.

One suspects that the chances of this accurate and incisive article ever making it onto the opinion pages of the hallowed New York Times and/or the Washington Post are about slim to none.

One of the best things we could do to compensate Iraq would be to put all of the war mongering criminals in jail. Pretty much all of those in charge in the last two presidencies.

". . . holding U.S. officials who caused this mess legally accountable will help achieve U.S.-Iraqi reconciliation, and it will send a strong message to future U.S. politicians that they will be held accountable."

I'll hold my breath until they are all behind bars.

No one will read this information in the corporate press. Nor have they read that scientists discovered, to their horror, that the United States used nuclear bombs in that war. The scientists were concerned with the high number of deformed babies being born there and did research to measure the depleted uranium in the soil. They found enriched uranium meaning that we had used nuclear weapons. Our nation is an evil force in the world and we citizens of the evil empire must do ALL WE CAN to get rid of all of the elected officials now 'serving' us in our federal government. Do not vote for the re election of any of them. We need a clean sweep and a new start. Don't moan that you have to choose the lesser evil. Face it. They are all EVIL. There are other candidates on the ballot and a serious drop in their vote total may get the message to them that they need our votes, not just the tons of bribes from the corporations. You must make a pledge to stand firm against the political propaganda and tell your friends that they must not vote for either a D or an R.

Sorry Raed.....and thanks for keeping the tears hidden!

It was a contrived war: A war of (our) choice and not a war of necessity.
It was foisted on the citizenry and clueless congressmen by lies told,
arms twisted, and palms greased. It is not beyond discovering who did
the telling, twisting and greasing. It got office holders re-elected, and
political contributors and business associates awarded no-bid contracts.
Iraq did not attack us, nor did it harbor the attackers. The war was the
work of criminals, and we know or can easily uncover the names of the
criminals. Chief among criminals was the then president W, who had
campaigned for his office by promising not to get the US involved in
nation-building, and who then sacrificed thousands of American lives
and a million Iraqi lives, and much treasure squandered, all in trying
to build our kind of nation in Iraq. No disrepute long adhered to these
criminals. THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT. Indeed they now comprise
a standard -- admittedly a low standard -- against which the present
presidency is supposedly to be judged. And future presidencies?
Will President Gingrich be as good a "defender" of American
security as was President W? We lend our minds to our great
leaders' making of myths instead of to the making of ethics. As
WW II General Patton was reputed to have said: "America loves
a winner, and will not tolerate a loser." Something must change.
We will not achieve aceptable change by replacing a defective
changer by a great leader who doesn't want any change. A new
Newt and his co-politicos represent the opposite of ethics-based
change. They would take us backwards. Some remediation must
be uncovered in America's heart.

Troops out, not really. There will be enough along with the private contractors to protect the military bases, amerikan corporate interests and that swell embassy we built over there. That protection of corporate interests are the natural resources stolen from the Iraqis and which they will never be able to profit from for economic stability. And if this is the kind of 'end game' of the contrived and deliberate greedy invasion of a sovereign nation, then just as the imf, world bank, wto and the other insidious factions that tell others how live and how to pay extortion to the u.s., it will just be another replay of what amerika has already done in South America, Indonesia, and so many other places in the world where the citizens look around and wonder what happened to their lives.

That's a disgusting picture attached to this piece. Certainly in vogue with trashing and crashing another country and leaving the junk and garbage and pollution behind. Nope no worry to clean up or try to fix a goddamn thing, an american extra privilege.

I long ago began to detest the sound of O'Bomber's voice the way I detested even the sound of Dubya's and I heard his hearty "Welcome home!' together with loud cheers before I could switch the radio station. O'Bomber and his flunkeys have retro-baptized the invasion and devastation of Iraq as a success -- so much for the "lesser of two evils".

Don’t forget all the depleted uranium rounds, shells and dust particles that cover the landscape. Phosphorus, chemical weapons anyone? Genetic mutations and birth defects?

Yea, were pulling out and leaving a legacy of pain and sorrow for generations to come.

Great job Bush/Obama what a team!

Not a Poem

The transparency of the moment
is only exceeded by its duplicity.

No one is watching.
We have other wars and other ancient people

to maim.
There are things we barely attempt to deny.

What would have brought us to our knees
in shame and revulsion

we take great pleasure devising
ways to appear to appear to appear

to hide.
There is a strain of absolute cruelty

in the public that has been packed into the shadows
and then squeezes out

as righteousness made of the horrific
and the spectator to the horrific.

As we do to others we unleash
upon ourselves

slowly and painstakingly.
Try to cross the border into the country of the truth

and you will face the tyranny of the lie
that everyone tells and no one believes.

The fireworks were lovely
by the way

and it was good that the chaos of the moment
hid the true carnage from view;

we could not count the dead: good rehearsal
for when they are us.

In November 2012 I will remember that president Obama needlessly prolonged the occupation of Iraq by three years. This incredibly cowardly president could do that because he was backed by SOFA-Iraq, signed by his predecessor Bush, which was poorly read by our nation. How many of our citizens knew that the agreement allowed our commander-in-chief to take all members of the US Armed Forces and their civilian aides out of Iraq unilaterally and at any time? Instead the focus has almost exclusively been on the "deadline of December 31, 2011" which helped president Obama to prevaricate for three years. Nothing of value was achieved and more of our men and women and Iraqi citizens were needlessly killed and maimed between the day he was sworn in as president and today. It is not a day of braggadocio but one of sad shame for the immense destruction done by our nation to a country that had no weapons of mass destruction and no intent nor the means to attack and hurt us with them. The "end of war" speeches given by the President and the Secretary of Defense add to the shame I feel.

A victory celebration? A festive event over Iraq? What bullshit. 4500 military dead and many thousands wounded? Over $1 Trillion spent to accomplish little except to eliminate a dictator whom we had earlier once supported and now most of the Iraquis despise us. Benefits: The large numbers of defense companies and mercenary outfits. By the way, whatever happened to all that oil that Cheney said would finance this endeavor (other than his Halliburton and other buddies)? Same as the prediction that we would be greeting with flowers and joy. Baghdad was not the Paris of 1945.
I rejoice in the safe return of our surviving military but will not be completely able to celebrate until Bush Jr, Cheney, Rumsfeld and associates are in prison. Again Obama disappoints by apparently forgetting these criminals.

It's subtle and easy to miss, but what jumped out at me was Raed Jarrar's reference to "the final attempt of the US government to maintain troops [in Iraq] under NATO being rejected by the Iraqis." NATO?

Afghanistan was and ostensibly remains a NATO operation. Libya was and remains a NATO operation (with a contrived vaneer of Arab League and United Nations Security Council authorization). The shock and awe invasion of Iraq in 2003, the overthrow of Saddam's regime, and the eight year long military occupation of Iraq by American combat forces, mercenaries, and other hangers on which followed never was a NATO operation.

Please correct me here if I am wrong here. The official narrative and historical reality of the matter was that the whole blood stained Iraq fiasco was undertaken by "the coalition of the willing" - Uncle Sam, Great Britain, and Spain most prominently, with a host of token support forces from a grab bag assortment of other nation states. The North American Treaty Organization (a Cold War era multi-national mutual military defense treaty counterweight to the Warsaw Pact) never had a dog in this fight.

I was unaware that the last cosmetic diplomatic chess move of the Obama/Hillary State Department was a symbolic handoff to NATO, a final departure negotiating fig leaf rejected by Iraq in the steadfast tradition of the North Vietnamese. Maybe this was slipped into the NY Times and WaPo accounts and I simply missed it. I confess, I tuned out following the final SOFA gyrations much like I stopped paying attention to the Paris Peace Accord negotiations dance towards its end. Anyway, thanks Raed.

Bill from Saginaw

I started reading Raed when he was posting with Salam Pax. Theirs and riverbends were just a few voices of Iraqi people we could actually hear. This is how you know it is all lies. The MSM puts all these generals and so called "middle eastern experts" in front of the camers to tell us about all things in the middle east. How come we never get to hear anything from the lips of Iraqis? Why aren't Iraqis allowed to tell their stories to the American people?