Is the Iraq War Over? by T.R. Donoghue

While the blogosphere is distracted by the latest moronic uttering from Howard Dean the nation has reached a milestone in the Iraq war. MSNBC reports,

The last U.S. combat troops crossed the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.

The final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., began entering Kuwait about 1:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), carrying the last of the 14,000 U.S. combat forces in Iraq, said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has been traveling with the brigade as it moved out this week.

If the end of the Iraq War seems a bit anti-climactic that’s probably because we’re not really leaving. Besides leaving behind the world’s largest embassy (it is the size of the Vatican) we’re also leaving 50,000 “advise and assist” troops behind through 2011 - maybe. The commander of the Iraqi Army is asking that U.S. troops remain for another decade,

General Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander of Iraq’s military, is suggesting that the United States stick around for, oh, another ten years or so. “If I were asked about the withdrawal, I would say to politicians: the U.S. army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020,” he said at a conference in Baghdad.

Still, as the New York Times media blog reports, the American media establishment has dutifully toed the Pentagon line,

The combat mission in Iraq doesn’t officially end until Aug. 31 but viewers and readers could be forgiven for thinking it ended tonight.
In a broadcast that Brian Williams said constituted an “official Pentagon announcement,” NBC showed live pictures Wednesday night as members of the last combat brigade in Iraq drove toward the Kuwait border, symbolizing an end to fighting in the country…
The Associated Press, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and other news media outlets also reported Wednesday evening that the last combat troops were crossing into Kuwait. Only NBC broadcast it live, in asymmetrical image to the invasion that captured the nation’s attention on television seven years ago.
The movement of the trucks, televised live on “NBC Nightly News” and simulcast on MSNBC, was a largely symbolic demonstration that the war, as Americans have known it, is in its waning phases.

A fitting “end” to a war which was launched by the Bush administration with a big assist from the media,

[T]he level of mediated public deliberation was so diminished as to make the preponderance of journalism little more than an instrumental extension – a sort of propaganda helper – of the strategic communication goals of the administration. With few notable exceptions, the press took a pass on its fourth estate prerogatives. Posing the hard questions, testing the administrations logic and execution at every point, remaining sceptical – all this was drowned in a sea of waving flags and gung-ho celebrations of military technology.

The true consequences and costs of the war will take decades to calculate.  Over 4,000 U.S. troops dead, untold thousands of Iraqi’s dead and maimed, families destroyed, children orphaned and trillions of dollars spent.

There will be time enough in the future to extract the hard lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom. For now let us be thankful that the end is now within sight. To those who have served In Iraq - thank you for your service and your sacrifice. To those politicians and propogandists who unleashed this hell on America and Iraq, may God have mercy on your souls.