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Showing posts from August 19, 2010

Last combat troops exit Baghdad, Iraqi Freedom comes to an end.

At last, the war in Iraq is coming to an end .  While troops will remain in Iraq until December 2011, they will no longer be serving a combat function.  Instead focus will now shift to training the Iraqi forces so that domestic forces can handle their own affairs.  History will be the ultimate judge of whether it was in America's best interest to sacrifice 4,400 of our bravest along with tens of thousands more wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars of money we do not actually have and scores of Iraqis caught in collateral damage.   Unfortunately it will prove to just as difficult to gauge the success of the war as it was to understand the original goal behind our presence.  Wars have additional costs beyond the lost lives, wounded families and financial burdens - they create a mental and emotional investment that is impossible to walk away from. For every single soldier killed, every innocent Iraqi lost and every dollar spent it becomes impossible to leave until a subjective go