The United States lowered its national flag in Baghdad, Iraq, as the American military mission in Iraq was officially declared over on Thursday 15 Dec 2011. This makes the pledge of Obama true.Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the top U.S. military commander in Iraq Gen. Lloyd Austin presided over the unpublicized ceremonial jaunt held at Baghdad International airport, putting an end to the almost nine year war, and thank the one million American troops who have served there.
The Iraqi expedition was not unconnected with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the Twin Tower and Pentagon by a group of terrorist who took command of three U.S passenger planes and used them as missiles against civilian buildings, the Twin Tower, the reputed tallest building in the world was reduced to a mighty dust rumble, U.S was left mourning with thousands of body bags at ground zero. In an official attempt to retaliate against the faceless assailants the then Bush administration deploy columns of tanks north from Kuwait to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It is possible that Schmidt, the Times' Baghdad correspondent, got word that an Iraqi businessman had purchased trailers from a closing American base, as he recounted in a first-person dispatch Wednesday.
As he kicked around the Baghdad junkyard where the purchased trailers were in storage a few weeks back, Schmidt came upon a strikingly different legacy of the invasion: several stray documents, maps, and binders, some marked classified that turned out to be part of documents one of the darkest episodes of the war.
The abandoned trove contained some "400 pages of interrogations" that "form part of the military's internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers," Schmidt wrote in his Wednesday article, "Junkyard Gives up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq."
Haditha "became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and resentment that not one Marine has been convicted," Schmidt wrote. "But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand."
We would not forget either the reason for the war it opened up a face for the previous faceless terrorist who uses the vulnerabilities of the American public to perpetuate evils that can not be reprimanded. Today every terrorist knows that his mother land will surfer for any act of terror they commit, this has brought temporary peace, a state that will be maintained for a very long time if the America public knows the real effect of the Iraqi war.
Today nine years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, American officials wanted to draw attention to progress achieved in Iraq, while admitting the tremendous costs of the war in which 4,500 Americans and a projected 100,000 Iraqis have died.
The terrorist driven out of holding the public to ransom for crazy individual madness at the cost of spilled blood by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real.
Iraq will be tested in the days ahead, by same terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, the Challenges linger, but the United States as pledge to be there to stand by the Iraqi people.
The passive farewell ceremony sounded a certain trumpet for end of a war that was launched and did indeed rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction which were terrorists breeding grounds that catch the world unaware on 20/11..
Pearl Harbor here we come.
China learn fast.
