Juan Cole: With a Whimper, not a Bang; A Milestone on the Way to the End of American Iraq

[laststeamtrain]

Tuesday, June 30, 2009
With a Whimper, not a Bang;
A Milestone on the Way to the End of American Iraq

T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of "Hollow Men" in 1926, "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper." He may as well have been talking about the war George W. Bush launched in Iraq in 2003.

The end of routine, independent patrolling of major Iraqi cities by US troops today is a major milestone in modern Iraqi history.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared Tuesday "National Sovereignty Day." Some 86 US bases have been closed in recent weeks (see the Jim Muir report). The LAT says that on Monday night, people in Baghdad danced in the streets, sang and set off (non-lethal) fireworks even in the midst of a dust storm.

Some Americans might find all this celebrating offensive. But the US public has mostly moved on, little interested in the foreign wars its armed forces are still fighting, and worried much more about the long-term consequences of the Republican Party's Ponzi-scheme economy of 2001-2008, the collapse of which has cost them or their family and friends their jobs. As in the 1930s, even celebrity gossip and the glitz of Hollywood are more present in people's minds than distant armies on the march. The public and the mass media mysteriously ignored the Afghanistan War right from 2002, and now Iraq is being given the same treatment, even though there are 130,000 or so US troops in Iraq and 38,000 in Afghanistan, and both contingents are still fighting and dying.

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http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/with-whimper-not-bang-milestone-on-way.html
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Why, why, why, why, why?

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid...

[Winterblues]

1. The Iraqi's finally have something to celebrate after seven years of death and destruction.

The occupiers are leaving their cities but not yet their country..