Flashback: The Iraq war is over.

[JackRiddler]

13. One obvious mistake you should correct, one giant fallacy.

"Contractors in Iraq" (180,000 employees in 2008) is clearly not the same as "contractors employed by the US Embassy" (5,000 in 2011).

Therefore you cannot on this basis make the remarkable assertion, "From 180,000 contractors to 5,000, that's a 175,000 contractor drawdown since 2008." In fact, it makes you look like you think all of your readers are idiots.

Who employed the 180,000 in 2008? Various entities are mentioned. How many do they employ today? Most relevant surely is how many contractors the USG paid for directly in 2008 and 2012. Find those figures, then you can make a claim.

The giant fallacy is the idea that now that Iraq has been well and destroyed, and its peoples set against each other, the war that continues is no longer American. No. USG-Americans have withdrawn (except for the incredible 16,000 employees of the most enormous "embassy" on Earth, a town-sized administrative complex, what are they doing there?). But the war that the USG started in Iraq continues.

Since you're probably not responsible for the war personally, why do you want to spin it? Would you lose sleep to admit that your country's government has committed an enormity with repercussions that continue today?

It's good that the USG did not manage to negotiate a SOFA extension and that the bulk of troops are gone. In a generation or two, Iraq might finally be recovering from what the USG did.