http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...0/21/gIQAUyJi3L_story.html?wpisrc=al_national 4,400 US lives. Uncounted Iraqi civilian lives. $1 trillion US dollars. Will we at least get some T-shirts or something on the way out?
I just heard about this too. The NeoCons must be apoplectic about it, one less war for them to profiteer in, of course it frees up some troops to invade other countries.
Our troops may be leaving but we will simply replace them with our mercenaries. http://www.npr.org/2011/05/17/136357821/as-u-s-military-exits-iraq-contractors-to-enter
Yeah. That has been our fallback plan for a while. Probably ever since the Bush/Iraq SOFA that we are following was initially created. That is why we have done everything short of making our own troops mercenaries (which would have happened by having them subject to the Iraqi justice system, etc) in order to try and keep them there. We know that as soon as our uniformed military leave, Iran will be the real influence in the country and, barring (unlikely) serious internal problems in Iran, that influence will only get greater and greater. But, we lost that fight years ago and there is no going back. Time to 'eat our peas' as one of our new posters said in a different thread.
Of course, if we had the foresight and intelligence to develop alternative energy sources, we could completely wash our hands of the part of the world and tell them to drink their crude. We're forced to fight wars to protect our own interests, the more of our interests that we can internalize, the fewer wars we would have to fight. True energy independence can't be drilled out of the ground, it's going to take technological development and social change. Imagine what the trillion or so dollars we wasted in Iraq would have done for the various renewable energy initiatives in this country.
It kind of sounds like you view our glorious little wars for oil, and Exxon, and our drive to control and exploit other peoples and regions are bad things. The tip off was the bit about technological development and social change. I almost think you might be some stripe of Librul.
"The U.S. is leaving Iraq"... - --> * <--- ...like the fine print on everything you need to sign. We'll be leaving troops there to "train" their troops... and keep an eye on things.
