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This video is from the live telecast, last night, of the 4-2 Stryker Brigade, the last U.S. combat brigade leaving Iraq. They drove from Baghdad to the Kuwait border. And crossed over – clearing their weapons as they left Iraq.
There are several video clips at the MSNBC site. Their servers weren’t doing a great job of keeping up, last night. If things are keeping up, just let the videos load and run in sequence. Sorry for the occasional commercial between segments; but, the video[s] are worth watching.
I watched it live – last night. They did about 4 hours of uncut, live feeds from Iraq with reporters and guest commentators in Iraq and the MSNBC studios
I caught most of it live, last night. NBC was just fortunate enough to have the hardware and staff on the ground to provide the feed to the U.S.
They had about a half-hour notice from the military and got Richard Engel into that last Stryker.
Overdue.
This is just more NBC ministry of truth BS. There’s still some 50,000 odd NON combat troops in Iraq. Plus all the contractors on the US government payroll.
-and now the occupation begins.
aint war grand?
(considering my g/f’s son just got sent two months ago to iraq from his cozy “permanant station” in Okinawa of the past 8yr (after had just reupping)
-um..NO. it’s not over.
-s
Now chaos can start in Iraq as the place devolves into a civil war.
They need to turn this war in to a soap: As the Cluster Fuck Burns. That’s a nice catchy title.
They change peoples titles where I work too.
Just leaves another big hole for fundamentalist fanatics to hide in. We’ll be back. You want this mess resolved, the only way is complete and total genocide. Fire off enough tritium to wobble the Earths axis, and do a gestapo style roundup in all nations.
I doubt that will happen, so we may have to go further and sit down and really talk things out. You have to give the average guy a reason not to turn to fundamentalist. Things like jobs, a chance to raise his children in safety, and with chances of greater success. You have to choke out the weeds, and they’ll go away. Forty years ago I heard a relative say that, “colored folk”, aren’t bad, but they don’t feel things like white people, like grief and love. All we need to know is from our own short history as a nation. I’m goddamned tired of paying for super carriers and planes with bogus specs to make a Senator happy.
It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and I ain’t heard her yet!
Bound for Iran? Lucky fellas.
And where are the videos of the DOUBLING of US “contractors” in Iraq as the quote unquote ARMY has left.
#7 Opie – Where were you going with that?
The remaining six “Advice and Assist Brigades” are regular U.S. Army combat brigades, 50,000 troops with tanks, artillery, and attack helicopters. This “news” is simply a public relations sham, as usual. Commanders of the brigades staying behind in Iraq have openly admitted that their military roles will not change at all come September.
A recent Deutsche Welle news segment called “Iraq: The end of all illusions” revealed what’s really going on in places like Baghdad. Electricity in the 115F summer heat is still, at most, five hours per day. They are planning to submit the Green Zone to this, withdrawing it from its “special status” allowing 24 hour commercial power (they’ll simply turn on the generators, the fuel for which you’ll be paying for like everything else):
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/06/iraq-green-zone-also-to-suffer-electricity-blackouts.html
Privately paid security forces (now in their own uniforms) are still just sectarian forces whose religious sect depends upon the particular neighborhood and their security “fee” is basically the equivalent of protection money.
The results of the election six months ago are still unresolved as neither side is willing to give. This could eventually have very violent results.
Iraq is now a terribly corrupt, crony capitalist banana republic (replace “banana” with “oil”) which is exactly what I expected it would become. The various people from different economic classes interviewed in the Deutsche Welle news segment pretty much confirm this. It was, as the news segment was titled, the end of their illusions of what their “free” nation would become. Americans, because they don’t get accurate news reporting about Iraq any more, still have their illusions. But, the U.S. government has what it wants: a compliant, corrupt leadership of a very oil rich nation.
Good riddance.
You can call the remaining troops quartermasters or engineers or advisors but if they’re wearing armor and shooting, they’re combat troops.
# 9 McCullough “Bound for Iran? Lucky fellas.”
Nah. We’ll leave Iran to Israel for a while. These guys will be heading iff to Afghanaland.
Pull everything out and let them kill each other. If they don’t, set up some incidents so that they do. Same result as us being there at 1/10th the price, or even less!
So was the surge a success or failure?
And when will the last combat troops leave Bosnia, Kosovo, Korea, and Okinawa?
The remaining troops are scheduled to be out of there by the end of 2011, but several 1000 security personnel will probably have to remain behind to help manage the Iraq military forces and keep an eye as to what is going on with ammo dumps and so on.
It’s basically over. The USA went in, deposed a tyrant at a cost of over 4000 US troops and somewhere around 1 Million Iraqi people. We got rid of the WMD that were not there, destroyed much of their infrastructure and wasted a trillion dollars in the process.
At least we are making progress in getting out… compare that to the “one step forward, two steps back” progress of the first 6 years of the “war”.
Happy to see President Obama is finally putting an end to Bush’s war to avenge Saddam calling is daddy a pussy.
A trillion dollars in debt, thousands of American boys sent to the death and hundreds of thousands civilians dead.
On the upside, Saddam is gone and daddy Bush is still jumping off planes.
MikeN –
The ‘surge’ made no difference. The Iraq civil-war carnage played itself out on it’s own, with many of the ‘bad guys’ just killing each other off, the Iraqi people adapting and segregating itself, and the US paying the opposite sides not to fight. The country is now governed by warlords imposing their own rules. It is unsafe in ways that we can not start to imagine in our cozy homes in the USA.
It is the mismanagement of the “war” for years, starting immediately after the true military fighting but prior to the desperate ‘surge’ period that allowed the country to degenerate the way that it did that should be really analyzed, and should be held in contempt for what it is: complete and utter failure.
It took us how many years to take out Japan and Germany (At the same time.)? We’ve been in this war how long? And what do we have to show for it, nothing.
Mission Accomplished!
Aren’t we also doubling the number of “civilian forces” we have there? Nothing to see here…
what a bunch of bullshit.
My unit is still here/there (Iraq) and we have lots of guns, Abrams, Bradleys, mortars, and snipers.
We’re advise and assist…in name alone.
>The ‘surge’ made no difference.
That reads more like ideology and Bush hatred causing you to want something to be true, rather than a look at evidence and analyzing it.
… and there are still over 50,000 U.S. troops in Germany. My friend just came back from a tour over there, he’s 27 years old and has been in the military for 8 years. Supposedly being stationed in Germany is a load of fun. He always tells me his great stories, he gets to go to a different country every year.
He also says that Iraq sucked and it’s the worst place he’s been to. I feel sorry for those guys.
#24 MikeN –
I will restate the sentence that you took out of context, plus your reply:
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>The ‘surge’ made a difference.
That reads more like ideology and being an Bush apologist causing you to want something to be true, rather than a look at evidence and analyzing it.
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The truth is much closer to what I originally said (as written in it’s entirety in #20) when you are more open minded to the truth and better informed about reality rather than propaganda.
Very well put:
http://agonist.org/actor_212/20100819/before_the_memory_holes_gets_filled_in
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Eight years. The longest war in American history. A war of aggression. 4400+ American soldiers dead. One million Iraqis dead. Who knows how many more displaced and chronically, perhaps fatally, un- or underemployed.
America’s first official war of aggression. At least we didn’t bother veiling this one behind an attack on a ship. Kofi Annan.
WMDs. NBCs. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” Chemical Ali. Baghdad Bob. Spider trap. Embedding. Qatar.
David Bloom: I miss him still. Peter Arnett.
Colin Powell in front of the UN with a vial of “anthrax”. Bush said in a nationally televised White House speech. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.” “Axis of Evil”. Three million Romans protesting war (there’s an irony), the largest anti-war protest ever. Mohamed ElBaradei. Hans Blix. Scott Ritter. Connection to September 11 attacks. Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, allies. Muhammad Atta in Prague with high ranking Hussein official. 48% still believe that Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Yellowcake. Niger. Joe Wilson. Curveball. Valarie Plame. Scooter Libby. Karl Rove. Judith Miller. Ahmed Chalabi. Stephen Hadley. Robert Novak. Tim Russert. George Tenet. “Slam dunk”. Paul Wolfowitz. PNAC. Douglas “The Stupidest Man In America” Feith.
Shock and Awe. Moqtada Al-Sadr. Sadr City. Ali Al-Sistani. Coalition of the “Willing”. Coalition of the Bullied. Shi’a. Sunni. Kurds. Coaltion Provisional Authority. L. Paul Bremer. De-Ba’athification. Basra. Kirkuk. Halliburton. Humvees without armor. Karbala. Najaf. “Mother Of All Bombs”.
Operation Desert Fox (probably never a good idea to name a battleplan after a Nazi). Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). Then, quickly changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Regime change.
General Tommy Franks. General David Petraeus. General Ricardo Sanchez. Linndie England. Abu Ghraib. Guatanamo Bay. Jessica Lynch, saved but not saved.
Abu Al Zarqawi. The statue in Fardus Square, Baghdad. Most Wanted playing cards. Looting. $9 billion dollars vanished in nine months.
“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” (seven years too early). “Commander Codpiece”. Fedayeen. Insurgency.
Amy Goodman. “Fahrenheit 9/11”. “Michael Moore is fat”. Downing Street memo. John Kerry. Vote irregularities in Ohio. Bush re-elected. Security Moms. Endless war. No war for oil.
“Nothing…. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.” “[T]he main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.”
Operation Option North and Operation Bayonet Lightning in Kirkuk, Operation Desert Thrust, Operation Abilene and Operation All American Tiger throughout Iraq, Operation Iron Hammer in Baghdad and Operation Ivy Blizzard in Samarra – all in 2003; Operation Market Sweep, Operation Vigilant Resolve and Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in 2004; Operation Matador in Ambar, Operation Squeeze Play and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, Operation New Market near Haditha, Operation Spear in Karabillah and the Battle of Tal Afar – all in 2005; Operation Swarmer in Samarra and Operation Together Forward in Baghdad in 2006; and Operation Law and Order in Baghdad, Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Baqouba and Operation Phantom Strike throughout Iraq – all in 2007.
Fallujah.
Purple thumbs. Jalal Talibani. Nouri al-Maliki.
And finally…Last U.S. combat convoy has left Iraq
Never forget. Never. We can never do this again. We must not let it happen. Ever.
Awake: “never again!”==you mean after Afghanistan right?
Another job well done.
#28 Bobbo –
There was some initial justification for Afghanistan… too bad that after the first 3 months it was utterly set aside. So here we are, 8 years later, basically starting over. So much good will, progress and opportunity lost. But the difference is that in the case of Afghanistan, it is a fight worth fighting.
Because of the wasted years, the next front may become Pakistan as the Taliban retook southern Afghanistan. Will it be worth fighting there also? Pakistan is much more dangerous than Iran, yet Iran became the next Iraq thanks to the right-wing propaganda. Pakistan already has nukes, it is utterly infiltrated by fundamentalists, yet all the talk until a couple of years ago was “Attack Iran! Attack Iran!”
Abandon Afghanistan, and Pakistan falls. That would be a big big deal.
Awake–so what manner of haruspication do you employ to plot your dominoes?
The “evidence/theory” in support of a war fought 7000 miles away must be overpowering. What facts/goals/probable outcome justify the Afghan war in your mind? You state saving the fall of Pakistan. Foolish. We will never know if “ultimately” our involvement in the ME caused or prevented anything you want to name. Ain’t reality a bitch?
The initial invasion/war/winning that War in Afghan was I agree “somewhat” justified. MEANING there were other options that were even better: like in/decapitation/out. How you get from an arguably start to a war worth fighting now is logically insupportable. You can point to a few good things, and a few potentially good things, but what you got in your face is a goat f*ck. These foreign adventures on our part are BANKRUPTING US!!!
Whatever benefit do you think we get that overcomes that reality?