— Brad Friedman
Tonight, it’s been announced, the last U.S. “combat brigade” has left Iraq, some 7 years, 4 months and 29 days after they were sent there for specious and deadly reasons by the Administration of George W. Bush.
Coincidentally, it is just over 5 years to the day since 14 Marines from a base in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Brook Park were killed by a roadside a bomb in Iraq. The incident, the deadliest bombing there at the time, when “just” 1,820 U.S. troops had died to date, led Bush to tell “the people of Brook Park” that he “hope[d] they also take comfort in the understanding that the sacrifice was made in a noble cause.”
That statement brought one very courageous woman — Cindy Sheehan, whose son had also been killed in Iraq — down to Crawford, Texas, where Bush had been vacationing at his ranch, in hopes of asking him in person “what noble cause” her son, and those from Cleveland, and from so many other cities and towns around the U.S., had died for.
Sheehan faced down an extraordinary gathering of seething hatred on the blistering hot Central Texas prairie for several weeks in response, in hopes of getting an answer from her son’s Commander-in-Chief to that simple question. (And yes, it was nothing short of seething hatred, which we saw first-hand as we covered the extraordinary moment on the ground for this blog and during more than 50 hours of live radio broadcasts, smack dab in the center of it all.) She was joined, in support, by dozens of other family members of the fallen, scores of U.S. Armed Service veterans and thousands of regular, patriotic U.S. citizens on that cow pasture near Bush’s home.
5 years later, nearly to the day, after that extraordinary summer and extraordinary display of American courage, the last U.S. “combat troops,” we’re told, have left Iraq, leaving “just” 50,000 behind, theoretically for logistical and training purposes.
4,415 U.S. troops, including U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, never came home from Iraq. At least not alive. Tens of thousands more have had their lives forever shattered due to permanent physical and emotional injury. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were also slaughtered and maimed in the bargain.
And tonight, after all of that time, we’re still left wondering: What was that “noble cause”?
UPDATE 8/19/10: NYU’s Nir Rosen tweets wryly: “american combat troops pull out of iraq. the remaining fifty thousand are armed only with sticks, fly swatters, pepper spray and nunchucks”
And we later followed with: “Last one out of Iraq, turn out the lights (as soon as they get electricity back).”
Video from MSNBC’s exclusive coverage of the last U.S. “combat brigade” leaving Iraq and entering into Kuwaiit follows below…
“What was that “noble cause?”
Freedumb? Dumbocracy?
There was no “noble cause” just as there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction…the real criminals, those who planned and implemented this war, walk as free men without consequence.
Their kids will never know the pain of losing their own to this disastrous jaunt…for that, only God can forgive them, because as a military family I cannot.
Paging DOJ…are you listening?
Recall that the original code name for the unprovoked invasion was “Operation Iraqi Liberation” until some smart guy in the Pentagon realized that the abbreviation for the invasion was “O.I.L.” Then they named it Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Yes, there was a “liberation” of sorts. More than one million Iraqis have been permanently liberated from their obligation to breathe.
Meanwhile, the body count continues in Afghanistan…
There is no noble cause you retard. We have known this war was a fraud for about 6-7 years now, why ask such a stupid question in the hopes of sounding profound… Youre just the gayest
A guy who calls himself ‘Thong’ speaks of gayness…
how profound…
Imperialist ‘wars’ fought for commodities and filthy lucre …is the end of empires.
Always has been…
“why ask such a stupid question in the hopes of sounding profound?”
It’s a rhetorical question…ironically you yourself asked a rhetorical question here though you neglected to include a question mark.
Nice that you managed to slur people with downs syndrome and also used “gay” as a pejorative too. Throw in a racial slur and you’d have the trifecta!
I was there in the blazing Texas sun with the whole group of them and was sickened then with Bush and still am. I perhaps naively feel he will get his just deserts maybe not in this life.
So Oil is the reason? I have seen BP winning contracts from the Iraqi Government, I have seen China winning contract, and I have seen Shell.I am sure there are more, but where does the US gain something from 7 years of conflict there?
My guess is to have a nice staging area and ally (as in put someone in US influence as a leader of Iraq) in the middle east, especially a neighbor of Iran. Then Afghan on the other side of Iran just for perfect lunching zones to enter in to Iran.
“So Oil is the reason? I have seen BP winning contracts from the Iraqi Government, I have seen China winning contract, and I have seen Shell”
You have to dig a bit deeper noah. See for one thing, the Iraq war caused domestic oil prices to spike, which ended up being quite lucrative for those oil companies with significant reserves, and for speculators.
The other, far more important consideration is that none of these companies (Exxon/Mobil,Shell,Sinopec,BP etc) are truly American (or Dutch or British or Chinese etc).
Even if every drop of Iraqi oil had gone to “American” companies, that doesn’t mean that American citizens or the American government would somehow profit off of these reserves. All of this oil goes into the international market and no national entity truly benefits more than any other. This is also why the “drill baby drill” crowd is so misguided.
All of these companies are transnationals; they have no loyalty whatever to any country.
Deepest sympathy to the families of the 4,415 who perished for an UNnoble cause. If the families cared more for those who were lost, they would have done more to prevent them from pursuing such a foolish endeavor.
Can’t run a war if no one shows up.
Ghostof911 @11, your post calls to mind the lyrics from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier:
BTW, leaving 50,000 troops, more than double that number of professional mercenaries and the world’s largest, heavily-armed embassy is a far cry from the end of the occupation of Iraq.
Knottienature tweeted “we identified an evil and rid the world of him.”
Yes, but did we really have to slaughter more than one million Iraqis, displace more than four million, lose the lives of more than 4,400 U.S. service personnel, leave Iraq strewn with deadly radioactive munitions and squander $3 trillion dollars just to rid the world of George W. Bush?
So we now have a permanent presence in Iraq and a large base there, just like our permanent presence in Japan and Germany. Now we can move on to our next war and establish our next permanent large base with thousands of soldiers in yet another country. If history lesson serves me, another country had many bases all over the known world, required more and more taxes to pay for it, devalued the currency, diverted more resources to military, and eventually went bankrupt and fell to invaders who had grown in overwhelming numbers. That country was Ancient Rome.
For the NEOCON’s the answer is obviously OIL. For W I sincerely think it was revenge for the failed attempt to kill his father combined with the silly and adolescent idea that the US could instill democracy in a region with 4,000 years of autocratic governance in their DNA.
It is sad that people believe that america wages war on Iraq only to get oil from them.West Palm Beach virtual office
West Palm Beach conference rooms
You forgot Haliburton who was just awarded the Iraqi contract to build these oil fields in Iraq. Haliburton was close to bankrupcy, then Cheney/Bush stumbled on the gift that keeps on dripping. 9/11.
Noah @ 9 asked:
Aside from the point that CDT3 made above (see this for more details) where did u get the idea that the point was for *the US* to gain anything??
To Cindy and all military families, my continued prayers for peace through fairness (real democracy) to grow in all PEOPLE’S Hearts and Minds in honor of your losses.
And some ot:
http://www.hd.ne/transcript_list.php?pd=danrather#
episode 526 scroll down through transcript to read what Macgregor has to say about military history and our future economics. Wow, it is quite refreshing to hear a military man speak sanely!
Garrick S @15 is correct that part of the goal, all along, was a major military base to insure that one more outpost of a global corporate Empire, maintained for a select group of billionaires, never slips the leash.
But the numbers are far more staggering than just Germany & Japan.
As Chalmers Johnson notes in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, per the 2005 DoD Base Structures Report, the U.S. had, by then, maintained 737 bases in other people’s countries “covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres world wide…”
This doesn’t begin to tell the story. The report “fails, for instance, to mention any garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia…)–even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever since by KBR….The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan…twenty sites in Turkey…$5 billion worth of military and espionage installations in Britain…”
The “cause” of the war in Iraq is the same “cause” I discussed at length in Beyond Afghanistan: Applying the Lessons of ‘Beyond Vietnam’–Empire.
It is the same cause that has been the source of U.S. foreign policy over the past 60 years.
In We Must be Insane I provided a partial list of U.S. interventions, excluding the Cold War and Cuban Missile crisis:
It was good to see the exit of combat troops on MSNBC and my mother commented that it was the best birthday gift for her, having lost her son 19 August 2003 in the UNHQ bombing along with 21 other top humanitarians who were in Baghdad working on many noble causes to better lives in conflict zones. This loss following her birthday was and is devastating to our family and to the world, because the noble cause for preemptive humanitarian actions which was one focal point of my brother’s work has slowed down. The price has been heavy not only in military lives but in many other lives including indigenous peoples. Let us put forth the truer totals of those who died in this “operation” to get a better perspective of the human cost. Let us not forget the “collateral” losses, the losses of journalists, translators, medical professionals, red cross personnel and on and on. We really need to comprehend our losses. I recall a young lady who was trying to tally these numbers when she was killed on the main road to airport. I can observe that the psychology of condoning the conflict brutalities in statements by pundits or even government advisors/officials has been seeping into our civil society such that our justice system has been corrupted and our governmental system of checks and balances has been compromised, and our overall treatment of people seems to be predicated on financial benefits. I hope we dig into the history of our actions and understand the consequences we must face for many lifetimes ahead. I hope we can look backward critically. I hope we have the backbone to right the ship and steer it to cleaner, calmer waters. The noble cause is to never preempt war again and to treat all peoples with humanitarian dignity at all times, foreign and domestic. It is to help heal those wounded in all aspects of physical and psychological wounds. There are better ways than war to do business in the world, and project our stature. The financial gains will be there and all will benefit if we keep the humanitarian perspective strong. I hope we revisit and readopt our founding principles and live them again.