By TIM ARANGO
U . S . Marks End to 9-Year War, Leaving an Uncertain Iraq
BAGHDAD — At a crowded market in the city center here, the flotsam of the war is for sale. Ripped Fuel workout supplement. Ready-to-eat meals, macaroni and cheese “Mexican style.” Pistol holsters. Nothing seems off limits to the merchants out for a quick dinar, not even a bottle of prescription pills from a pharmacy in Waco, Tex., probably tossed out by a departing soldier.
The concrete blast walls that shielded the shopping stalls have lately come down. Since then, three explosions have struck the market, killing several people. “This will be an easy target for car bombs,” said Muhammad Ali, a merchant who lost two brothers during the cruelest times of the conflict. “People will die here.”
After nearly nine years, about 4,500 American fatalities and $1 trillion, America’s war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish on Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops take the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States’ most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.
For the United States, the war leaves an uncertain legacy as Americans weigh what may have been accomplished against the price paid, with so many dead and wounded. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was vanquished, but the failure to find illicit weapons undermined the original rationale, leaving a bitter taste as casualties mounted. The lengthy conflict and repeated deployments strained the country and its resources, raising questions about America’s willingness to undertake future wars on such a grand scale.
Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop “surge,” but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” Emad Risn, an Iraqi columnist, recently wrote in Assabah al-Jadeed, a government-financed newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis, too.” ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/mi...
The concrete blast walls that shielded the shopping stalls have lately come down. Since then, three explosions have struck the market, killing several people. “This will be an easy target for car bombs,” said Muhammad Ali, a merchant who lost two brothers during the cruelest times of the conflict. “People will die here.”
After nearly nine years, about 4,500 American fatalities and $1 trillion, America’s war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish on Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops take the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States’ most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.
For the United States, the war leaves an uncertain legacy as Americans weigh what may have been accomplished against the price paid, with so many dead and wounded. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was vanquished, but the failure to find illicit weapons undermined the original rationale, leaving a bitter taste as casualties mounted. The lengthy conflict and repeated deployments strained the country and its resources, raising questions about America’s willingness to undertake future wars on such a grand scale.
Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop “surge,” but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” Emad Risn, an Iraqi columnist, recently wrote in Assabah al-Jadeed, a government-financed newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis, too.” ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/mi...
