Spinning the US failure in Iraq

When I watched the last U.S. combat battalions leave Iraq on Wednesday night, I couldn't help but recall the scene when the last Soviet troops departed Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989. In both cases, the two governments soft-pedaled the hard truth about the strategic defeats that the withdrawals represented. Official Washington, in particular, has been eager to spin the Iraq withdrawal as a success, a prelude to a bright Iraqi future in which the United States can begin recouping its $1 trillion-plus investment over the past seven years (not to mention, get something back for the 4,416 American soldiers who died during the adventure). But the prospects for long-term U.S. domination of Iraq appear dim. Once the 50,000 American military "advisers" are gone, scheduled to depart by the end of 2011, the United States will have to rely on a small army of State Department security contractors to protect a network of diplomatic offices, including a giant embassy in Baghdad and consulates in Erbil, Kurdistan, and in Basra in the south. Meanwhile, any residual U.S. military presence, however it's packaged, remains unpopular with an Iraqi society that has resented the bloody U.S. occupation that has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and millions injured, unemployed, sweltering in the heat, and homeless.