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March 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda As Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta marked the occasion with a speech in a fortified concrete courtyard at the Baghdad airport, helicopters hovered above, underscoring the challenges facing a country where insurgents continue to attack American soldiers and where militants with Al Qaeda still regularly carry out devastating attacks against civilians.
“Let me be clear: Iraq will be tested in the days ahead — by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself,” Mr. Panetta said. “Challenges remain, but the U.S. will be there to stand by the Iraqi people as they navigate those challenges to build a stronger and more prosperous nation.”
Those words sounded an uncertain trumpet for a war that was begun in 2003 to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that proved illusory. The conflict was also cast as an effort to bring democracy to the Middle East — another pretext that rang hollow during Iraq’s worst sectarian bloodletting, and that hampered Washington’s efforts in the past year to support the peaceful protesters of the Arab Spring.
The American withdrawal opens a new chapter for Iraq, a nation forged less than a century ago by British colonialists and tortured ever since by rebellions, wars and brutal dictatorship. Long a borderland between Persian and Arab empires, the country still struggles to balance the ambitions of Iran, the powerful theocratic neighbor whose nuclear program has become a profound concern to the United States and its allies.
For Americans, the ceremony on Thursday marked an uneasy moment of closure, with no clear sense of what has been won and lost. As of last Friday, the war had claimed 4,487 American lives, with 32,226 more Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics.
Those losses — and the humiliating collapse of American claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — helped turn sentiment at home against the war, contributing to a crash in the popularity of President George W. Bush during his second term and to the election of Barack Obama, who opposed the invasion in 2003.
For the Pentagon, the Iraq war — in combination with the continuing deployment in Afghanistan — forced a painful rethinking of how to fight insurgencies and to interact with civilians. Under Gen. David H. Petraeus, American commanders learned valuable lessons in the Iraqi deserts of Anbar Province as they worked with local tribal leaders and turned the tide against Qaeda insurgents in 2007. Those lessons were later employed in Afghanistan.
But the broader effort to build institutions that can maintain rule of law amid Iraq’s sectarian stresses has proved more challenging, both for the military and its civilian partners, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Security and International Studies. As the Pentagon draws down its forces, the strains of a decade of war have underscored both the limits of an all-volunteer force and the critical need to train Iraqi (and Afghan) forces who can keep the peace.
Many American officers, fearing Iraq’s instability, had hoped to leave a larger, more enduring military presence than the one allowed for under the agreement reached this year with the government in Baghdad.
Although Thursday’s ceremony represented the official end of the war, the military still has two bases in Iraq and roughly 4,000 troops, including several hundred who attended the ceremony. At the height of the war in 2007, there were 505 bases and more than 170,000 troops.
Those troops that remain are still being attacked daily, mainly by artillery or mortar fire on the bases, and roadside bombs aimed at convoys heading south toward Kuwait.
Thom Shanker and Michael S. Schmidt reported from Baghdad, and Robert F. Worth from Washington.
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