US Military Forces in Iraq
 

...have withdrawn from all Iraqi cities and in the past nine months have either shut down or turned over 150 US bases...including 30 bases in the past 30 days.

And your point is?

his point is that his old nickname Pathfinder, is no longer in use.

It marks a landmark day in the conflict...does it not?

sure it just means the iraqis will fuck this up too...They are not ready to take over anything. they do not have the will to fight..... Just my experence...I am glad that we can start to get out of there and let them have it all...

Since there is not any combat taking place...who is it that they do not have the will to fight? Do they still have some violent acts taking place within the country...yes. Will there always be violent acts taking place within the country...yes...but many thousands more Americans kill Americans every year than was killed during the Iraq conflict every year of the conflict...Americans and Iraqi's combined...so the violence level currently in Iraq does not begin to compare to the violence level in the US.

They do not have the will to fight the insurgents that are STILL putting IED's out and killing Americans (4 today) and iraqis. Most of what I saw there was that they could not be trusted. Our own interpreter set off an IED on us as we were stoped on the road. (he met with an untimely and painful death) The so called iraqi police tried to ambush us as we rolled down the street, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army are funded by iran and have been a pain in our ass since we got there. I had him in my sights in 2004 in Najaf and should have disobeyed the order and took him out.. But being the good American I just followed orders..Big mistake..

The "insurgency" level is very low at this point in time and I will repeat that there is more and has been more violence in the US by far...every year of the Iraq conflict than there has been and currently is in Iraq. Iraq currently is a representative democracy and the overwhelming majority of Iraqi's apparently want a democracy and not a theocracy so they may very well make a major effort to keep it that way. Will there still be power plays...yes...as you still have some Bathists that would like to return to power and of course you have the built in conflicts between the Sunnis...Shites and the Kurds.

What slays me is that they had fireworks to celebrate this. In typical Middle Eastern fashion, they are calling this a "victory".

My opinion is that there will be a little bit of chaos right now then a lot in the future. There was a car bomb yesterday that killed 32, but I think the terrorist will hold off on major things until we pull more of our troops out of the country. There are still 130,000 US troops in the country, but they can't act without the authority of the Iraqi government. So if thing go south fast they will call us in.

Once we are mostly gone I think there will be a huge surge in violence with a hope to cause chaos and then an overthrow of the existing government and we will pretty much be back to where we were when this started.