The response from Iraqis is jubilant; today has been branded National Sovereignty Day. The Guardian has a few choice quotes:

Baghdad’s river-front parklands, which have been reclaimed this year after being deserted during the height of the insurgency and sectarian war, were last night transformed into outdoor dance venues, where audiences of around 3,000 – almost all of them men – danced to the strains of a recently returned Iraqi singer, Salah Hassan, exiled in Dubai for the past five years.

One reveller at an outdoor concert in Baghdad’s zoo, Tamader al-Waeli, 25, said: “It has been a long time since the last big celebration. We have now got rid of the occupiers and will not see them again on Iraqi streets. Baghdad needs the peace of its past life back again, we want to regain what we had, but at the same time the security forces now have extra duties and responsibilities and I hope they carry them out.

Another man at the concert, Ahmed Ebrahim, 35, said: “No words can describe how I feel. The occupation stayed in Iraqi hearts for six years and this is a big occasion that deserves to be a permanent national day in future. The occupiers put me in Bucca [an American-run prison in Iraq]. But now I am free and so is Iraq.”

Good luck, Iraq.

You’ve already heard everything I have to say about this war, but I’ll just reiterate that this was my primary reason to vote for Obama*, so my big payoff is today. The rest of his presidency is frosting.

* and if you think this withdrawal would have happened anyway, read the alternative.

We’ve heard how much it costs to support the war, in terms of money, human lives, and world sentiment. But how much does it cost to support the millions of American soldiers who served their time? How much to heal their wounds, to treat them for PTSD, to provide educational benefits, to help with housing?

To me, these things are much more important than the war itself, because they affect Americans directly. We should protect our borders and help keep the peace around the world, but we must take care of the people who have sacrificed so much to do that for us. Ignoring our defense is ill-advised and may lead to danger, but ignoring our defenders is heartless. Brutal. Insane. Unconscionable.

I bet it doesn’t come near the $500 billion we’ve spent to have them support us, so why is it that I keep hearing news stories about how we’re not spending enough to help them? Shouldn’t I be hearing conservative op-ed columnists grumbling about how we pamper our veterans, instead of stories about crumbling hospitals, suicide rates, and homeless vets?

Or am I just missing something?

It’s been two years since my last numbers update, so here are the current tallies:

• Weapons of Mass Destruction found before invasion: 0
• Weapons of Mass Destruction declared by US before invasion: LOTS
• US Cost in dollars: 500,000,000,000 (yes, half a trillion dollars already)
• US military deaths: 4,000
• Iraqi civilians killed: 82,000
• Weapons of Mass Destruction found after invasion: 0
• U.S. timeline to leave Iraq: NONE
• Days until the 2008 presidential election: 224

And yes, that last link is a blatant plug for Barack Obama. As was that one. But seriously, how else am I supposed to respond to such depressing numbers?

In a stunning reversal of Bush administration conventional wisdom, a new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes Iran shelved it’s nuclear weapons program over four years ago.

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” reads a declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate key findings.

Oh, wait. It was ABC News, talking about a National Intelligence Estimate prepared by our very own intelligence agencies. Oh. Um…

But hey, Iran is still producing quantities of highly enriched uranium, right? And that can’t possibly be used for any other purpose, right? And just because they say they’re not producing nukes, and they actually aren’t producing nukes, that’s no reason to conclude that they won’t produce nukes, right?

Right?

• Years since the Mission was supposedly Accomplished: 4
• Signatures needed to get us out of Iraq: 1

“For the majority leader of the United States Senate, in the time of war, with soldiers dying on the ground, announcing that we have lost the war, is very close to treasonous. I looked it up while we were driving over here, what the definition of ‘treason’ is. It’s the betrayal of trust.”
– Tom DeLay, 2007

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy….President Clinton has never explained to the American people why he was involving the US military in a civil war in a sovereign nation, other than to say it is for humanitarian reasons, a new military-foreign policy precedent. Was it worth it to stay in Vietnam to save face? What good has been accomplished so far? Absolutely nothing.”
– then-House Majority Whip Tom Delay, 1999, a month into the US mission in Kosovo 

A U.S. military brigade is constructing a 3-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital’s most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq’s most populous and violent city.

U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad said the 12-foot-high barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers to strike and for death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and then slip back to their home turf.

Although Baghdad is replete with blast walls, checkpoints and other temporary barriers, including a massive wall around the Green Zone, the barrier being constructed in Adhamiya would be the first to be based in essence on sectarian considerations.

More details at the LA Times story.  So, how much of this has to happen before the Bush administration admits we’re in the middle of a civil war, and losing?

Sen. John McCain strolled briefly through an open-air market in Baghdad today in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq.

NBC’s Nightly News provided further details about McCain’s one-hour guided tour. He was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

McCain recently claimed that there “are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today.” In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market today was proof that you could indeed “walk freely” in some areas of Baghdad.

I’m so glad to see that the security situation has improved so dramatically.  I’ll be sure to visit Baghdad for my next vacation, provided I can hire my security force in time.

British government officials have backed the methods used by scientists who concluded that more than 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, the BBC reported yesterday.

The Government publicly rejected the findings, published in The Lancet in October. But the BBC said documents obtained under freedom of information legislation showed advisers concluded that the much-criticised study had used sound methods.

The study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimated that 655,000 more Iraqis had died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. The study estimated that 601,027 of those deaths were from violence.