U.S. lowers flag, marking official end to Iraq war

The United States lowered its flag in Baghdad as the U.S. military mission in Iraq was officially declared over Thursday.

In a low-key ceremony at Baghdad airport Thursday, Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta "thanked the more than one million American service members
who have served in Iraq for 'the remarkable progress' made over the
past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the
struggling democracy," the New York Times' Thom Shanker and Michael
Schmidt write.

"The muted ceremony stood in contrast to the start of the
war in 2003 when an America both frightened and emboldened by the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sent columns of tanks north from Kuwait to
overthrow Saddam Hussein."

In the run-up to this week's ceremonies marking the war's close,
Schmidt, the Times' Baghdad correspondent, got word that an Iraqi
businessman had purchased trailers from a closing American base, he
recounted in a first-person dispatch Wednesday.

As he kicked around the Baghdad junkyard where the purchased trailers
were in storage a few weeks back, Schmidt came upon a strikingly
different legacy of the invasion: several stray documents, maps, and
binders, some marked classified, that turned out to document one of the
darkest episodes of the war.

The abandoned trove contained some "400 pages of interrogations" that
"form part of the military's internal investigation, and confirm much of
what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed
24 Iraqis, including a 76-old man in a wheelchair, women and children,
some just toddlers," Schmidt wrote in his Wednesday article, "Junkyard
Gives up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq."

Haditha "became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring
Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one
Marine has been convicted," Schmidt wrote.

"But the accounts are just as
striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the
soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently
painful encounters with a population they did not understand."

Almost nine years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, American officials
expressed relief Thursday to be officially ending the war, in which
4,500 Americans and an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have died.

In the Baghdad ceremony marking the official end of the war Thursday,
Panetta said the next time he comes to Iraq, he will need an invitation
from the Iraqi government--and noted that he was pretty happy about
that.

"After a lot of blood spilled by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an
Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real," Panetta said
at Baghdad's airport, Reuters reported. "Iraq will be tested in the
days ahead, by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic
and social issues ...

Challenges remain, but the United States will be
there to stand by the Iraqi people."
The subdued "Casing of the Colors" farewell ceremony sounded "an
uncertain trumpet for a war that was launched to rid Iraq of weapons of
mass destruction it did not have,"

Times photographer Michael Kamber
wrote in a caption to one of his photographs documenting the event.

The last 4,000 U.S. forces in Iraq are due to withdraw to Kuwait by next week.

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finally.