Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken wing night, wings were rationed at six per person.

We got another indication of how far out of step some of the Republican candidates for President are when it comes to public opinion during Saturday night’s debate when Rick Perry said he’d send troops back to Iraq: Rick Perry said he would send U.S. troops back to Iraq at a Republican presidential debate in [...]

For years, analysts have worried that Iraq’s tenuous hold on stability would collapse upon the withdrawal of US forces. We’re now watching it happen.

It didn’t take very long after the removal of American troops, for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki to begin trying to consolidate power: BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s Sunni vice president denied charges he ran a hit squad that killed government officials during the nation’s wave of sectarian bloodletting, accusing the Shiite-led government Tuesday of waging [...]

82nd Airborne solider David Hickman was the 4474th American serviceman killed in Iraq. He should be the last.

Sometime around 5:00am Eastern time this morning, the final convoy of American troops crossed the border from Iraq to Kuwait: BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops to leave Iraq drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, marking the end of the nearly nine-year war. The convoy’s departure, which included about 110 vehicles and 500 [...]

After 3,193 days and more than 4,000 lives, the American war in Iraq is officially at an end.

In her new memoir Condoleeza Rice says that there were significant internal disagreements in the Bush White House over Iraq War policy: Just days after President Obama declared an end to the Iraq war, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is releasing a memoir providing insight into the turmoil over the war within the Bush [...]

President Obama is being attacking from the right for following through on a policy decision made by his Republican predecessor.

As James Joyner noted, earlier today President Obama announced that by the end of December all American troops would be removed from Iraq, with the exception of those Marines necessary to defend the American embassy in Baghdad. The media is characterizing this as the end of the Iraq War but, as Spencer Ackerman notes, that [...]

President Obama is set to announce that all American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year.

Some reports today seem to indicate that the United States is abandoning plans to keep a contingent of military forces in Iraq past the December 31st expiration of the current Status of Forces Agreement: BAGHDAD—The Obama administration is abandoning plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past a year-end withdrawal deadline. A senior administration official [...]

Back during the days of the George H.W. Bush Administration, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney were colleagues. Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, along with President Bush, they successfully guided the United States through its largest military engagement since the end of the Vietnam War. [...]

My local ABC affiliate decided to preempt “This Week” yesterday morning so they could spend the hour discussing the fact that it had rained really hard the day before and some tree limbs were down. So I missed George Will criticizing Dick Cheney for what’s not in his new book: Five hundred and sixty five [...]

Iraq has become so dependent on Iran for its survival that it is endorsing the brutal tactics of Bashar Assad.

Via the BBC:  Five US soldiers killed in central Iraq Five US soldiers have been killed in central Iraq, the US military has said. Iraqi security sources said there had been a rocket attack, with other reports saying the target was on the outskirts of Baghdad. The BBC’s Jim Muir says the US military has [...]

Defense Secretary Gates hinted this week that the U.S. would stay in Iraq if the Iraqis wanted. It doesn’t seem like they do.

Rasmussen of all pollsters finds a majority of respondents willing to say that the Iraq War was a mistake: Looking back, a slight majority of Likely Voters believe the United States should never have gotten involved in Iraq in the first place. They also believe the mission there was more of a failure than a [...]

Iraqi officials aren’t pleased with the manner in which the U.S. occupation of Baghdad has changed the city, and they want us to pay to fix it: (Reuters) – Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls [...]

It turns out the Iraq War was indeed based, in part at least, on a lie.

While the violence is down in Iraq, it’s not gone.

Three U.S. soldiers killed today, two of them by Iraqi Army soldiers: Two American soldiers were killed when one or two Iraqi soldiers opened fire on them at a military training base in northern Iraq, while a third soldier died in an attack to the south, according to the U.S. and Iraqi military. The violence [...]

Via the BBC:  Tariq Aziz, Iraqi ex-minister, sentenced to death. Aziz was already in prison: In March 2009, he was jailed for 15 years for the executions of 42 Iraqi merchants. Five months later, he was sentenced to seven years’ further imprisonment for his role in the forced displacement of Kurds. Based solely on the [...]

The WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents show “U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.” While there’s no evidence here of a widespread, continuing WMD program, there is some disturbing new evidence: The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. [...]

Michigan Iraq War veteran gets NOT FUN vanity plate.

U.S. forces are still engaged in full-scale counterrrorism operations in Iraq. In what sense are “combat operations” over?

AP staff have been instructed “combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months.”

President Obama didn’t use the words “Mission Accomplished” last night, but the message was the same.

FOX reports that the entire combat phase of the Iraq War will cost less than President Obama’s stimulus. That’s not a useful comparison.

America’s mission in Iraq is shifting from an active combat role to a smaller security presence. But the war that gripped our attention for years is now off the radar screen.

The Pentagon can not account for 95 percent of the Iraq oil revenue from 2004 to 2007.

A disturbing video which seems to show American soldiers shooting unarmed civilians just for fun is making the rounds. CSM’s Dan Murphy has the backstory: A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two [...]

Thomas Friedman, who has over the years earned both enmity from the Right for his criticisms of the Iraq War and derision from the Left by his continual calls for another six months, leaves plenty for everyone in his latest column. On the one hand, the weekend elections were another “very good day for Iraq” [...]

Professional iconoclast Stanley Fish has been predicting for a while that people would come to miss George W. Bush once the heated controversies of the moment had faded and the big picture emerged. Now, he sees evidence that he was right. A perhaps more substantial sign incorporates a sign famous (or infamous) in the Bush [...]

TNR’s Marty Peretz argues that “The Verdict Is In On The Long American Excursion In Iraq. And It Is Favorable.” He admits right at the outset that, “Of course, Iraq hasn’t turned out that well. Sunni jihadniks are still routinely murdering pious Shi’a on pilgrimage to Karbala.”  But, he contends, “There are three especially compelling [...]

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM is going to be renamed Operation NEW DAWN, Jake Tapper reports. ABC News has learned that the Obama administration has decided to give the war in Iraq — currently known as Operation Iraqi Freedom — a new name. The new name: “Operation New Dawn.” In a February 17, 2010, memo to the [...]

Where should we point the fingers for our current fiscal/economic mess? Keith Hennessey has a post that I tend to agree with. Hennessey looks at the opening statements from President Obama on his new budget, The fact is, 10 years ago, we had a budget surplus of more than $200 billion, with projected surpluses stretching [...]

The government of Iraq has finally executed “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, arguably the most heinous official of the former regime save his cousin, Saddam Hussein. Majid, an enforcer in Saddam Hussein’s regime and his cousin, had earlier been sentenced to death four times for genocide and crimes against humanity.  Earlier this month, he was sentenced [...]

We’re about to pass a rather significant milestone: The last deployment for a U.S. Marine Corps unit in Iraq marks the closing of a military chapter for the war as they prepare to leave the country, troops said. More than 40,000 members of the U.S. Marines rolled over the Kuwait border into Iraq in March [...]

The L.A. Times has a fascinating article about the difficulties in accounting for estimated costs in a troop surge in Afghanistan. The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama’s budget experts size it [...]

Just as we’re starting to ignore Iraq and refocus our attention on Afghanistan, things are getting very dicey again: A series of explosions targeting government and commercial buildings struck Baghdad Wednesday, killing at least 75 people and wounding more than 300, Iraqi police and medical officials said. The blasts in the capital followed a string [...]

Tim Lambert linked some prewar Iraq War casualty predictions collected by John Hawkins in early 2003: If we go into Iraq, how many casualties do you expect to see (on the side of the US and our allies) John Hawkins: “Probably 300 or less” Charles Johnson:“Very few” Henry Hanks: “Less than 200″ Laurence Simon: “A [...]

Barack Obama built his presidential campaign around being the candidate who opposed the Iraq War from the start and therefore had the most credibility in ending the war.  As the campaign went on and he got more advice from the experts, however, he began subtly hedging his promises, careful to always refer to “combat troops.”  [...]

It appears that suicide bombings are back in a big way in Iraq: At least 75 people were killed and 120 injured in two explosions in Iraq on Thursday that shook a quiet residential Baghdad neighborhood and a restive city north of the capital where Iranian tourists were targeted. In the first attack, a woman [...]

After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun.  Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives. The most interesting of these, alas, [...]

“South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker tell The Telegraph that they got a signed picture of Saddam Hussein from some Iraq Marines. During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the move South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as [...]

Yesterday, as was noted here and there, was the 6th anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq.   That we’re still there after so many years is remarkable — depending on who’s counting, it’s the second longest war in American history — but the number 6 isn’t one we pay much attention to.  We like [...]

A new poll shows that Iraqis are decidedly happier and more optimistic than they were just a year ago but that they’re still unhappy with the United States invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and put their lives into a state of chaos. Iraqis are more upbeat about their future and less concerned about violence [...]

You remember that pullout of American combat troops from Iraq?  Not so fast. A U.S. military spokesman says American forces will still conduct combat operations even after they pull back to bases outside Baghdad and other cities as part of the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement. Brig. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim says the redeployment to the periphery will [...]

Given that OTB got started during the run-up to the Iraq War and that my commentary on that subject was what first got me noticed by some major blogs, it’s perhaps ironic that I’ve hardly written about the subject lately.  Partly, it’s a function of my now doing most of my foreign policy blogging at [...]