Reflections on Iraq....

Currently, I'm sitting in my trailer living quarters waiting for word on a flight to take me from here to another airbase and from there to America. I expect to be in America early next week. I leave Iraq this time with a very different feeling than I left Iraq in 2004. In 2004, it was very clear to me that I left Iraq in a condition where much work remained. Today, I feel unequivocally that my work, our work, is relatively done here. That's a good feeling.

Contrasting the two deployments, 2004 versus 2010 could not have been easier. In 2004, the Iraqi Army didn't exist. The armed Iraqi's I worked with were little more than death squads who shared a mutual distaste for Sunni militants, but for different reasons. The civil war in the dark 2006-2008 period illuminated that most of those Iraqi "National Guard" groups I worked with in 2004 were probably the progenitors of future death squads. The populace in Iraq in 2004 in Diyala (a rural province mostly) weren't as jaded as the Baghdad citizens I dealt with in 2010. It feels like Iraqi's have grown weary of violence, but for the most part they prefer American security forces to their own privately, because they trust us more than their fellow Iraqi. That's a lingering effect of the civil war where neighbors killed neighbors, and thousands were killed each month. But, in public the Iraqi politicians want us to leave. I was turned back at numerous check points in Baghdad this year because they didn't want an American presence. Iraqi politicians want to assert Iraqi sovereignty. There was no such concept of that in 2004. Most importantly, unlike in 2004, I never had to fire my weapon in anger this deployment. And that's a good thing. I attribute that to the numerous Soldiers between 2004 and 2010 who had to fire their weapons far too often. Thank Ben, Mike and Dan for taking care of those guys. Most importantly for you fellas, I have heard numerous Iraqi Army NCOs and junior officers talk nostalgically about the "good" days fighting side by side with the Americans in Baquba, Sadr City, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, Ameriya, Adhamiya, and other dark corners of Iraq. It's not the fighting that the Iraqi soldiers relished, they relished working with us that closely.

So, as I leave Iraq, I feel better about the country than I did in 2004. I feel better about what we as a Nation have done here. Regardless of why we got here, how we initially made this place hell through our missteps, we have at least righted many of those wrongs and put this place on a better footing than I thought possible in 2004. It was remarkable to see tens of thousands of Iraqi voters walking back from the polling stations as I guarded the ballots. The ghosts of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson would have been proud on our efforts here the past few years. They have been far from perfect, but they are laudable. Not all Democracies are perfect, but at least Iraqis have a chance now and the bleakness of the civil war period has passed. I think the ghosts of the men that I knew, men like Christopher Cash and Dan Whitten and Larry Buaguess would look at Iraq and say - "This is good enough." A ticker tape parade isn't necessary, the military knows what it accomplished and didn't accomplish in Iraq and we're proud of it.