The sad chapter of the Haditha massacre may have been put to bed in a legal sense when Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich received an incomparably light sentence, walking away with no jail time, for ordering the troops under his command to “shoot first, ask questions later” in an incident that killed 24 innocent Iraqis. But this issue isn’t close to being over for the Iraqis in the village of Haditha.

In an attempt to defend President Obama’s foreign policy decisions the Center for American Progress has released a terribly misguided one page chart comparing the Iraq war and the Libya war. The chart’s basic message is that Obama is better than Bush, because Obama is much more thrifty when he launches a war, even an illegal one based on lies.

Some US contractors are getting a lesson in the new Iraq. The Iraqi government has detained hundreds of contractors, including some who work for the State Department at the US embassy, on a variety of charges. For some reason security contractors aren’t popular there.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute laments that Obama pulled out of Iraq too soon, because . . . well because we should have stayed their longer because we weren’t finished.

It does not seem to occur to Ms. Rice that one of the most important functions of a National Security Adviser is to think through the consequences of proposed national actions. Aside from asking whether what your boss and his militarist advisers are planning is justified, the job requires you warn against measures that would destroy peoples, rulers, governments, . . . You’d at least get your principals to recognize that the Pottery Barn rules applies: you break it, you can’t fix it, you own it.

Now, seven years later, with the American military finally gone, the same ruling alliance (which is still in power, despite some internal shifts) is clamping down to cement its rule? You don’t say. But please don’t try to tell me it’s any kind of sudden development.

The row between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi has grown. Maliki issued a warrant for Hashemi’s arrest on terrorism charges, accusing him of operating pro-Sunni death squads. Hashemi denied the charges, and his supporters compared Maliki’s actions to that of Saddam Hussein. Maliki is now ordering a handover of Hashemi, who has fled to the Kurdistan region.

The war ended in Iraq last night, and within moments, it seems, chaos has reigned in the Iraqi Parliament. But while this is almost sure to be used as evidence that the military should never have left Iraq, the events here would have played out at some point, in absence of perpetual occupation.

As many of you will remember, I wrote a lot of posts here at FDL about the war in Iraq before I got ill and had to take a break. While writing less, I am still on the various “progressive” emails lists where “activists” talk about issues like the war and the traffic in recent days shook me up.

The first was an email inviting activists to join one group in an informal cocktail hour to “celebrate” the end of the war. I found myself sitting and shaking at the thought. What celebrate? How many years and we … celebrate?

In a ceremony known as “Casing the Colors,” the US military formally ended their mission in Iraq, with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on hand to make things official. The location of the ceremony gives away exactly how this war is ending, and it doesn’t read “triumphantly.”