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.”

Joe Biden wrapped up his two-day trip to Iraq today, promoting a new phase in US-Iraqi relations. But that phase, contrary to popular myth, will include US military troops on the ground throughout the country.

We knew that Joe Biden was scheduled to visit Turkey and Greece this week, but while he was in the region, he swung over to Iraq, apparently to renew discussions about a “continued American presence in the country.”

This is what Liz Cheney’s “victory” looks like: since Obama took office in 2009, 262 Americans have been killed in Iraq. And with regards to the other war her father screwed up, we’ve lost another 1,201 men and women.

The Middle East’s two key exports these days seem terribly at odds with each other: oil, the lifeblood of the global economic order, and political unrest, in the form of protest movements rolling across the region. Occasionally, though, oil and dissent can mix, and workers may be channeling a bit of the Arab Spring into the petrol empires of Iraq and Iran.

More than 390,000 US military field reports from the Iraq War were released by WikiLeaks one year ago. The reports—the Iraq War Logs, which range from 2004 to 2009, revealed the truth of the US occupation of Iraq. When they were released, editor-in-chief Julian Assange hoped the logs would help correct the attacks on the truth that had occurred before, during and after the war’s official conclusion.

You can summarize the story of Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People with his assessment of the scams Iraqis pulled off with reconstruction dollars: “It wasn’t so much we were conned, it was as if we demanded to be cheated and would not take no for an answer.” The book describes what he saw of the various reconstruction efforts in Iraq, particularly his experience serving on a State Department Provisional Reconstruction Team in 2009.

Now that Mitt Romney has come out strongly in favor of keeping the troops in Iraq until a perfectly seamless nothing-could-possibly-go-wrong my-work-here-is-finished it’s-Miller-time-but-not-for-me-thanks-I’m-Mormon orderly transition is completed, it’s worth revisiting those hazy crazy days of Mitt’s youth when he had the opportunity to go to Vietnam and personally make The Case For American Greatness.