3152 Days Later

3152 days after President Bush landed on the USS Lincoln and declared "Mission Accomplished", the US military is holding their ceremony in Baghdad to formally shut down the war in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta marked the end of the U.S. war in Iraq at a highly symbolic ceremony Thursday.
U.S. soldiers rolled up the flag for American forces in Iraq and slipped it into a camouflage-colored sleeve, formally "casing" it, according to Army tradition.
Panetta said veterans of the nearly nine-year conflict can be "secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside."
Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives in a war that began with a "Shock and Awe" campaign of missiles pounding Baghdad, but later descended into a bloody sectarian struggle between long-oppressed majority Shiites and their former Sunni masters.
Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke during the ceremony at Baghdad International Airport.

While it's going to take a long time to judge whether the "mission" was actually accomplished (and we're betting it's going to take a few decades before historians come to any consensus on what the "mission" was), after this ceremony it's pretty safe to say that after today, "combat" operations in Iraq actually are over.

U.S. Army military policemen conduct a dismounted patrol along a road outside Camp Taji, Iraq, Dec. 2, 2011. The policemen are assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, Company H, 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kissta Feldner

By: Brant