Iraq, two years on

I've been looking for an excuse to post something here (life has gotten busy, and therefore a bit sterile/unpostworthy of late), so I went sifting through the archives... and ran across this bit about our presence in Iraq, and how much good it would actually do.

I think it's high time to do the grown-up thing and say... I was wrong. Mind you, the fact that the locals got tired of beating on each other is at least as big of a factor as our physical presence for getting to this point... but the Iraqi government has survived the challenges of the past two years, they have real, trained security forces that are picking up the slack, while we are disentangling ourselves and preparing to get out in an orderly manner.

Of course, there's still plenty of room for one party or another to royally screw things up... in particular, I hope we're well and truly gone before the central government really butts heads with the "semi-autonomous" Kurdish region over key cities and resources. On the whole, though, I'm actually hopeful for a reasonably stable country there going forward, which I didn't expect before short of a lopsided civil war with massive casualties for all involved. Live and learn, as the saying goes.