THE US combat mission in Iraq is officially over, President Barack Obama was to announce in an address from the Oval Office today at 1am Irish time.
As of today, the 50,000 US troops remaining in Iraq will shift from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to “Operation New Dawn”.
Mr Obama has made a four-day event of the culmination of the drawdown. In his weekly radio address on Saturday, he called the end of the combat mission “an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war” and reminded listeners that “as candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war. As president, that is what I am doing.”
On Monday, Mr Obama awarded Purple Heart medals to 11 wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The president has been eager to avoid the triumphalism of George W Bush’s May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech, which could haunt him if violence again flares in Iraq.
Yesterday, he met with soldiers at Fort Bliss army base in Texas. “It’s not going to be a victory lap,” he said of last night’s speech. “It’s not going to be self-congratulatory.”
Presidential spokesmen evaded the question of whether Mr Obama would credit Mr Bush with ordering the “surge” that improved security in Iraqi, or attempt to reconcile his past opposition to the Iraq war and the surge with his role as commander-in-chief.
The number of Iraqis being killed each month has decreased from thousands to hundreds, but many Iraqis fear the end of the US combat mission will signify only what has been called “the peace of the Green Zone”, the relatively secure international and Iraqi government compound in the centre of Baghdad.
The Washington Postreported a 30 to 50 per cent increase in the sale of firearms as Iraqis seek to protect themselves in the wake of the drawdown.
The chief concern of the US administration is the absence of a functioning Iraqi government. No party won a majority in parliamentary elections last March 7th. Vice-president Joe Biden is in Baghdad to celebrate the conclusion of the combat phase in a ceremony today, and to push Iraqi leaders to form a government.
Mr Obama said “the main message” he intended to deliver last night was to congratulate the military on a job well done.
“We’ve got the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” he said at Fort Bliss. Of the more than one million soldiers who have served in Iraq, 4421 have been killed and nearly 32,000 wounded.
Mr Obama promised to provide medical and psychiatric help for wounded veterans, and to improve the opportunities for education and employment through what he called the post-9/11 GI Bill.
The end of combat is in some ways a semantic sleight of hand. Remaining troops are combat-ready. “We are still going to be going after terrorists . . . Our conterterrorism operations are still going to be conducted jointly [with Iraqi forces],” Mr Obama said yesterday.
Some 4,500 US special operations forces remain in Iraq for this purpose. And tens of thousands of private contractors in Iraq – mercenaries – will continue to be paid by US taxpayers.
Mr Obama told troops he would also discuss America’s other war last night.
“We obviously still have a very tough fight in Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s going to be a tough slog . . . And that’s going to mean some casualties and it’s going to mean some heartbreak.”
In his radio address, Mr Obama promised that “by the end of next year, all of our troops [in Iraq] will be home”. His dual pledge to begin reducing troops in Afghanistan in July 2011, and to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, is severely criticised by US conservatives.
When Mr Obama took office, the US military presence in Iraq was 140,000 troops and it reached a high of around 170,000 under the surge ordered by Mr Bush.