Nearly 4,500 American lives lost. 32,000 injured. $800 billion dollars (that’s a little less than the Dems spent in a single day on the stimulus, but still.)

We officially ended the war with more of a whimper than a bang yesterday in a simple ceremony at the Baghdad airport as Iraqis burned our flag on the city’ s streets. Iraqi leaders declined to attend.

This war took the innocence of the American people in a way Vietnam could not. It has long been buried deep in the American psyche as an absolute, unquestionable truth that all people want to be free, that that is an intrinsic part of human nature. Our nation was founded upon this premise. When they waved their purple thumbs in Iraq after they voted, we thought they were like us, that they would want to live like us, that they would value as we do the individual freedom we still (mostly) have that is the basis for our society.

In Iraq (and Afghanistan), we learned otherwise.

We thought we could win their freedom for them and that because it was freedom, they would value it.

In Iraq, (and Afghanistan) the American people learned otherwise. You can’t give someone freedom. They have to pay for it with their own blood in a determined, self-led effort to earn and keep it or it will have no real value for them.

We thought that left to its own devices, with freedom handed to them, a people would naturally value individual freedom over the collective as the basis for their society.

In Iraq, (and Afghanistan), the American people learned that you can’t impose individual freedom upon largely Islamic cultures that value one form of Islamic law or another over the life of the individual — and all else.

 What, if anything, the idiot politicians learned, I don’t know. Maybe this went exactly as they intended.

But that’s my two cents.