Iraq in the State of the Union speech

"Last November marked the 1245th anniversary of the construction of modern Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur. During the last 13 centuries, Baghdad had been occupied 20 times before the U.S. army became its 21st foreign invader.

During the last few weeks, the U.S. government has finally announced its plans to maintain long term foreign intervention in Iraq, including leaving permanent military bases for decades to come. The majority of the Iraqi public, including myself, suspected this would happen all along. A poll conducted by World Public Opinion last year showed that 77 percent of Iraqis believe that the U.S. government is planning to leave permanent military bases in Iraq. But while the plans for leaving military bases haven’t changed during the last years, the reasons and excuses have shifted from protecting the world from W.M.D.s, to protecting Iraqis’ human rights, to protecting Kurds from Arabs, to protecting Iraqis from “foreign Jihadists”, to protecting Shias from the evil Sunni Baathists, to protecting the Iraqi democracy from insurgents, and now it is about preventing a full scale sectarian civil war where “the Sunnis” will be murdered in a horrible genocide once the U.S. troops pullout from Iraq. "
Raed in the Middle