Hat tip to my Tumblr buddy Anglophonic.

As much as I’ve questioned Obama’s backbone these last few years, it’s very nice to see him cleaning up the messes that the Republican supermajority put is in, and it’s almost undeniable that he’s been our most effective president militarily in decades.

And, man, I’m very happy for the troops that are going to come home alive and whole.  We left way too many innocent people broken, homeless, and dead on that sand pile.

Now that we have a blueprint for declaring American ‘victory’, here’s hoping we get our dumb asses out of Afghanistan before 2016.

Per CNN:

This afternoon President Obama stepped into the press briefing room at the White House to announce that he had just spoken via secure videoconference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and reaffirmed his commitment to remove all U.S. troops from his country by the end of the year.

“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said. “Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

I’m guessing that Iraqi leaders heard about the American Kill Squad in Afghanistan, or maybe that our bombers can’t seem to discern between children or adults, or the American soldiers who called in an airstrike to cover up their murder of an Iraqi family.

What I’m hearing here is: “We’ll pay you to let us do whatever the fuck we want”.

If you want to make sure troops are ‘protected’, Panetta, you need to put protections in for whistleblowers who expose bastards like the ones I’ve listed above, not seek legal immunity for the monsters who perpetrate these war crimes.

Per CNN:

The U.S. Secretary of Defense says any agreement reached that keeps American troops in Iraq past an end-of-the-year deadline to withdraw must include immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

“If they want the benefits of what we can provide, if they want the assistance, if they want the training, if they want the operational skills that we can provide, then I think they have to understand that they’ve got to give us some protections in that process,” Leon Panetta told sailors Friday during a visit to Naples, Italy, home of the U.S. 6th Fleet.

It doesn’t sit well with me that McChrystal dishonored a soldier’s memory to keep George Bush from looking like an idiotic jerkoff, and was then more than willing to go to the media and embarrass a Democratic president once the tables turned.

However, it’s the Washington way to reward scoundrels and incompetents with government posts, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Per ABC News:

President Obama appointed retired General Stanley McChrystal to co-chair a commission on military families this week, but according to perhaps the most prominent military family of the last decade, McChrystal is unfit for that duty.

Mary Tillman, mother of Pat Tillman, the former professional football player turned Army Ranger who was tragically killed by friendly fire 7 years ago, is angered by McChrystal’s appointment, telling ABC News that he was part of the propaganda effort pushing the false tale that Tillman had been killed by the enemy, and keeping the truth from the world — and their family.

“I was actually pretty shocked to hear it; I don’t think it’s the appropriate choice,” Tillman told ABC News. “Considering that we have plenty of evidence indicating that McChrystal was involved in the cover-up of Pat’s death…he’s not the right person for that kind of a job.”

Tillman says the president’s appointment of McChrystal “makes him look foolish, frankly.”

She tells ABC News that “someone who has a heartfelt desire to help families would not have been involved in the cover-up of a soldier’s death, especially one that they used to promote a war.”

McChrystal — who declined comment to ABC News — was the commander of special operations in Afghanistan when Tillman was killed in April 2004. Soon after McChrystal wrote his commanders an urgent memo that, “It is highly possible that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.”

Having heard President George W. Bush might speak publicly about Tillman, McChrystal wrote to his higher ups to make sure they knew the truth so as to “preclude any…public embarrassment if the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public.”

Some would say I’m a little bitter about this (and rightfully so, I think, after hundreds of thousands of civilian and coalition deaths in the War on Terror), but I’m sick and tired of seeing respected news outlets giving face time to George Bush’s cronies so they can attempt to rewrite history. 

Not only were there no weapons of mass destruction, but the Bush Administration knew it, and attempted to discredit or intimidate folks who claimed otherwise. They outed our own intelligence agents who reported contradicted information and commuted the sentence of the fall guy they held to account for the outing. Not one of them has spent a moment behind bars for these crimes.

Washington (CNN) — If the Bush administration had known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it probably wouldn’t have decided to invade in 2003, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” program, Rumsfeld noted there were multiple reasons for attacking Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein from power.

However, intelligence reports — now shown to have been false — that Iraq possessed WMDs were the main reason for going in, Rumsfeld said.

So, yeah, I’m a little bitter, and I hope everyone will remember just how the Bush Administration duped Congress and the American public into his little meat grinder, and President Obama will not receive my vote after the manner in which he himself has supported these quagmires.