That Old Refrain

Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!

Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.

Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.

For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.