Bush visited Iraq before. He served Thanksgiving dinner to troops in Baghdad in late 2003. He met then new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in 2006. And in 2007, he visited Anbar province, once the bulwark of Saddam Hussein. Recently, he sprang a surprise visit cum farewell visit to the country that is almost synonymous with his name, in a pejorative way.  He was feted with a formal welcoming ceremony by no less than Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. Bush was all smiles as he hears of Iraq’s post-invasion reconstruction.

The formal pact signed by both Washington and Baghdad calls for US troop withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011. By June next year, US troops will vacate Iraqi cities such as Baghdad. Bush vacates the White House in less than six weeks. Today, there are only 149,000 US soldiers left in Iraq. Last year, there were 170,000. In June 2007, there were 180 attacks a day. Now, attacks are down to 10 a day. The commanding general has already announced that some of the US troops will still stay even after the June deadline.

Bush, the interventionist, claims that his greatest achievement as a US president is the liberation of Iraq. Some people call it intervention. All refer to it as invasion. Bush’s dream to free Iraq of the proof of terror has been costing over $500 billion. But the cost of Iraq war is not what it is advertised to be. Those who keep close watch claim that it has cost approximately $1.2 trillion (and counting because the US is obligated to pay war repatriation indemnity to a country it wages a war in), at $300 million a day, of US taxpayers money. The real cost of the Iraq war is estimated to actually be $3 trillion.

The human cost of the US invasion of Iraq is over 4,000 American military casualties and an estimate of approximately 100,000 wounded soldiers. The total human cost of the war is 655,000 lives, including Iraqi civilians.

With Bush’s farewell visit, some may look at it as coming back to the scene of the crime. For Bush, he sees it as the crowning glory of his presidential career.

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Via Yahoo! News