Today's Dumb Headline

Why Obama is ending the war in Iraq

This version is from Yahoo, but I have seen similar wording elsewhere. Argh. Obama is not ending the fighting in Iraq, which hardly deserved the name of war anyway. He is withdrawing US troops from the country. The fighting may or may not go on.

While I'm at it, let me point out that this is not really Obama's decision. Several Republican Presidential candidates attacked him for this, and the Post is running an online poll asking, "Do you support President Obama's decision to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of the year?"

But it wasn't his idea. At the end of the year the existing agreement between the US and Iraq, under which US troops are in the country, expires, and the Iraqi parliament will not support a new agreement. They will not agree because their constituents, the Iraqi voters, are overwhelmingly opposed to letting US troops stay. We said when we invaded that we wanted to create an Iraqi democracy, and this is democracy in action.