By Robert Parry

President Barack Obama is putting the best face on the final American troop withdrawal from Iraq, declaring that the last soldiers will leave with “their heads held high.” Meanwhile, neoconservative war hawks are denouncing Obama’s failure to twist enough arms to get Iraqi leaders to accept “residual” U.S. military bases.

Yet, however it is spun, the Iraq War represents one of the worst strategic defeats in American history. An arrogant President George W. Bush invested about $1 trillion and nearly 4,500 American lives in a conflict that did little to advance U.S. national security interests and overall harmed U.S. standing in an economically crucial part of the world.