![]() ![]() His plans to end the conflict were undone by Iraq's poisonous sectarian politics, Iranian meddling, his own mistakes and the devastating civil war across the border in Syria. Obama followed Bush into the White House determined not to let his presidency be defined by war - especially not the one in Iraq, which had already cost more than 4,000 American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, when he took office. ![]() "Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free." But the war would consume Bush for the remainder of his presidency. "Because of you, our nation is more secure," he told the sailors on the Lincoln. Bush thought he had his answer - the "Mission Accomplished" moment - on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln two months later, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. David Petraeus turned to a reporter and uttered one of the most prescient sentences of the Iraq war: "Tell me how this ends." troops bogged down by guerrilla attacks on the way to Baghdad, then-Maj. ![]() He was far from the first person to wrestle with the question of how to bring the messy, grinding fight to a close. Obama rose to national prominence in 2002 on the eve of the Iraq invasion by calling it a "dumb war a rash war a war based not on reason, but on passion not on principle, but on politics." His candidacy hinged on his promise to end it as quickly as possible. "By any measure, this has already been a long war." "Next month will mark the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq," Obama told the troops. He stood surrounded by camouflage-clad Marines, many of whom were just days away from being shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan. In February 2009, less than two months after he took office, President Barack Obama had flew to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and laid out his plan for ending the war in Iraq. ![]()
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