Iraq’s Legacy
By the end of the surge in the summer of 2008, insurgent attacks had dramatically fallen in Iraq from a peak of 1,500 per week in the summer of 2007 to fewer than 150 per week in 2009. In April of 2009, Baghdad hosted its first Flower Show in over six years, and the New York Times reported that “for the first time in years, Iraqis have been taking a visible pride in their surroundings.”42 This relatively peaceful period was shattered in 2010 when the Iraqi national elections engendered a new round of violence. In one single day, May 10, 2010, suicide bombers killed 100 people and injured another 350 across Iraq, a new record for the number of civilians killed or hurt by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Much like the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the ...
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