The Iraq War: 477 Latinos Killed In 9 Years Of Combat

The video of the men dressed in camouflage, casing the American forces flag that flew over Baghdad, was barely a few seconds long, but it signaled the end of almost 9 years of combat. A group of American and Iraqi diplomats and military personnel held a relatively small ceremony at the Baghdad airport on Thursday that formally and finally shut down the war in Iraq.

There will be plenty of time to assess the impact of the war on our nation – the distance of time will will provide a better perspective for that. But in the immediate space following the end of the war there is room for an initial rendering of facts. There is, for practical purposes, a free Iraq. And with that a sense of stability in that nation. A tyrant was deposed.

Our motives for entering the war, and the cost in lives and to our treasury that it took to pursue those motives,  will be analyzed, discussed and pondered for years to come. But here are some basic facts, as compiled by Fox News Latino:

• the war claimed 4,500 American lives and more than 100,000 Iraqi lives.
• 32,000 Americans were wounded
• at a cost of more than $800 billion.
• 447 of those killed in action were of Latino descent.
• There are currently 140,000 Latinos enlisted in the U.S. military – close to 12% of the total force.

The end of the war has been long awaited, the draw down a long time in coming.

As of Thursday, there were two U.S. bases and about 4,000 U.S. troops in Iraq — a dramatic drop from the roughly 500 military installations and as many as 170,000 troops during the surge ordered by President George W. Bush in 2007, when violence and raging sectarianism gripped the country. All U.S. troops are slated to be out of Iraq by the end of the year, but officials are likely to meet that goal a bit before then.

The cost, by any measure, has been much too high.