I‘ve been stewing over something really lousy that Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been saying: Iraqis have won a “great victory” over the “foreign presence in Iraq.”

That “great victory,” as he calls it, is the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq’s cities. That “foreign presence,” as he calls it, is the U.S. – the thousands of mainly young American men who have fought a vicious enemy in Iraq under the harshest conditions for more than six long years.